Moan on Monday - potatoes

When you buy a bag (5 lbs or so) of potatoes, you invariably get one huge one, and one tiny one. And various sizes in between. Why can't they be sorted by size? Are there some sizes of potatoes no-one wants to buy?

Just about as bad as it gets!

After my tranquil afternoon last week at the table in front of the window, the workroom has been invaded by plumbers, replacing the boiler in the cupboard. The lino had to be cut back, the hardboard prised up, the floorboards sawn through - but now the new gas pipe is in - in fact the boiler is in. There's just that little window in the back wall - the vent for the old boiler - that needs bricking up. And the small matter of all that needs doing in the living room, which also had its floor taken up so that piping could be run through.

In fact things are getting better not just in terms of the work nearing completion but on other fronts as well. I've been able to rescue, from somewhere under the dust sheets in the living room, the various peripherals needed to finally download photos. And at the weekend studio I was able to work on my "black books", more of which later.

However there is the small matter of reinstating some sort of order in the workroom, once the plumbers finally leave, and putting the flooring back. After that, all the furniture from the front room will be moved in, so that the entire floor can be replaced. The packets of "ash" laminate are waiting in the hall. It's all feeling rather more hopeful, less all-pervasively chaotic.

Local discovery

Along with blue plaques, there are brown plaques and green plaques, commemorating people who made contributions to history and "famous places".  Here in the back streets of Upper Holloway, north London, at the end of a group of shops-used-as-housing on Marlborough Street, is the site of  Marie Stopes' first family planning clinic, opened in March 1921. In 1925 it moved to Whitfield Street in central London, where it remains.

The opening of the clinic created one of the greatest social impacts of the 20th century and marked the start of a new era in which couples, for the first time, could reliably take control over their fertility.

Upper Holloway is also Pooterland - the setting for "Diary of a Nobody" (1888). In the Pooters' day, these shops would have been a useful local amenity.

A colloquium of houseplants

Gathering the houseplants into the bath keeps them out of the way while the living room gets filled with dust during the floor replacement that is a consequence of the gas pipe replacement that is necessary for the new boiler - and finally having that new boiler will mean we have hot water again and can use the bath for its proper purpose!

Meanwhile the houseplants get to have a little holiday. And everything else will get thoroughly dusted once the furniture is back in place. Did someone mention repainting the room, "while we're at it"? Hey, why not... 

Book du jour

 Coptic stitch joins some squished cans rescued from the street. You do need to gather quite a few before two the same size are available.

The shape of the paper resulted from drawing both outlines on top of each other, and then cutting the shape so it would fit "inside" both.

Just about as good as it gets

Waiting in all day for a delivery, I finally got around to a bit of tidying up. This is about a clear as the work surface is ever likely to get. Much clutter has made its way to the hanging bin-bag -

The new table under the window, though, is filling up with the remains of half-finished projects.

I cleared a space and sat and wrote, and made a long(ish) list.

"Bliss is a quiet place, a calm mind, and a grand project." (And a nice cuppa tea!)

Book du jour - "embossing"

By doing lots of variations of "words on black bookcloth" I'm getting up the courage to make the big leap to putting the titles on the actual covers of the books. Also, I'm still trying to figure out what would be the best way to do it.

This morning, two more possibilities - at the top in the photo, the letters were cut part-way out of the board. The unwanted bits were easier to peel out than I imagined. More work is needed on the configuration of the words - the E should have more space round it, and the D is too wide - something to fix next time.

Once the cloth is glued on, you have to feel around to find the sunken bits, and define them (carefully!) with the tip of the bone folder. The rubbing makes the book cloth shiny - even through a layer of protective paper. So I decided to go for the shiny look.   Heather Weston calls this technique of making a sunken impression debossing (embossing is making a raised impression).

At the bottom of the photo, two layers of board, the top with a window, into which I'll insert a bit of metal with "punched" metal (from a drinks can?). Yes, that is a gluey mess on the cloth - undesirable, but it does give me a chance to find out if it can be sponged off. The recommendation is to "wet the entire cover" to get a uniform effect when the cloth dries again. I've used a glue/paste mixture which is supposed to be "water reversible".

Book du jour

The latest version of the "black boxes" has the trays separate from the covers - not glued together yet though. It feels very flabby in the hand. (And took ages to get to this stage!)

Before the cover can be glue on, the title needs to be punched onto it - and this book doesn't have a title yet, nor does it have contents. I do have a few ideas. At this point, the insides betray their origins - useful bits of sturdy card picked up at a gallery -

I've been playing around with various ways to cover the trays, and with the optimal size and spacing of the three pieces that form the cover. It's all practice ... I'm still learning how to measure accurately, exactly where to cut the corners, how to keep the glue off the black cloth, and other basic stuff. At the moment those practicalities have taken over from the conceptual part, the actual contents of the book.

Ghost nets

GNA (GhostNets Australia) holds regular workshops and the results are exhibited widely. Debris washed up on beaches is used as the base material and GNA hopes to draw attention to this marine tragedy through its recycling efforts. This project was completed at the Cairns Indigenous Art Festival; photo by Kerry Trapnel, from the TAFTA newsletter.

Ghost nets are fishing nets that have been abandoned at sea, lost accidentally or deliberately discarded. They travel the oceans of the world with the currents and tides continually fishing as they progress through the waters. As they are unattended and roaming, they fish indiscriminately, not only catching threatened species but undersized and protected fish as well.

Practising

 The letter punches (8mm) arrived - very heavy, and very oily - needing cleaning -

 They include an ampersand -

I hit on a title for my first "black book" and am practising -

Alignment, spacing - and getting a good impression (with one whack of the hammer). Tricky.

Art I like - Liza Collins

Liza Collins graduated from the Royal College of Art and taught tapestry weaving at Middlesex University before moving to Texas. The work on show originated in a road trip to the Texas Panhandle. The tapestries are small in size but rich in colour - delightful.

The exhibition continues until 29 October at artisan, north west London.

Reading drawings

Follow a thread... looking for work by poet Ana Hatherly (above is The Writer, 1975) brought me to a blog discussing comics, on which there is a post about the many similarities between comics and architectural construction documents: 

"Superficially, the pages of both tend to convey information in similar ways: drawings of simplified pictograms are ordered into grids of panels, often in conjunction with text and an elaborate system of symbols and line weights." Ah yes, symbols - a "writing" system ... a series of iconic pictograms ...

The post takes "a rather narrow look at architectural working drawings, and the commonalities and dissimilarities they share with comics". And very informative it is - architectural drawings are organised from the broad (site plan) to the narrow (details) and a series of identification tags and bubbles take the user to the appropriate page. Text is descriptive, calling out materials and processes. Arrows indicate the part being discussed.

The post also reveals why I have "trouble" reading comics - "how do we know how to read a comic? We seem to inherently want to read panel-to-panel in the same way we read prose: left to right, top to bottom. However, even the most basic arrangement of panels does not always follow this pattern, with unusual arrangements of tall or wide frames that seem to disrupt the eye’s flow. Navigating a comics page is a learned skill, one that is arrived at through trial and error." (Below is Ozamu Tezuka's "Space")

Reading, then, is a learned skill - and that applies not just to reading words/text. Aha. "Reading" is a useful word - with slippery meanings. Or perhaps our perception of "reading" is due to our own old habits?

I'm intrigued to learn of the work of Chris Ware, who not only uses architectural spatial conventions but adds "diagrams that function on the same level as architectural drawings. They can communicate a large amount of information that, if it was told as part of the narrative, would interrupt the flow of the story.... Ware often inserts these diagrams into and around the narrative in the least disruptive way possible; he tends to save the most elaborate ones for covers, endpapers, or frontispieces, while working the simpler ones into the body of the comic. Like an architect, he uses a standard set of symbols to signify a complex set of relationships in the clearest manner possible."

Book? du jour

Finding a drawerful of painted papers from years ago prompted me to make some little boxes for the book-rings.

The rings fit snugly into their "matchboxes" -

Out of the box, they make a flamboyant display -

The rings are made with a 3/4" square punch, glued onto scrim and then onto double-sided velcro.

Art I like - Tara Donovan

Tara Donovan uses humble, ubiquitous materials in ways that make you pay attention to them - tarpaper, toothpicks, drinking straws, glue, pins, shattered glass, pencil stubs, paper plates ... 600,000 plastic cups ... small objects connected into large structures.

(photos from this review of a recent show)

More works, and a short video about installing the roomful of plastic cups, are here. "Donovan doesn't start out with the design, but the objects, and then the work just sort of ... emerges" says the commentator. "It's problem-solving" says the artist.

Back to college

Yesterday was enrollment day - filling out forms and paying out thousands of pounds. Ouch.

I hadn't been to college for a month and was startled to see, at Vauxhall bus stop, an entire (but unmemorable) building had disappeared -

And further along the route, was this bit of wall painting new, or had it been there for months?

(It's a fact of life that people looking at things - or photographing them - make you stop, look, and notice things...)

In the college shop, sheets of metal mesh (I'm playing around with an "unconventional materials" quilt) -

In the library, shelves chockablock with returned books - this is the typography section

and this is 769.4, where the artists books are filed among the illustrated books for children -

I had to use the new automated checkout and it is SO much better than the one at the grocery store! You put all the books you want to borrow on it, and within moments it gives you a printout of not just those (and their due dates) but also of all the others you have at home already.

Graphic nature

Seen at Kew Gardens.

Scribbly trees

Tangential to my research on the writing/drawing continuum is a scribble that occurs in nature - under the bark of some 20 species of eucalyptus trees, mainly on the east coast of Australia. It's made by the larvae of Ogmograptis scribula. There are half a dozen species, and at least five distinct scribble patterns.

Scribbles are caused by moth larvae feeding on photosynthetic tissue just below the epidermal cells in the tree trunk.

Pix from here and here.

Ampersand, etc

Found here (the blog also has pastry ampersands -- mmm, edible typography!). This ampersand looks particularly chirpy ... what is it about it??

In case you're wondering (as I was...) where the word comes from, I'll save you the trouble of looking it up and quote the derivation from Wikipedia:

'The word ampersand is a conflation of the phrase "and per se and", meaning "and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and".[1] The Scots and Scottish English name for "&" is epershand, derived from "et per se and", with the same meaning.
'Traditionally, in English-speaking schools when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin expression per se (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign as the 27th letter, pronounced and. Thus, the recitation of the alphabet would end in: "X, Y, Z and per se and". This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.[2][3]
'Through popular etymology, it has been claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications, and that people began calling the new shape "Ampère's and".'

One thing leads to another, and the Wikipedia entry led to another - Tironian notes - a system of shorthand dating back to Roman times. The original system of 4,000 signs was extended to about 13,000 used by medieval scribes.

The pic is Vindolanda Tablet 122, about 90-130 AD (from here).

Digressing again, the entry on etc. goes into the niceties of grammatical usage of the word, inter alia:

'Some publishing house styles[who?] (particularly in Britain) no longer require either the preceding comma or the following stop.[citation needed] In general, writers are advised to use the traditional style unless circumstances dictate otherwise.
'Some pickier editors consider that “and the rest” implies a finite list thus distinguishing “etc.” from “and the like”, “and so forth” and so on. “Apples, bananas, oranges and so on” would be preferred to “apples, bananas, oranges, etc." unless the greengrocer supplies a list of available fruit.'

And that's entirely enough digression for now.

Moan on Monday - undelivered mail

If the postie finds that a letter or parcel is to big to fit through the letter slot, or needs to be signed for, they ring the bell - and if no-one is at home, they have to fill in a card with details so that you can go to the post office and collect the item. Or you can go on the Royal Mail website and arrange redelivery, through the item number written on the card. That's good.

What's not so good is that you've been home all day and find one of these "undeliverable post" cards -- the postie hasn't even bothered to ring the bell, just left the card --- and didn't put in an item number.

So, off to the post office. The 20-minute walk across the park is all well and good, but the experience goes downhill after that; the collection point is at the back of an industrial area -

Looks inviting, doesn't it?

I raised my concerns about inefficient mail delivery with the poor guy on the other side of the counter. Even he agreed that it takes more time and effort to fill in the card than it does to ring the doorbell.

Too late