Winter blues

After six weeks  I took the tapes from my hand this week as the fracture in my little finger is finally healed, but it is still swollen and I am unable to bend it much. Thinking that activity is the best medicine I looked at my list of 'things to try' that I jot down when the ideas come to me and set about trying to encourage my hand to return to normal duty.
I have become involved in trying out another alternative photographic technique this week (more later!) and whenever I go down this road my mind goes back to cyanotypes, the technique that started it all for me. Despite having new chemicals I still have lots of the solution that I made up for a workshop nearly three years ago and every time I say I won't use it again, I have to push it and see if there is anything left to it.

 I have cyanotyped on top of rusted paper before and thought I'd try it on fabric. The piece I chose is quite old and the rust marks were made with fabric laid out on bubble wrap and then rusted tools laid out on top, so it has a definite right side and wrong side as the bubble wrap clearly left an impression. I decided I'd make the wrong side, the right side,for this experiment and I soaked the fabric with the cyanotype solution. Interestingly the rust resisted the solution and it just sat on the top. I exposed it for about 15 minutes and the resist is clear by the fact that the rear of the fabric (above) is much paler than the front.

 Here on the front I put the acetate that I used for my screen print trying to see if the rust worked with the beetles.

 The results were great and now I am thinking about adding a gum arabic transfer on top of the print. Time will tell. In the meantime while I was waiting for the fabric to expose I found a pile of material that I'd either cyanotyped or indigo dyed many moons ago. I had started to make some patchwork pieces to use them up and obviously forgotten all about them. Now I've brought them back to the house and I started doing some more last night. Keeps the hands moving and is quite calming. Just love those blues but wishing for a bit more sunshine to play with rust and cyanotype again!

Postcards from the edge

 I was delighted at the end of last year when Fiona asked if I'd like to join her and 4 of her  friends in a postcard print exchange for 2017. I jumped at the chance for sharing ideas and the parameters were straightforward:- send four postcards to everyone else on the list, once every three months, in a pre-determined size and picking from a list of print techniques to realise them in.

 All postcards had to respond to the changing seasons so January's offering was Summer....
now I know it's not summer here but it is in the southern hemisphere and I did not want to be out of kilter so I did my summer postcards in December for January posting and I am currently contemplating a collagraph for autumn to be posted in early April.

 I chose to do a monoprint based on a Barbara Kingsolver quote from the book 'Prodigal Summer' and I sat back to wait for mine to arrive. Susan's came first followed by Kim, Andrina, Fiona and Steph. Poor Stephanie's took 2 months to reach me and we'd almost given up hope of getting a full set and then it just appeared last week. So, now I had 6 including my own and wanted to find a way to keep them all together. As I always slip in default mode and make a book I cracked on with an idea today.

 I made a mock up of a double folded accordion book and made pockets to slide each postcard into. I thought cutting a letter out of the front would show a peep of the postcard and make it relevant as all the seasons have 6 characters so I could make a full set by the end of the exchange.

 Then I just cut off one of the flaps and turned it on itself to neaten the front. I was thinking of adding covers but I used quite thick paper for this exercise and just drawing or printing something on the front may be enough. I am well aware that my cutting is wonky but I did not plan it too closely. I made it just to see if it would do the job and I think it will although I need to re-think the right typeface to use. I also know that summer has two 'm's' but Blogger won't upload the second photo for some reason which was housing Susan's postcard. I love technology!!

 That last statement is of course only partly true.......

 I went up to Bristol yesterday to do some screen printing and had a mock up of all these beetles from either my drawings or my photos from the Natural History Museum in Oxford. I cut them out and stuck them all on a circular piece of paper because I have been looking at making toroidal books recently. Simon, who was running the workshop said I work in a very analogue way because most people would have scanned all the drawings in and moved them around in Photoshop. Well, I use Photoshop a lot but like to have my hand in things and quite enjoy messing about with scale on the photocopier and superimposing images on top of one another.

 With the circular book in mind I bought these old sheets which I think might be from a tachograph or something similar and I printed by beetle ring onto them for a bit of experimentation. I might use them individually or stick and cut them back to back before making the book. I shall reveal all when I decide.

In my 'analogue' way I had produced some imagery for the 'winter' postcard for the exchange already. As we're in the middle of these freezing temperatures it is a season uppermost in my thoughts! Simon altered it in Photoshop to get it onto acetate and I gaily printed 8 versions to get 6 good ones but I have noticed today that they are too small! He may have changed my original or I made an error up front. Who knows?
The long and short of it is that I have my postcards for July already but not only are they the wrong size, I have realised today that screenprinting is not one of the disciplines on the list. Drat and curses.
I'm not showing them here just in case..... but if I have a surfeit of winter themed postcards to get rid of.... anyone want something sent from Wales?

Getting ahead

 About a month ago I nearly fell down the stairs but I managed to save myself by catching my hand in the banister, resulting in a fractured finger. I heard a sickening crack and thought I'd broken bones so a fracture was getting off lightly. Since then my hand has had to be taped up and you realise how important every digit is when you don't have use of all 10 of them! Luckily it was my right hand and I am left handed so it could have been worse. In fact I could have fallen badly and done myself a bad injury so I consider myself very fortunate. I have been able to carry on drawing this month and I have been working on ideas for a screenprint as I am going up to Bristol this weekend to get some screens exposed with Simon again. He has set up a special day for me and one other so I aim to make the most of it and I need both hands strong enough to pull that squeegee!!

I've been drawing beetles and hellebores - as usual, with more ideas than I can fit into the time allowed - but I also want to do something local to here so I went up to St Davids Cathedral yesterday to add more photos to my groaning files.

 I've lost count of how many times I've been up to St Davids in the 20 years we've lived here but there is always something new to see. Yesterday it was empty of people, probably because Wales were playing Italy in the Six Nations at the same time. St. Davids was like a ghost town so the cathedral seemed like it was all mine, except this time I got more involved with what was outside rather than inside.

 I realised that I had never walked around the whole perimeter and looked in detail at the  statues either side of the big windows. The two above are either side of the main door but the others are towards the east end, mainly in shadow in the afternoon. Some are eroded beyond recognition but others stand out.

 I love this lady clad in her sandstone wimple and the creature below was a real find.

 My favourite is the young man. Something about those flowing locks and the faraway look in his eyes just speak to me. I can see me returning just to see what he looks like in different light. Yesterday was cold but sunny and he was in shade for the afternoon. I might try an early morning to see if his features are highlighted more sharply then.

And finally, when they restored the east end of the cathedral they added a sculpture of the last Dean, John Wyn Evans, a figure I remember well. My husband said 'Oh look there's Eric Morecambe'.....
which got a withering look from me, but at the moment I need him as a driver so I kept my thoughts to myself. I need to stay strapped up for at least another two weeks but when I go back for the next look , I shall drive myself, and leave him at home!