Finishing the sky birds project

I knew the "scroll" would have to go into a box to protect it during travel, and decided to make the box into part of the work. Over the days of thinking about it, it evolved into a box that would unfold and be mirrored inside, with the poem that inspired the piece used ... somehow ...

When I started putting the box together, the first parts were easy - measure and cut the panels, and cover them with the cream silk printed with the flocks of sky birds. I used some of the silk for the hinges too -
Figuring out what to do with the base was more difficult - I made a tiny model to help. The panels are labelled to avoid yet more confusion - the narrow panel on the right has to be narrower than the one on the left so that the two fronts can overlap cleanly. The difference is 3mm - the depth of the card used for the box -
In the end I hinged just the central base to the back panel, and made a cloth to spread out under the "wings" of the piece -
The back section is ready to be joined in. It's a different colour because the piece of cream silk was the size it was - just big enough for the side panels. In fact the blue (a metallic dupion) wasn't really deep enough ... which called for the black at the bottom to be added, and black to be used for the bottom and for the embroidered cloth that unfolds from the bottom of the box.Mirror-foil lines each section -
The stitching was done from the reverse - I wrote the lines of the poem onto a piece of iron-on stabiliser, and then realised it had to be written in mirror-writing to be the right way round on the front of the fabric. Fortunately there was just enough stabiliser on the roll to write it again.

Finding a suitable bobbin thread and tension -
A fair bit of time was spent searching for the darning foot for my longshank machine, and in the end I had to do the stitching with an ordinary foot, feed dogs up, and very short stitches, stitching very slowly and using the knee lift a lot to swivel the fabric around. Blessed be the writers of short poems!
By the time I braced myself to do the stitching "the hard way" I was so rattled that I forgot to check that the writing fitted onto the obvious lines of the fabric. Hey ho, never mind!

The poet's name is hand stitched - here's the reverse, which was subsequently hidden in the hem. I hand stitched my own name onto a bit of cloth, and decided to place it onto that hem, directly behind the poet's name -
The back view -

Leaving the cloth square meant the mirrored "wings" could be adjusted to different angles if necessary.

It's a wrap!
"The Flocks of Sky Birds" will be in "Whatever Floats your Boat ..." exhibition at Slough Museum, 18 May to 11 June, open Weds-Sat 11.30-4pm. Twenty-eight members of the Thames Valley group of Contemporary Quilt are taking part.

Book du jour (sort of)

Actually it's a cube box, a container for a square book - the "thumbhole" (there must be a real name for that?) is a half-circle punched out with a circular punch - first time I've used this one, and it can barely handle two layers of paper. Hmmph.

The instructions (by printmaker and book artist Claire Van Vliet) are in the Hedi Kyle Festschrift book -
Sorry about the fuzzy picture. While trying to sharpen it up just now I finally noticed the arrow showing grain direction ... will have to try it again with the correct grainline ...

Seen on the 52 bus

Devore hair! - it made my day.

At Collect craft fair

Dual-language - English starts at the front cover, Hebrew starts at the back cover -

The backing cases are as interesting as their contents -


An animation mini-festival, using many techniques -

magazine morph

stitching

signage gets lively

The chair I was sitting on, made of cardboard -

The week at college

At the final Bokship seminar, "thinking about what we're making" - an exercise in choosing where and how to display a piece of work - on the wall, on shelves, a "moment of importance" in a vitrine ... etc etc...

Egidja's work consists of "fired" books, too fragile to cart around, so she chose to show photos. Juk-Hee's shredded books spill out into the space; my "wormhole" looks on in astonishment -
Youngest participant was BookBaby, in her bling footwear -
Also, information about marketing and promotion - including gallery and bookshop markups, various types of publicity, pricing ("less respect for low priced work"), book fairs and moving outside them, "distributing the idea of the work", workshops, launch, press releases...

Afterwards, the chat in the congenial environment is an important part of the session -
Next day, a special seminar with Paul Coldwell, who has published three books including his prints. He talked about the genesis and production of Freud's Coat, With the Melting of the Snows, and Kafka's Doll, and also brought along some artist's books that he owns, including a huge, leather-cased, beautiful edition of Patrick Caulfield prints juxtaposed with poems, another with some prints by Joe Tilson, Tim O'Reilly's Accidental Journey.

The meat of the seminar was the response to the question, "how do you make money doing this" - strategies for knowing your audience, being in the right place, judging and working on the effect of the work - how do people know that you exist and what your ideas are; what srategies can you use to make it easy for people to find out.
Textile printing was mostly for the "sky birds" piece with its imminent deadline -
I rescued some "nice" paper from the bin and used the marks on it for a bit of play (though this is on the clean side of the sheet) -
More printing was for the piece for the midpoint review on Tuesday 17th - with Sky Birds out of the way, I have a couple of days to finish that. All of a sudden there seem to be too many deadlines!

Book du jour

Here's one I prepared earlier - bits of tracing paper sewn together in a line, and the ends of the threads used to catch the stitching between alternate pages, then tied at the spine. The corners are starting to curl...not very practical...

On the way to Atlantis

Down Brick Lane with its 24-hour bagel shops flanking the pub -past grafitti writ large -
and shops catering to the restaurant trade -
up the stairs to the 2nd floor (no lift) -
to find a warehouse of art materials -

Printed "sky birds"

One possibility was two layers printed on scrim - I washed the piece, so it could hang more "naturally", and lit looked like a limp rag!

The birds printed on mull felt better, somehow -

At the bottom, to keep the curled shape, florists wire stitched on to resemble a landscape.

Here are the flocks, 38cm high, ready for their box -

Lovely surprise!

A new twist on a traditional Korean lamp - made by Mee Eyoung - thank you SO much! I love the triangular shape, the sweep of the roof, the little slits on the solid side... not to mention all those associations with the warmth of home, and of friendship. Below, the lamp in situ - can you see the red path leading to the door -
The jar (from a charity shop - used for loose change) also has a Korean feel, and there's a painted box from Russia, a "peasant" wood box also from a charity shop years ago, "the quaker twins" found while out walking in Canada in 2008, a lavender bag from Margo Selby's shop, and the painted cupboard bought at auction in Durham in 1971. Every object has its story...

Another wrinkle in the hacking saga

For completeness' sake, this final -- well I hope it's final! -- bit of the hacking/spam "Madrid" story...

If your email account is hacked, and you go back to using your original account (after running a complete check with your up-to-date virus protection, of course - and resetting your password), you must also look in your account settings to see if a "reply-to" address has been added.

Any reply-to address should be one that you know you own.

It's easy to be fooled by a small substitution -- ymail for gmail, especially!

Further, if one of your contacts has been hacked and you are now receiving legitimate emails from their original account, check the header on their message for the reply-to address, and let them know if there's a problem.

Many thanks - and a virtual bouquet - to the kind friends who did this for me!

Hand-drawn graph pads

By Louise Naunton Morgan - see more here and buy this one here.

A typology of shame poles

In England we had the stocks, in Belgium they had shame poles. Sophie Nys has collected 80 into a book.

Here (where you can order a copy) it says: "A shame pole is a freestanding device for displaying miscreants at a public location in a village or town. In its most basic form, the shame pole was a simple cylindrical or beam-shaped wooden stake to which a neck iron was attached at throat height. The pole was typically made by the local carpenter and often remained undecorated. The wooden pole, decorated or not, was then commonly dug into the ground without any base or treadboards, although there might be a step made in earth, wood or stone. The maintenance of a permanently erected instrument entailed ongoing expense, as well as additional repair work due to vandalism, storm, and war damage. This was especially so with simple wooden poles, which, exposed to the elements, rotted away and regularly had to be replaced.

"When a pillar was of stone, it was usually carved out of Belgian bluestone by specialist sculptors. Various types of stone pillar can be distinguished on the basis of style and form, although they all have a crown, a shaft with a chapiter at the top and a base, which primarily consisted of several round, square or polygonal treadboards. The shaft was typically octagonal, but was occasionally hexagonal, rectangular, cylindrical, stepped or obelisk-shaped. There was a cut-away notch in the shaft at about throat height or higher to secure the ring to which the neck iron was attached. Sometimes this ring was not built in, but fastened to a vertical rod so that its height was adjustable."

"Bed of Nails"

A woven blanket (digital jacquard) by Jeremy Laing, showing acrylic fingernails. Here you'll learn that this is the third in a series involving acrylic fingernails - the first a pinata and the second "a prototype for an edition of solid gold nails nested on a bed of hair and found shoulder pads". Strangely fascinating...

Shadows

By Kumi Yamashita, found here. Yamashita was born in Japan, has an MFA from Glasgow School of Art, lives in New York, and is devilish clever with creating shadows.

Drawing machine

The machine, designed by Danish artist Eske Rex, makes huge, detailed drawings. Watch it in action here. (I first saw it here.)
Is it drawing - or just technology?

And see its close relative, Grinder, here.

Performing drawing

Gestural drawing, writ large - Tony Orrico gets his whole body involved. See more here, but be warned that watching the video, which is only 6 minutes long, might make you feel rather tired.

"Penland 10: seated quartet" ... hmm, how was that drawn ...

But is it a ...

Is two CDs in a cover a book? If it comes with, or becomes, an art newspaper, does that change anything? This is King of Limbs (new to me!), seen here. Art is by Stanley Donwood, based on northern European fairy tales and their association with forests and woods.

Of the limited newspaper edition of the album, Donwood said: "What I like about newspaper is its ephemeral nature, I like the way the paper goes yellow and brittle when you leave it out in the sunlight. I wanted to do this thing like a really annoying Sunday paper, you know when you buy the paper and all this crap falls out? I wanted to do something really annoying with all these crappy bits of floppy, glossy paper."

To promote the CD and vinyl release of The King of Limbs, Radiohead distributed a free single-issue newspaper, The Universal Sigh, at record shops across the world on 28 March 2011. It is separate from the Newspaper Album version of The King of Limbs. This 12-page tabloid was printed using offset lithography on newsprint paper; it features artwork, poetry, lyrics, and short stories.