My goodness

Forgive me lovelies, it's been far too long since my last confession post. I do think about posting, but then I get back to whatever I was doing and vow to catch up later. The last few weeks have been so busy. And then yesterday the whole 'busy' excuse got ramped up to 'emergency panic' status as a number of projects that had been ticking along in the 'one day I'll get it to you' category all landed on my doorstep to be done ASAP. So here I am, writing to you while my Book class do their own projects, between helping them with their problems, because once I get home there will be NO time to blog.

In the meantime, I've had a few little adventures, like the day my iPhone fell out of my bag while cycling in a tipsy manner and I found it a few hours later by retracing my route, only to discover that it had fallen on the road and had been repeatedly run over by cars. It was lying in a little pool of glass, as sprayed as blood, and would quite obviously never work again. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO was my first reaction, and panic as I thought of how much information was on it, and how I hadn't backed up for (thankfully only) a day or so.

But then I went to my phone provider and did a new contract that involved slightly more money and a much newer iPhone, and now I'm all 'that old thing, tuh'. No grief, just wonder at how much technology has improved since the iPhone 3. Yay!

Bumblebee found a beautiful flower to hang around with, and they are now like Siamese twins, connected at the hip when in each other's presence, and by non-stop telephonery when not. He's discovering what it's like when someone REALLY digs you, rather than just merely likes you, and he's totally hooked.

I have been busy in my studio, printing and planning and making, plus teaching at Megalo. This weekend I'll be taking the final week of the class promoted in my last post, showing the children how to sew their books together and make covers.

I think I've finally shaken the cold that has been bugging me since Easter, although it's still lingering a little bit. I'm seeing the doctor this week, just to make sure everything is hunky-dory.

Gym and I broke up, which is probably why I keep getting snotty, but he just put too much pressure on me, and he had weird friends that stared at inappropriate bits of my body. Now I go for hour-long fast morning walks around the border of our suburb, which takes me up around the base of Mt Majura, complete with rabbits, kangaroos and lots of birds. If I miss my walk, I don't think 'damn, I'm wasting money', which is much nicer than when I skipped gym. The walk makes me very happy, and my brain gets all juicy and creative, so that when I get back I'm raring to get into the studio.

I've seen a few movies, one of which was 'Iron Sky', a film so silly it's genuinely hilarious, about Nazis living on the dark side of the moon and trying to re-invade the Earth. It was made on a very low budget, and has to be seen with absolutely no expectations of quality. The piss-take of Sarah Palin is worth the price of admission alone. Bumblebee just didn't get it; I think you have to be an adult to understand the humour. I think it will be a cult movie eventually, it'll grow on people.

What else has been happening? My mind is a blank. All I can see is the print I'm working on at the moment back at my house, awaiting me. It's for a little show coming up in the Photospace Gallery at the ANU Art School to mark the Transit of Venus happening on 6 June. I had a simple idea, but it's turned into a complex process that's taken a lot more time than it should... and will look like a simple print. *sigh*

OK, I'll leave it there, but I will return soon, I hope. If not, imagine me buried under a pile of marked-up pages as I lay out the definitive scholarly edition of Henry Lawson's 'While the Billy Boils', which is what landed on my desk yesterday...

art attacks

I've been trying to write a blogpost since Saturday, but my weekend and early week just keep going and going faster and faster until here I am, and it's lunchtime on Wednesday. My art attacks, let me share you them.

Contents
Friday: Robert Guth at CCAS
Saturday: Material World at ANCA, plus some jazz
Sunday: Guerrilla printing day with Angela
Monday: Edible Books & farewell Lynda
Tuesday: Running away with ourselves
Wednesday: Remember to breathe

Friday
I'm actually not much of a one to go out on a friday night except to the movies but my ukulele group was invited to play towards the end of an end of a PhD event at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Plus it was a chance to catch up with lots of friends from art skool. So we went and won some odd things at the auction (and lost some wanted things that were outbid) and ate the yummy kangaroo doner kebabs and the endless hot fresh sugary donuts that kept pumping out of the donut machine and eventually the uke group found each other, dragged some chairs into a circle and had a play. We're not a very forward group, we fly under the radar a bit. No leaders, lots of attitude, unable to finish a song at the same time, but happy and jolly and with good taste in music. Well, we think we have. We played some Billy Bragg, Lou Reed, the Breeders, the Cure, Johnny Cash... you get the idea. Fairly Gen X, us. Most of the crowd had gone home by the time we started, but we played for the cleaner-uppers.

Saturday
A lovely visit to the Farmers Markets to buy yummies, into the studio for some Making time, and then my friend Angela Gardner arrived from Brisbane to spend a night and a day with me. Angela is a printmaker and poet, and byrd and I used one of her poems for our Demolition piece at Print Big a few years ago. We nattered for a while, and then it was time to go to ANCA for the opening of Material World, the show I'm in where we all had to make site-specific works with found objects. It as a wonderful opening, one of the best I've been to, mainly because it was low-key, friendly, there was heaps of food & wine and a band, and at 7.30 the lights were turned out for Earth Hour and we sat around the fires and looked at the candle-lit art and talked to each other happily. Narelle Phillips, one of the curators, writes up her experience here. She's an ace chick, and working with her is always a pleasure.

I enjoyed people's reaction to my work, once they found it. All you could see on the way in was the dangling bookmark ribbons, but if you went outside for a glass of wine and a bit of cheese and then walked back in, there it was, obvious as hell. Many people just assumed I'd filled the girder with intact books, because it looked very natural and un-artlike. Another friend came up to me and said that it frustrated him because there seemed to be no logic to the shelf arrangement. When I told him that it wasn't mean to be logical, and that the books were often in conversation with each other, he went back and spent TWENTY minutes looking at it. When he'd finished I asked if he was happier and he just shrugged, which I guess means NO, but... win for me, it engaged him for TWENTY MINUTES. How many other works of art can do that? Bless.

Afterwards we dragged ourselves away and over to a fabulous party close to our place, where some friends were farewelling their son as he flies to Berlin soon to complete a Masters in jazz. So there was more food and more wine and a stage where he and his mates got up and played a storm for us. We left at about 10.30, but apparently it all didn't finish until 3am. Who says Canberra is boring?

Sunday
Angela and I had a hope that we could have a play in the studio together before she left. She had a 5:15 flight, and in our favour was the change back from daylight saving, which gave us the feeling that we had an extra hour. We left the party at a decent time, despite the good jazz, to give ourselves a fighting chance of a solid day's play. So we awoke, and talked about texts for a while as BB made us a big cooked breakfast. We sat out the back and ate the big cooked breakfast and talked ideas and then hit the studio.

We worked with a new poem that had been brewing for a few weeks. I didn't grasp the meaning at first (sometimes takes a while with poems, don't you think?) which dismayed her, but once we discussed it and I talked about finding and creating a graphic starting point for the meaning, we were off. We set and printed an editioned letterpress broadside in one day! Mind you, the type is still sitting on my press today (I'll dismantle it once I finish typing); it was crazy fun. We're a good team: she arranged the wood type into cloud shapes while I tore up the paper (working out the dimensions as I tore, changing our minds once or twice) then I locked the wood type on the pressbed while she started setting the poem's text. She printed the embossed woodtype while I was her clean-hands assistant, then I set up the metal type while she put away the wood type and mixed the ink. We printed the last layer and finished with time to spare to look at a few other printed things and get to her plane. Phew! Here are a few photos:


Upside-down clouds!


Embossed clouds.


If we'd had more time I would have got this curve much smoother, but I did the best I could in a hurry.


The final work, drying on the rack.


Angela, working the press.


Happy, tired ladeez.

Over at Angela's blog you'll see the same photos and similar words from a different angle. I'm glad she liked listening to Dig Music with me. I've become quite addicted to it, and yesterday came home to discover that I've won a double CD of blues & roots music in a small competition they were running. Yay!

Monday
As well as teaching my normal class, I'd wrangled the students into making some edible books as part of the annual International Edible Books Festival and bringing them in for a 'lunch'. It was pretty rough and ready, since neither Ingeborg (the other teacher) and I had time to organise plates or tablecloths or such things, but the works themselves were delightful, and the ones that could be eaten (some were hypotheticals) were delicious.


I was very fond of these bananas. Have a look at my flickr site for the full range, many put a lot of effort into it. I loved being able to eat a miniature 'Animal Farm'!

Monday evening was spent, as usual, at my ukulele group, but this time we were farewelling a steadfast member who is moving to Melbourne. She is a beautiful singer, and there was much discussion about who could be 'the voice' now. We made her sing all 'her' songs in the songbook the group has compiled; she does a rendition of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case of You' that is almost better than the original and definitely better than any other cover I've heard. We also played 'Under the Milky Way Tonight' by the Church in honour of Jimmy Little, who'd died that day (or the day before?).

Tuesday
Tuesday I spent some time with a cousin of BB's, down for the Renaissance exhibition and when I dropped her at the bus back to Sydney, I kept going in to the uni and caught up with a dear friend to talk about life, the universe, and doing some work together. We had lunch and started talking about things that got very intense, and I finished by suggesting that we just drop everything for a few hours and go to the uni bar and play some pool. We giggled like schoolchildren as we played, completely invisible to the 20-somethings playing around us, except for the moment when T, a pool shark in her youth, got up on the table to do a particularly impressive backwards shot. That got their attention. It was tremendous fun and I went home afterwards feeling quite revived.

Wednesday


BB's lovely cousin took this photo of Padge.

So here I am, sitting in a quiet moment, ready to get back into the action again. More printing, some Folk Festivalling on Friday and then I'm going to the Blue Mountains for two days to celebrate a 50th birthday and to meet Dr Sister Outlaw's new kitten. I'm looking forward to Monday, pure sleep-in time, and maybe a movie date with my nice cooking man. Did I tell you that while Angela and I were printing, he was in the kitchen making cake, fig & pear paste, something else that I forget and spaghetti for dinner? My, this house buzzed last weekend.

Getting around to doing

Do you remember my open letter to Jemal Sharah, asking permission to print her poem, 'Revelation'? It took me ages to track her down and then I submitted my broadside idea to the Print Council of Australia's Commissioned Prints scheme. It wasn't selected, for various reasons, one of which I think is that letterpress isn't really considered printmaking, even though it's been printed in the same way that a print is. *sigh* No matter, no grudges, especially because since then I've become a member of the PCA's board, and they are all lovely, lovely people.

The broadside proof -- here it is



-- sat around for a while, and I'd look at it and think 'I have to get on to that'. Then I printed all the text, and shifted the colour, which was originally a deep blue-black to a colder blue-grey. I did that late last year, and then all I needed to do was the image circle on top of the embossed text.

But sometimes you don't feel like doing the thing that you have to do. Every few days I would freshen up my never-ending To-Do list and every time the list would be topped with 'Finish Revelation'. It would just sit there, staring at me accusingly.

On Sunday, I woke up and thought: today's the day. No particular reason, just a weird surge in confidence like someone had just handed me a Dumbo feather in my sleep. I got up, went down to the studio, and finished the print. My hands didn't tremble, my confidence didn't fail me. Here's a little photo-essay:

















Oh, the relief. It's a weight off my mind, and of course once it was done I was mentally whipping myself for not having done it sooner. I mean, the colophon on the bottom says 2011. But... but, things that you do with your hands and your heart and your eye aren't always things that flow, and I honestly think that if I'd forced myself, I would have botched part of the edition. Tomorrow I will count the prints and check for mistakes and sign and emboss them with my chop, but I'm certain that there are very few dodgy ones. Yay.

Also, for those who are interested, my lovely son has started his own blog. I heart the URL, which he entered in frustration as Blogger rejected all of his earlier suggestions, and now he's stuck with it, LOL. I have to restrain myself from going in & correcting his spelling mistakes and grammar; it's a hard habit to break, but I know that this is a little snapshot of him at this age and therefore very precious.

Finally, Padge, looking vaguely peaceful in his new fez, bought from here. He actually hates wearing it, but that's no reason to stop putting it on his head.

Sampled

I finally finished my type sampler.

Open publication - Free publishing - More fonts

(If that doesn't load for you, go here)

I also wrote about it here.

That done, I'm going to head over to Crazybrave Zoe's for an unAustralian hot pot party. Australia Day itself was pretty good; I took Bumblebee to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy shindig but we left before it all got excitingly stoopid. Then there was an afternoon of fine press printing, and then the fireworks I mentioned earlier. Something for everyone, don't you think?

Sampling

Hello! My ears are a bit better after making myself do very little for a while. Then I got really bored, because I'd already given myself a really restful holiday, and I was gagging to get back to work just when the Doctor told me to stop. So I've been pottering around the studio, building up the stamina to really get into things.

This weekend was Summernats weekend, an annual rev-head car festival, and it traditionally makes a lot of noise - plus the dickhead population increases tenfold in our part of town, which is just near the festival venue. It drives BB crazy, so when he mentioned wanting to go to Sydney to catch up with visiting UK-based friends, I jumped at the chance to send him away and really start something solid.

Off he drove, leaving me with two straight days to be in my studio with the music pumped and the ink rolling so as to ignore the sound and smell of tyre burn-outs across the way.

I've been meaning to produce a type sampler for ages, mainly as a tool for my working process and to show people what fonts I can use, and because it's a huge endeavour to get a sample of everything out and arranged usefully, I might as well print a stack of them to give to people over the years.

Here's a few images from the weekend. There's more at my flickr site. I've been printing non-stop, have pulled over 500 prints and I'm just under halfway through! The rest will take a couple of weeks just because I have to juggle it with everything else. BB came home tonight and grumped about the kitchen being filthy, but I made no apologies, because there were better things to be doing all weekend. Voila:











As you can see, Padge helped. I want him to give me a foot massage (they ache to buggery), but he's not very keen.

Helpful cats

I thought I'd sort out a few typecases yesterday, since I'm working on a type sampler for myself (and those who like to collect such things). The big triumph was finding a whole drawer of 12pt French accents in Garamond, just as I have a visiting artist who is setting a French poem. Huzzar! We'd been wondering what to do re. accents and now the problem is solved.

Padge came and helped. One minute he was here:



and the next time I turned around to replace a case he was here:





He's a very helpful cat.

Let me show you more ways that he helps in the studio.



Paperweight.



Keeping things upright.



Load tester.



Security.



Stocktaking.



Press operator.



Chair warmer.

Pooter's main job is Padge-washer.



He doesn't like being a printer, mainly because of the silly hats they have to wear.

Checking in

It was only when Colonel Duck nagged me on the phone tonight that I realised how long it's been since I blogged. I feel light years away from the calm of the farm (say that out loud), pictured above. I have got some more photos, as promised, here.

Since then I've been... hmm, what have I been doing? I've been sucked into my lovely studio space, that's what I've been doing. I've been doing all sorts of interesting things, like helping people print their book pages, and starting my two broadside residents off in their new printing adventure, and teaching a book class at Megalo with an excellent bunch of people, and having lots of people visiting and staying and playing. It's been good fun, and it's actually my work. How lucky am I?

Sorry, I'm keeping this short, mainly because I've had a long day and I can't remember most of the things I wanted to blog. When I can remember them, I'll check back in!

Transition

I finished my residency on Friday; it hasn't hit home yet, but I guess it will when Tuesday comes and I'm in Melbourne rather than at the school. I've written two more progress posts on my work blog: one on printing and one on posting. I had such a good time. What you see above is three-quarters of the school, gathered in front of the 'bounceback wall' in the playground after we'd posted our cards. It's a small, close and warm community of children, teachers and parents, and I'll miss them, although I will be returning in October for a visit to deliver their single-coptic-bound book of postcards and I'll also visit regularly, since it's on my flight path to uni.

Next stop is Melbourne, for the Impact7 conference that seems to be competing with the AFL Grand Final for space and attention when you look at the list of associated exhibitions. I've written my paper and sent down my portfolio for presentation; the biggest stress is how to see and do everything in the short time we have, including catching up with people. There's a blogmeet planned for Saturday late arvo/evening but we haven't settled upon a meeting place yet. I will tweet it when I know, so if you're interested, watch my tweet listings in the ride sidebar there --->

I'll also be tweeting during the conference and liveblogging with the Book Art Object group, as part of our project.

In other news, every year before my birthday my mother-in-law rings me to ask what book I'd like for my birthday. This year I asked for Kerryn Goldworthy's Adelaide book, knowing that it's being released soon... and discovered that it's being released on my actual birthday, 1 October! Yay, onya Kerryn. I'm over halfway through Sophie Cunningham's Melbourne right now, which is a great lead up to my trip.

Dammit, I've been thinking of things I want to blog, but now that I'm sitting here (having just polished off a wonderful breakfast made by Best Beloved: Eggs Benedict on a poppyseed bagel) my mind is blank.

It's the Lifeline Bookfair this weekend, but I'm not getting too excited, having only just resolved all our bookshelves and also having rediscovered the local library. I popped in yesterday and got all cranky about their demarcations. There's a General Fiction section, which I think should be EVERYTHING that's not 'genre' fiction like thrillers, horror, sci fi and fantasy. But no, any book written by someone with a funny name, or written by a woman or written by an Australian is shunted onto a different table (in order: World Literature; Romance/Chicklit; OR Gender Fiction; Australian Fiction). I inwardly cheer when I see an Australian in the General Fiction, or laugh when I see Bury's 'History of the Later Roman Empire' (both volumes) in the Historical Fiction section.

I'm going back today because they're having a 'Bookbinder's' table, with what they call 'treasures' with broken bindings, all under $10. I'll be interested to see what is a treasure.

The wind is horrendous today, it's the worst thing about Spring. It makes being in the studio very unpleasant, because there's a gap at the top of each rollerdoor, and the wind slips over and brings dust. I've just found 2 sets of secondhand glass sliding doors, complete with screen security doors, at the local builder's trading post and a building friend (the same one who built the kitchen in our last house) is going to install them over the next couple of weeks in front of the roller doors so that I can open them and get light without wind... huzzar! That will foil you, cursed wind.

My other great find is also a pair. There's a little auction house near the farmers markets at EPIC and I wandered in the other day and asked if they ever get mapping cabinets (no artist ever has enough). He had two coming in that week -- timber ones! I gave him an absentee bidding form (I had a guest at the auction time) and I won them! They are being delivered when I get back. Out with the sticky-drawered crappy metal cabinet that I have now and in with the timber stack! Happy, happy happy.

So much to look forward to when I return from conference hobnobbing... time to get up and pack!

Glorious day

Gosh, you can really feel the sap rising in Canberra at the moment. It's days like today when you never want to leave the place: blue sky, fluffy clouds scudding by in the warm air, blossoms on trees everywhere, bulbs breaking out wildly in gardens.

I had a lovely day today, helped by having a great sleep on one of our pillows that until now I'd overlooked. I'd bought it for Bumblebee, recommended by a mattress shop as being good for young growing things. He used it for a couple of years until I bought him a memory-foam pillow and he discarded this other one instantly. It has a sliver of rubbery stuff through the centre of it, and I've been using it to prop myself up when I read, but only last night tried it as a sleeping pillow. Oh! The rubbery bit allows your head to move easily without any effort from the neck muscles; it's like floating on water all night. I'm hooked. Mind you, I did have a vivid dream about travelling around Greece and Turkey with Pavlov's Cat and Zoe: eating, drinking and laughing through some very odd scenes. But the sleep itself was FABULOUS.

So the rest of the day was spent lolling in bed for half the morning and then hoiking up the roller doors and pottering around my studio in the sun getting small but important jobs done, occasionally just stopping in the sun to sit with a cat for a while. I love those days.

Yesterday was spent being nice to strangers while I worked in the Book Studio for the ANU Open Day. So today had to be my whole weekend, and it did very nicely as such.

My residency is swinging along; I wrote another report about it here, including a photo of myself as Professor Snape. To make myself even more authentic, I wore contact lenses for the day for the first time in ages, something that makes me squint and scowl a bit, so I had that Snapey look down pat. I took them out when I got home with a huge sigh of relief... sure, I can see boundlessly, and colours look great without dust and scratches on them, but I can't see close up comfortably, and my eyes just feel nakedly naked. Glasses just feel RIGHT.

I would like to put on record here that I am very angry with Officeworks Online. I have been struggling with my inkjet printer for weeks (sorry, Book Art Object peoples, this is the big hold-up story) and finally, after endless cleaning of printheads and stoopid wastings of paper and ink, I got online and purchased a new printer. I thought that, since it said that the printer in question was in stock and I could pick it up from my local branch, that it would be quicker and more line-jumpingly easy to order and pay for it that way.

But NOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I went in, and was informed (nicely and regretfully by my now-familiar nice man in the Braddon store) that despite their having a FULL SHELF of the sodding things, he was not allowed to give me one because the order had to be processed by gnomes and stamped by fairies and the printer had to be delivered to the store from a 'central' warehouse and the whole process would take 'at least' two working days. This being Friday, that means, EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD A BIG SHELF OF THE BUGGERS, Monday or more likely Tuesday before it would magically happen.

PREHISTORIC FRIGGING DINOSAURS. I am imagining the order being couriered by a unicorn ridden by puss-in-boots rather than instantly transmitted through the ether and hitting someone's computer within seconds.

I gave written them a very nasty letter and promised that I would whinge to anyone who would care, so this is that moment. I am CRANKY, and I will use my local people happily, but after this and the fact that I couldn't use their sodding upload file button a few weeks ago for their print service, I am abandoning any part of their online facilities. And so should you, unless you live in a regional area and can't get to a real redblooded sales person in a store. GAH.

{think of the clouds scudding today... breathe}

Bah, I think I'll go and resume my newfound relationship with this pillow. I wonder what dreams I'll have tonight?

Moving Studio Duck, the photoessay

Before:



Packing:



Now:



During:



At the other end:





(none of this shows the chaos of boxes in the third part of the garage space)


And that's about all the energy I have at the moment, apart from saying that I won't be able to resist the chance to go in to the old space and have a skate tomorrow, before I give it back... look at all that lovely clean concrete!

Getting my skates on

Action stations here! I've been cleaning and painting and shifting and whatever else it takes to clear one space and shift another.

I finally got the home studio (which is a triple garage space) cleared and the walls painted before I went to Sydney for a Print Council of Australia meeting. It was in conjunction with the Sydney Printmakers 50th Anniversary, so I met a lot of very interesting and talented people, and also, on the way home, managed to sneak in a quick catch-up with a couple of blog-friends and have a look at Lawrence Finn's fab home studio.

When I got back I painted the central pole and the connecting door from the garage to the house a nice browny-red colour, and then swept the floor and...



got out my skates.

I haven't used my skates for over 14 years, or certainly haven't had them on since Bumblebee was born. I did do a little bit of roller hockey about 15 years ago, with everyone else on the (casual) team wearing rollerblades. I don't like iceskating, too wet, too cold; I can't do rollerblades, they lock my ankles in a funny position and do my knees in. But rollerskates! Aahhhh...

When we lived in Townsville in 1980-81, pretty much the only recreation was the local Kirwan skating rink (and of course, it isn't there anymore). I almost lived there, and it was a fantastic place to hang out with my friends, meet boys, hone my skating skillz etc. I never wanted those wussy white girl-skates, always wanted the soccer-boot style, and once I got them, always wanted to be in the speed skating sessions.

One of the 'happy places' in my head is zooming around the rink, trying to be faster than everyone else, accompanied by 'I See Red' by Split Enz.

I practiced for a while, feeling pretty wobbly at first, but the more I went round my little personal rink, the more confident I got. I asked my cousin-in-law, Vince, when he came by last night, to take some photos of me having a skate in my studio. He thought it was pretty funny. He also took a video, but when I looked at it, I thought I could do better; I taped one for myself, and here it is, with a classic 'me' moment at the end, when I tried to be cocky and almost ended arse-up.



I will say that at NO POINT in the afternoon did I fall over!

I would love to skate more regularly, but the only option these days seems to be to join a roller derby team, and I value my limbs and neck too much to do anything even mildly contacting. I'm going to get some street wheels, and skate around the neighbourhood, I think.

Today I'm laying down recycled-tyre rubber flooring and on Friday the heavy machinery comes in. Goodbye, private rink!

Sky

I know, I know, I haven't blogged anything.

Well, I just wrote a post over there, so consider it a placeholder.

Easter, day 1 (post 1300!!!)

I rang the RSPCA about the white kitty. They got me to ring Domestic Services, who came & picked up the body and took it away to be scanned to try to notify the owners.

Anyway, my regime this Easter is to go to the studio in the mornings and to the National Folk Festival in the afternoons. Today the plan went well, except that instead of waking up early and bouncing off to the studio then going to the NFF at lunchtime, I lolled about in bed drinking tea and eating homemade hot Om buns (like hot cross buns but with an Om symbol drawn on them) made by Best Beloved and then going at lunchtime, ending up at the festival around 4.

I still got a lot done.



These are a couple of knitting pattern book images I inherited from one of my type purchases (when you buy presses or type you often have to take the rest of the crud the printer or his family are trying to offload). They usually come in sets of four: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK (CMYK) but I only have the yellow and blue blocks. So it's a two-colour print.

I spent a bit of time playing with ink, to get the right colours (I mixed a geranium red with silver and a dark green with silver):



to make this rough idea:




for a print folio called 'Freaks of Nature', curated by artist Rona Green.

Then I set the type for it:



I flipped it around for you, but for those who can't make it out, it says

Cherylneezcha dreamed of that day
when she would be crowned
SCRAPBOOKING QUEEN

The finished product will be cropped to make a bleed print (where the colour goes right off the sides) and each print will have a gold or silver crown stuck onto her head (a proper, acid-free scrapbooking sticker). Fun!

(Since taking that photo I changed the name to Sherylneezcha. I'm striving for something quite clarsy but unique, like every contemporary mother. It had to be phonetic, and involve at least one Y and a Z. I also wanted it to be a strong name, and thought incorporating Nietzche might help her get through life with the right attitude.)

I also planned my flip books for an upcoming Megalo book show, and started working on my next Book Art Object piece.

And being at the studio and getting all this done made me very happy, so I could then really enjoy the bits of the NFF that I caught. While I was eating my dinner there I watched a documentary about Bill Munroe, the 'father of bluegrass' in a room full of people who really cared about all the teeny tiny details of who played with him when and how many times he scratched his mandolin front to make it less fancy. One of the aforementioned players, 'Chubby' Wise, played his fiddle like Barry Morgan plays his organ, teeth and smile and half-closed eyes and all. It was heart-warming.

I love Easter. I rarely get interrupted because everyone else is on holiday and most shops are closed, so I can just get on with things.

I hope your Easter is just as satisfying.