Booking our travel

Yes, yes, busy busy busy. I haven't abandoned you totally, although it must feel like it -- sorry.

I've just had most of a week at the beach, so I'm feeling refreshed and only slightly daunted by the demands of the next few months. I booked the Depot Beach cottage (the same one where we were married) because I'm always completely exhausted and unable to talk to anyone after teaching at the Sturt Winter School, and so I decided to be exhausted and taciturn at the beach. It was a good call.

 This was the view from our bedroom (the beach is through the trees, and the trees were our wedding chapel). There's one bird, as you can see, but through the week we had many, many more, attracted by our bags of 'wild' bird seed. BB was hand-feeding kookaburras and butcherbirds mince as well. There was a lot of poop to clean up at the end, but worth it.

This was the weather, cool but sunny, perfect for long walks along our beach and around to the neighbouring beaches (this is Pretty Beach) and no pressure to go into the water. Winter beaches are the best! A certain member of my family who doesn't want to be blogged is here just starting one of the many large holes he likes to dig...

Anyhoo, let's talk about why I was tired. I like teaching at the Sturt Winter Schools: you spend a whole week with your students, living in at the Frensham School and eating the more than adequate catering. The classes run from 9 to 4, but it's rare that we finish on time, and so it's a lovely intensive week of making.

This year I thought, instead of just pitching a general book arts class, that I'd give people a theme, because most years the feedback is that people didn't really know what materials to bring. (They still made those noises this year, but only little noises, since they all responded to the theme.) Having just been to NZ myself at the end of last year (when I had to pitch the class), I thought of a travel theme, since everyone travels somewhere, even if it's just along the timeline of your life. So it was called Booking Your Travel, and it was such a success I think I'll run it again sometime. The class had eight participants: Avril, Putch, Pip, Elizabeth, Ros, Toni, Liz and Cindy (in order of their seats around the space!).

Here you can see (l-r) Ros, Elizabeth, Pip, Avril.

Instead of moving everyone through a progression of binding styles, instead I let people play, and introduced techniques as they suggested themselves. The first day we still played with concertinas and concertina bindings, because it's a great way to loosen up, and works really well with scraps of things. It's also a great way to determine skill levels, and to ascertain everyone's sense of aesthetics. It's no use exhorting someone to let loose with trimmings if their preference is to be streamlined and spare with their designs. Each student is an individual, and their work should reflect that.

Avril's postcards, which fold out to make a big wall-hanging/poster of Hawaiian vintage cards backed onto momigami paper.

Cindy's cards, tickets and receipts, machine-stitched with orange thread using a sewing machine we sourced at the school. 

The best part about a class of women of a certain age is that everyone has experiences and various skills, and book arts is all about utilising any skills available. We had a professional graphic designer (Avril) who makes artists' books in a group with another class member (Cindy), so they had lots of ideas and skills. Plus we had Liz Jeneid, a very respected artist who makes books in her practice (that was a wee bit scary but Liz is GORGEOUS) and spent many years teaching art, so she was able to share a lot of ideas and show us some gorgeous work. But there were others who saw themselves as new and raw, but who had fabulous sewing skills: Elizabeth (whose family called her 'the mender' because of her sewing skills and her ability to fix things) Pip and Putch. Sewing skills are hard to come by in younger people, and I don't think these women should underestimate their abilities. Toni turned out to have a head for construction and Ros, who is a south coast artist, has an eye for colour and desire to flow things that permeated through her books.

Elizabeth's coptic-bound and fabric-covered book, complete with evidence of her mending skills...

 Putch used coptic sewing to make a spiral of her grandson's congratulations (on being born) cards...

Ros discovered that snakefolds can completely transform drawings.

Toni just made up the most excellent stuff.

They all bounced off each other beautifully, learning not just from me but from each other, and I learned from them, which for me is the perfect way to run a class. And they all got along swimmingly, which is very important when you spend all day together for a week! I would like to thank all of them for that.

One of the exciting books made was by Elizabeth, who brought along a bundle of pen and watercolour sketches of Venice, and we spent a bit of time looking at them and thinking what to do with them. They would have been perfectly pleasant sewn together as a book of some form, but what we ended up with, because Elizabeth was open and daring, was a spectacular tunnel-book that pushed those sketches into something magical. We all went crazy when she finished it, and Cindy made a video. Elizabeth even made teeny tiny strings of bunting for it, and used some glorious old maps of Venice to augment the drawings. Great effort.

I could feature all the books, but alas I haven't got enough time. I've put together a flickr set of the books, and I think you'll agree with me that everything is just amazing.

I made one resolved bookwork while I was there, as a present to Dale Dryen, who has been organising the School for years, and who is stepping back and taking a different role. I'm pleased to say she liked it :)

The covers are a vintage front cover cut in half then coptic-sewn, and I made a little slipcase for it.

Last piccie: the beautiful old tree that stands outside the Headmistress's office at Frensham, I love walking past it, and it always makes me think of the Aged Poet, who died around this time last year.

Stay tuned: new exhibitions coming up in August and September!

PS: I promised you cats: Padge, of course, wanted to come to Mittagong as my teacher's aide. Oh, I wish.

Matters of economy

Because Mr Padge keeps losing his collars and Mr Pooter doesn't, or rather, Pooter does shed them, but in places where they can be found again, Padge is now wearing an old collar of Pooter's, which means that they are now both black cats in blue collars. And even though one is very fat and the other very thin, sometimes, especially when they sit in the Roast Chicken position, it is very hard to tell them apart.

Except when they lie on their backs, as in this shot where Mr Padge tried his most helpfully to be a paperweight this morning as I worked in bed.



Actually, the fact that Padge doesn't lose the crappy old blue collars makes me highly suspicious that someone in the neighbourhood is souveniring his own collars, which have traditionally been red. The last one was Barbie pink (I mistyped oink there, and was sorely tempted to leave it) as a joke on Best Beloved, but didn't work because his red-green colourblindness makes him impervious to shades of pink. Damn. Collars are expensive, and getting little tags engraved even more so. So for reasons of economy, Padge can be Pooter for a while in the wider world. If there's food involved, I suspect he'll answer to anything.

I'm writing this while I print out a little promotional flyer for my wares. With the time and energy and ink cannisters it's taking up, I might as well have handset and printed it, dammit. Up to now, I've been sending out an infrequent but free print newsletter to a growing mailing list. I got back from NZ to find that stamps had leapt to 60c!! Egads, people, snail mail is expensive!

So I've decided to regroup, and now want to offer to people the chance to subscribe to a regular (twice-yearly) newsletter/zine thingy for $5 a year. It will not be all letterpress, because that would blow it out of the water, but it will have a touch of it here and there. Anyone want to join up? I'm calling it SNAIL, since the last batch were called SNAIL MAIL. If you do, fling me an email to ampersandduck (at but I bet the spammers scan for (at) these days) gmail.com and I'll let you know how we proceed with payment.

I've almost, but not quite, shaken off my horrid cold. It started as a sore throat, moved up to my sinus, and then settled happily in my chest. I'm hacking up all sorts of blah, which catch in my throat on the way up & give me a great husky blues voice that sounds very dramatic on the phone. This is one reason why I'm on Facebook such a lot, for those who care, and also why I'm working from home a bit rather than standing in my still quite cool concrete studio.

Mind you, I did find the energy to complete the printing for my latest Book Art Object piece, and it should be dry enough today to finish... huzzar! Then I can send it out, and then, only then, can I share some photos, because the whole point is for the recipients to work it out for themselves. It's a one-trick pony, but I've had fun training it.

Another thing I've been working hard on is helping to rebrand ANCA, my studio complex, with a new logo and website etc. I haven't been responsible for the actual graphic side of it, but as I'm on the ANCA Board, I'm getting my hands dirty in other ways, like making decisions, letterheads & party planning. If you're interested, save the date of the 9th of December for the launch of the new ANCA look. Very exciting!

That's also the date, as well, of the Christmas Party of the Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild, so I'll be party-hopping. If you are interested in that, it's a Show & Tell, Bring & Buy evening, so everyone needs to bring something to sell or show. Or just come & chat & buy, all good.

Still inkjetting. Might as well get out of my pyjamas and have some lunch :)

Passive aggressive non-art making

Wow, last weekend was exhaustipating.

I wanted to just be in the studio this week, binding a batch of Transmigration to fulfill a purchase order (only buying one copy, so there's a nice fresh batch if anyone's interested), but of course, life got in the way, so while I got the batch done, I didn't get a lot else done. Bumblebee's laptop died, 6 months after purchase, so luckily it's within warranty, but the kerfuffle getting it to the techos and then the extra kerfuffly kerfuffle trying to pick it up again hasn't endeared me to the magical world of PCs, no matter how much I love The IT Crowd (that link is to a fun TIC game). I should have bought him a Mac, the techos are closer to home.

Combine that with the Aged Poet needing extra attention, various chores I had to run and some extra argy-bargy when Bumblebee accidentally took my studio keys to school with him and I had to jump through hoops to get them back because high schools don't like parents just wandering into school to talk to their children (unlike Primary Schools, which think you're an anti-social weirdo if you don't pop in once a week... year 7 is a transition for parents as much as the kids), not much art-making got done.

[breathes in]

[breathes out]

Which reminds me of that fabulous Ben Folds Five line: all this breathing in, never breathing out... (from the song FAIR)

And then yesterday I spent the morning helping Bumblebee clean his room. Five shopping bags full of rubbish, two vacuum cleaner bagless cannisters full of crud and a number of plastic boxes full of toys deemed too young for him (one of which is scrawled over with thick black marker saying DO NOT THROW OUT DO NOT SELL), a window open and the removal of sundry dirty clothes (socks thrown behind the bookcase, etc) and fetid towels, his room has finally temporarily lost its goaty reek and you can actually see the floor.

It was with a huge sigh of relief, then, that I went to the studio yesterday, closed the door on the world, rolled my sleeves up and spent a few happy hours playing with type, paper and yellow ink.

You'd think it would be a simple task, but yellow ink needs very clean rollers to print clean and bright and not a dirty olive colour. In fact, the day before, I'd inked up Kitty the Press with said yellow ink, and been very disappointed, even though I'd cleaned the rollers and all the bits around them scrupulously. I decided to abandon the machine's rollers and went out to the local art store (Maureen's, not Eckers-crap, of course) and bought a brand new spotless hand brayer. It is now my Yellow Roller. Not a spot of anything else will touch it.

And thus I progressed from this:



to this:



And I hope you can tell the difference in brightness and clarity. I was completely inspired at the Print Symposium by Tim Maguire's amazing CMYK work, and am embarking upon a spot of colour play as a result. This particular piece is for the latest Book Art Object project. One layer done, five to go.

Today we decided to have a family day, so I stayed away from the studio, even though I'm longing to get back to play with magenta ink. We haggled all day over things to do together: no-one wanted to ride at the lake, all the good movies were over by the time we thought of it, with no afternoon sessions, and we didn't want to stay home and attack the garden. Then I remembered that the Old Canberra Inn, which is basically our local pub apart from anything in Dickson, has free pool tables on Sundays. Bonus! Within half an hour we were happily playing pool, helping ourselves to the free jukebox with its bikie-inspired playlist (I taught Bumblebee the informal and very rude chorus to The Angel's Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again, to BB's vaguely disapproving look, and fell in love over again with Ian Moss and Don Walker, wishing that Jimmy had choked on his own vomit sometime in the 80s), but still, in the back of my mind there was a 'I could be printing right now' sensation. I swallowed it, but it's slightly bitter as it goes down.

I came up with a wonderful music trivia question, and you're welcome to use it if you have to compose trivia nights or whatever:

What have these three songs got in common:

and you play excerpts of 'Bow River' by Cold Chisel (or 'Saturday Night'), 'Errol', by Australian Crawl, and a third one, which you can make tricky by adding your own third or you can make it easy by making the third one a Ringo Beatles song.

Answer? They are all songs not sung by the band's lead singer/s.

What do you think? Got any better or additional examples?



Sigh. Now Bumblebee looks like he's got some horrid throat swelling thingy, so I've dosed him up with garlicky chicken soup and am mentally preparing to not go anywhere tomorrow except the doctor. Sigh. I'll get back to the studio sometime. At least it's waiting there for me, patiently.

Next weekend I'm teaching a book class at Megalo, and there are spaces, if anyone's interested. I'm trying to rustle up participants, because the more people there are, the more I get paid, and I'm not earning anything regular until I start back at the BookStud next year. So if you know anyone that would love to learn how to make booky things, let them know. My bills will be most grateful.

Best Beloved just said goodnight, as he's having a Sleep Head-start (I've worked out a great system: if he goes to sleep solidly first, I can creep in and read an e-book under the sheets for a while, which beats him whinging at me to turn the light off), and as he kissed my neck he said 'mmm, you smell nice, what is it?'

'Hogget.' I replied. It must be, because I slow-cooked it all afternoon. It was delicious, cooked with green olives that had been marinated in preserved lemon & garlic. I guess there are worse things to smell of, but it's not very romantic.

Craptastic

Oh poo bum, it's all messy, isn't it? The election, I mean. I checked into the ABC last night before bedtime (oh, how I miss Aunty!) and decided not to stay up late. This morning is no better.

So I've brought my breakfast into my flat, probably illegally, since there's all sorts of rules around this college, and one of them is no wearing hats in the dining room -- I was told off for wearing a beret whilst eating the other day -- and I'm going to write about lots of things to cheer myself up a bit while my washing washes.

Phew, that was a long sentence, wasn't it? Lord knows if it's correct or not, I'm not in the mood to check. I'm eating jam on fruit toast, and drinking hot chocolate. They have a beverage machine here, so I can have endless hot chocs if I like, and they have an icecream machine, too, but I haven't lurked in that direction yet.

Yesterday was just a weird day, from go to whoa. Full of things going wrong, and bad decisions. I tripped in the carpark of the New World supermarket, and although I didn't fall, I banged my knee on a car, and there's nothing like a nagging scrape on the knee under your jeans and a slight lingering shakiness to make you feel a long way from home.

On the way home from the markets I met a very friendly cat, black & white with a wide jolly face, who, when I clucked at him with my most non-threatening cat hello, came right up to me, chatting to me. He (I'm assuming himdom, because he looked male) and I had a lovely chat and pat and then I realised that he had a hole in his side, not fresh but roughly healed, and then looked harder at him and noticed his general scragginess. We lingered a bit longer until some other people walked past us and he ran off. I wish I could have taken him somewhere, but with no car and no place to bring him etc, it would have been very difficult. But he haunts me, and If I see him again, and he still looks scraggy, I will act. I'm presuming he was part of a student group house and was dumped, or ran away when they changed houses or something. I've been told since that there are a lot of abandoned ex-group house pets in the university area.

So I was already feeling a bit rattled when I got to the Print Room studio. My plan had been to proof the next poster and launch straight into printing it, with a view to finishing it by the end of the weekend. But it just wasn't working, and I fiddled and fiddled, and proofed and mixed ink, and fiddled, and suddenly it was 5.30 and I had a pub date with some librarians. Sigh.

I have to say, however, that there were bright spots in the day. The crepe filled with gooseberry and pear jam for breakfast was excellent, as was the lemon brioche I had for morning tea. The Evansdale Karitane Mellow Blue cheese I bought and started last night while checking on the hanging of Australian politics is superb (and NZ$6 for an enormous chunk). Yay for the markets!

I met my two new friends, Allison and Lorraine (apologies if I misspell) at the pub, when we scoffed hot thick wedges of potato and drank alcohol, and then went to the uni bar, Refuel, for the 5th birthday party of Dunedinmusic.com, an all-day event that was just warming up its evening session as we arrived.

Of course, all day I kept forgetting to take my camera, but Allison gave me hers to take photos of the gigs, and I'll post them when she sends them to me. The first couple of bands were ok, but we were settling into a booth and having fun observing the slowly growing crowd.

Then a band came on that just forced me to get up and closer to the stage. At first the drawcard was the lead singer, who was a cross between Cindy Lauper and Madonna and someone else who I can't think of but has a shit-hot operatic voice. She was dressed in a hot-pink bra and corset, with breasts that almost poured out of the whole shebang, and as she leaned forward to play the organ keyboard, every person in the audience leaned further in to her, and her voice would wave over you in rills. It was absolutely hypnotic. And then, once I got used to her spectacle, I noticed the rest. It was only a drummer (excellent drumming) and a bass player, whose fingers just never stopped moving. The music was hot, the stagecraft was wild, and their name is easy to remember: CULT DISNEY. I tried to get a recording, but they are currently in recording, so I have Allison on standby to get me their CD when it comes out. But I think it will be tame compared to the live experience.

This was followed by The Chills, reincarnated and in fine form, playing a small (they only had half an hour) selection of their songs, including a wonderful cover of the Cat Stevens number Matthew & Son. Bliss! Then I just couldn't stand any more, because I've been standing all day every day for three weeks straight, and I needed to get horizontal. So the concert went on for hours afterwards, and I hope everyone involved had fun, because the small bit I saw was ACE.

Almost time for the library to open and for me to get working. Donald-the-Special-Collections-Library has been very busy lately, as he is changing exhibitions in his lovely gallery space. He's taking down a show about their Railway holdings, and putting up what promises to be a fab show about Pulp Fiction. He was in the paper yesterday with a photo of him surrounded by lurid book covers. I'll share more of that with you when it's all installed.

He took time out the other day to share with me a couple of his treasures, and one of my side-loves: examples of foreedge painting. Sometimes books aren't just guilded on their page-edges, they also have secret paintings. Often these are quite innocent, and merely book-enhancing, like this copy of Virgil:





But occasionally (and probably more often than private library owners will reveal), you come across something that just makes you laugh out loud:







Isn't she gorgeous?

Hi ho, hi ho, off to work I go.

Calendary

This thursday: 10 December

Canberra Bookbinders Guild Christmas Meeting.
If you've always wanted to join but felt shy, this is the perfect first time experience. it's a Show, Tell & Sell session: people are encouraged to bring their work to show and they are also encouraged to bring things for sale, whether it's books or excess materials or tools. There'll be a glass of wine or three and it's also bring a plate of nibblies. 7.30, Woden Community Centre (behind the big discount chemist, opposite Woollies -- the door is self-locking, which is sometimes off-putting: you have to ring the doorbell and one of the nice binders will rush out & open it).

ALSO
Megalo are having their annual Member's Show opening, even though they haven't put it up on their website. I think that starts at 6pm, so you can do like I'm doing, and rush between the two events.

Next week: Wednesday, 16 December, 6pm





ANCA Gallery & Studios (where I have my studio) is having their Christmas show, with lots of goodies up & about. We're also having a lucky dip, fondly referred to as '20:20', because the dip items will be priced between 20c and $20, and all proceeds go to the Fred Hollows Foundation (chosen because we're visual artists, vision is very important to us). So far we have all sorts of things in the dip, including these:



I call them 'mouthpieces'; they're origami mouths, and when you pull the side tabs back & forth, the mouths open and shut. If you hold them in front of your face the effect can be quite freaky! (I know that by sewing them they sully the idea of fold-only origami, but I found they hold together much better as an object with a bit of a stitch.)

I'm sure I can add other things to this list of events, but between those and all of Bumblebee's primary school graduation hoo-haas, they're quite enough to be doing for now.

Bega bindings

I'm out of love with my red digital camera. I bought it on the way to Korea in 2004, so I suppose it's given me five good years of service, but it's either succumbing to inbuilt obsolescence or I'm getting bad eyesight and shaky hands.

Anyway, I'm starting this way because I took lots of photos of my weekend workshop in Bega, and only a few of them actually came out ok. GAH!

Here they are. All of the following images are of work made by participants:



I kept the weekend very broad and quite simple -- a few fun kinds of book structures, a lot of talking about what constitutes a 'book', a demo how to do eucalyptus oil photocopy transfers, stuff like that.



I showed a couple of Powerpoint slideshows, one about the work I'd done by myself and with other artists, and another using what I'd put together for what I thought would be my talk at the Library on Thursday night.



The talk went really well,* with me pulling out a lot of my books and talking about them, and letting everyone (there was about 15 people there) pass them around and look through them (which is the point of making books, isn't it?). One of those looking was once the proprietor of a favorite secondhand book shop, Candelo Books, which used to be located along the way to Tathra Beach, taking up most of an old cottage along the highway. The shop is no more, but he survives, and is a lovely articulate and fantastically-educated man who helped keep the conversation flowing.



The workshop had 13 members, and we were hosted in a room underneath the local lawn bowls club. I'd had a day between speaking at the library and starting the workshop, so I did absolutely nothing other than flop around, read (Georgia Blain's Candelo, winkled from the Bega Library, since I'd just finished her Births, Deaths and Marriages), and play Gameboy, trying desperately to fit a weekend of leisure into one blessed weekday. I did manage to cook a cake, one that Zoe had fed me a few days earlier, from this recipe. Lady Duck had a big bag of persimmons, so I couldn't resist. It's the scrummiest cake. I didn't have the right persimmons, you're meant to use the astringent sloppy ones, so I didn't get the magical alchemy, but I want you all to know that even the hard non-astringent ones work if you cook them up until they're mushy first (I used the microwave).


That's my persimmon and walnut cake in the centre, almost gone before I thought to take a photo. All workshops need lashings of cake. The one below was a shop-brought choco sponge roll (brought by Rhonda), and the one above is polenta and poached pear (brought by Anna). There was also a lovely coconut cake the next day, and I can't remember who brought that, but it was also delicious. We were happy females.



I encouraged everyone to pull apart old hardbacks and find sheet music and maps to play with, and they all did really well. People had all sorts of backgrounds (getting them to talk about themselves is the best part of the start of the workshop), from art to graphic design to costume design, and some had no art at all, just wanted to try something new. Fabbo!



I also liked seeing what people brought to play with, and they didn't disappoint: vintage boxes full of thread,



not so vintage boxes full of thread:


brand new contraptions that do dye-cuts and embossing, old stamps and woodblocks, and check out this exquisite needlebook:



The woman who owned this is a Oscar-nominated (and AFI winning) costume designer who has spent years scouring op shops and junk shops for props and costume embellishments. That needlebook was used in the TV series Under Capricorn. She has a regular stall at the Candelo markets, and also has lots of interesting stories.


I promise you, I took lots of photos of people, but this is the only decent one, and it doesn't do the poor girls justice. On the left is Sharon, who has a lot of fabulous jewellery in the new Craft ACT shop, and on the right is Ali, who is learning to wrangle silver under Sharon's tutelage. I am wearing a pair of Ali's earrings as I type, and have been wearing them non-stop since she sent them to me months ago. They are working very hard on their bookiness.



The whole mob were a great bunch of women, and we had a lovely time. I went home on the first night tired but happy. Well, I didn't go straight home, I first bought a bottle of cold white and a pack of Bega cheese crisps and went around to my lovely nana's house and watched the lawn bowls (!) with her and her crazy dog. Then we all went to the pub for tea.

On the second night, after cleaning up and saying goodbye to everyone, I got back to the farm exhaustipated.** I couldn't string many words together, and I certainly couldn't drive any further. I'd been invited to cracker night at Chez Megan, which was a fair drive up the road... but Lady Duck was not well, and Best Beloved, bless him, is not a confident driver (or he thinks he is, but I'm not confident about his driving) so I did the unthinkable and PIKED. I felt awful about it, because iconophilia had made the trip from Canberra, but what to do? Enough was enough. I curled up next to the cats and nodded off in front of the tv. A big night's sleep and then we went back to the first proper day of Canberra winter... and today was even colder.

Tomorrow I'm running a Japanese bookbinding session for the Majura Women's Group, which should be lots of fun. But I hope they have heaters!

[Many thanks to the Bega Valley Shire Council for giving me a reason to visit my parents! And to all my lovely workshoppers.]





* If you click that link, you'll get Meg's post on my talk. It's the first time I can actually see why people keep telling me I look like my mother.

**Exhaustipated = so tired that nothing comes out easily.

im in ur newzpaprs

Total coincidence, but I happen to be in both the Bega Times and the Canberra Times on the same day, for totally different reasons.

Canberra Times, in a review of my bookbinding exhibition (which now has my exhibition essay up on the gallery website):



and Bega, to promote the upcoming workshop I am hopefully teaching if they get the numbers:



Trying to look casual and approachable, don't want to scare off the punters

If you want to read the words, just click on the images to get somewhere that will make them bigger. I'm chuffed that Megan is billing my workshop as 'entertainingly invaluable'. I think I'll pop that on all my promotional material.

Colonel Duck has been ringing me excitedly through the morning each time he found an article. I'm going to appoint him my official Press Secretary.

Funny, in all the wrong ways

If you've ever been married, you'll relate to my experience of last night's exhibition opening. It was a lot like being the bride on the day: all the running around beforehand, the stress of wondering if it will all go well; and then the event itself: making sure it goes smoothly, trying to talk meaningfully to everyone in the room (and failing), and forgetting to have another drink or a loo-break because you're too busy smiling and hoping everyone is happy.

I think everyone was happy. All the binders I met and saw seemed to be smiling, and I hope they told other people they were the binders so that they got their fair share of praise.

Of course, I didn't get a chance to take photos, but I saw other cameras out and about, so I'm hoping I'll get some eventually. I did take a couple of shots right at the end, just before we left for dinner. The CUPCO people had put out some stickers, which some of the kids thought were really cute and stuck all over themselves. Cute, sure, until you looked closer (and I'm sorry about the quality of these, I was just. so. tired.):





We now have the larger sticker on our fridge, alongside a less explosive CUPCO Dali Lama sticker.

A lovely part of the evening was the arrival of For Battle's World Peace and a Speedboat, otherwise known as Speedy, with her friend Sarah (with whom I'd once worked on a very painstaking publishing project). They'd driven down from Sydney (and were going back later in the night) just to catch the opening! Champions. They came out to dinner with myself, BB and B, bookbinder Elke and other friends. Classic after-big-event dinner at a really crowded, noisy restaurant that took ages to take our order, and we couldn't split the bill. Still, it was great food, and it was nice to sit and natter face to face with Speedy, Sarah and Elke.

Then we went home and CRASHED. All three of us, out like a light within minutes.

I'm off the hook for a little while now, apart from a floor talk happening at the gallery tomorrow between 3 and 4pm -- all welcome, of course -- with myself and a couple of the binders talking about our work, and two excellent poets, Geoff Page and Alan Gould, reading Rosemary Dobson's poetry straight from my book, combined with lashings of afternoon tea. Oh, do come, if you're around. Then I'm going to relax for the rest of the weekend, because I haven't had a weekend for the last few weekends -- I've been helping print someone else's books as a type of 'ghost' printer.

And today, as I type, I'm getting a new toilet. That's right, a new toilet. See? Glory, wonder, beautiful books, good times, and it all ends up with a toilet. Or toilet humour (thanks to Speedy, and definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK).




[A big THANK YOU to Craft ACT, and all the bookbinders, and to ANNIE.]

open invitation

Finally, I get a chance to put this up:





You're all invited. It's on for five weeks, so if you're anywhere near Canberra in that time, I won't forgive you for missing it. Even if you don't like bookbinding, there's an awesome show of 'animated softies' next door.

Here's a sneak preview of the show:





And because all the books have the same text, we put the text up on the wall, so people can read it for themselves:



And here is a view up through the other gallery (G1), where you can see a glimpse of the CUPCO softies:



There will be an official website page at Craft ACT, but it's not ready yet. I've got a post on my website, which I'll keep updating as I go. At the moment it hasn't got any images, but it will, soon.

There is also a floor event this Saturday, 16 May, at Craft ACT, from 3 to 4pm, featuring floor talks by myself and fellow participants Genevieve Swifte and Linda Newbown, and readings of Rosemary Dobson's poetry by Canberra poetry overlords Geoff Page and Alan Gould. Sexy! How can you resist?