Diamond Jubilee Give-Away

It's not the largest Diamond Jubilee memento you'll come across but it is a one-off! I finally got around to sticking the crown - a gift from my friend Sheila - on to the front after making the little flag book weeks ago, so I am now offering it as promised for my Jubilee give-away. If it appeals to you just leave me a comment on this post or send me an e mail by the end of play on Friday and my assistant will draw the name as per last time.

Stepping out

 In the last week or so the final stages of the all Wales coastal path were opened after a five year project. This now means that the whole 870 miles of it is accessible which is an amazing feat to achieve. Now, along with the Pembrokeshire Coast Path (Britain's only coastal national park) the rest of this beautiful country can be enjoyed as well. So far on my hols on my home turf I've been north and south of the county enjoying dry, if not warm weather and walking my socks off. Today was the sunniest and warmest so we headed north to Aberporth to try the new access path to Tresaith. Although we walked further I thought it was fantastic that there is a mile long paved path providing access for all. No excuse for anyone to say they can't enjoy the coastline and what a glorious day it was. I saw sand martins in huge numbers flying in and out of dunes and saw and heard a couple of whitethroats, summer migrants to these shores. Lately I've been guilty of being restless and wanting to move away from Pembrokeshire but today was one of those glad to be alive days and I would not have wanted to be anywhere else. I hear the weather is changeable for tomorrow - well, it is still Wales after all - so something indoors might be on the agenda like a visit to St David's  Cathedral. I can recommend this holidaying in your own backyard stuff! If you tell yourself you're on holiday and plan your days as you would  if you were somewhere else it really works!

Sea treasures

After days of rain, rain and more accursed rain I was feeling a bit stir crazy but today was dry so I decided to get out for a walk to the beach. When I set off it was dull, grey and gloomy but as I neared Manorbier I suddenly saw these fabulous colours in the view as the sun started to come out. Look at those murky grey seas lit up by sudden sunlight and contrasted with the acid yellow of the oil seed rape fields and the fresh greens of new growth on the trees. There has to be a painting or something in there within all those strips and bands of colour.

I thought there would be no-one about but Manorbier beach was busy so I went up to the local church which is a favourite haunt of mine and took a few photos for some ideas I am working through.As I  still had not had my walk  I stopped along the coast a short distance at Penally on my way home and walked across the golf course to Tenby's South Beach where I walked along the beach to Tenby and back. My friend Vickie told me yesterday that Lonely Planet have said Tenby is THE place to go this year. Obviously nobody knows that yet because the beach was pretty deserted. The sun had not been out long enough to tempt people down there but that was fine with me as I had a bag with me and decided to collect some things to draw later. I now have a (pungent smelling) bucketful of crabs, mermaids purses, shells and seaweeds etc out in the garage to pick from.

The sea potatoes or heart urchins were a lovely find. They are not often found on that beach so I am pleased with them. Sadly, I was messing about in Photoshop with the photo to add texture and lost the original but I think I shall have a go at  trying to introduce their shapes or patterns into a print. For those of us in the UK, this has been a dire month so far weatherwise but I hear it is about to improve. I hope so because getting out in the fresh air with a fair wind behind you certainly lifts your spirits and I feel quite energised by today's walk. My husband is on holiday next week so we are planning a holiday here in Pembrokeshire, thinking about going to places that are familiar and trying to see them with new eyes or going to see places we rarely visit because they are on our doorstep and we take them for granted. At least if the weather fails to improve I don't have far to come home!

Flags for Peace

 So, there I am with all those indigo samples and wondering what to do with them as I only wanted to try the methodology and had no idea what to do with the outcomes! I was toying with the idea of prayer flags and in the way that fate intervenes, logged on and read this post by Fiona. This took me here to Flags for Peace 2012 and I just knew that fate was telling me to 'join in with this one Lesley'. I shall be making a special flag to fly on the designated day of September 21st,World Peace Day and my late father's birthday, and the first person who would understand the reason I'd want to support this. What an appropriate date for me, fate again! So, I cut up my samples, found some tape, screen printed a few with my own little dove for peace, ran them through the machine... at haste.... and then worked out where they might go. They just about stretch from my shed up the garden  to the middle of my herb bed.  Although prayer flags are traditionally in five colours, blue is the chosen colour for sky and space so I think mine are just right. Prayer flags are used to promote peace, compassion, strength and wisdom and the Tibetans believe that the prayers will be blown by the wind to spread the goodwill and compassion into all pervading space. I think if enough people sign up to raise a flag for peace on September 21st that goodwill will encircle the globe.

Ladies sing the blues

 I mentioned a few posts ago that I might be trying out a new way of dyeing with indigo shortly. This was first suggested by my friend Vickie a while ago after reading an article about it in the journal of the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers. Whilst I am no longer a Guild member, Vickie is an active weaver and dyer and we were intrigued by the notion that there was a 'simpler' way to use the dye rather than the traditional means most dyers are familiar with. I read extensively about it and found the best information came from the blog of Jenny Dean, well known for her informative books on natural dyeing. What was useful to us was not only the methodology that Jenny outlines but also the dialogue from comments left for her posts about this method. Even so, despite the fact that Vickie and I have been dyeing for more than a dozen years or so, it was not all plain sailing.

The basic premise of the 1-2-3 vat is that you use three items in the proportion of one part indigo, two parts calcium hydroxide and three parts fructose. I sourced the calcium hydroxide and Vickie found the fructose in the local health food shop. Between us we had four types of indigo from different suppliers and we decided to try two of them to see if the depth of colour was altered.All of the articles and blogs we'd read said the outcome of this vat was a paler blue than the norm and that because of the alkalinity of the vat it did not do great things to wool, however, one of the comments left on Jenny's blog suggested that deeper blues had been achieved with different indigo and that's actually what we found today. I had some indigo grains from a company called Kemtex** and we tried those first. The vat looks very scummy and I think that's because we did not have enough water in it. We first dyed a skein of handspun wool and got this gorgeous blue which might have been more even if the vat had been deeper. It was rinsed properly in water with vinegar added and it  did not seem to change the handle of the fibre at all which is worth noting for all handspinners. Whilst Vickie's plan was to dye wool fibres and a silk noil warp she has wound for a weaving project, I intended to just sample dye some beautiful cotton fabric and try dyeing some different types of paper as well.

We set another vat up simultaneously and used an indigo extract and I think the photo below demonstrates the difference in colour quite clearly although it has to be said that the silk noil warp was a natural beige colour and that might have affected the take up of colour. There was something significant in the timings however as the pale blue was in the vat for over 40 mins whilst that darker blue skein came out of the first vat after five minutes or so. How can something dyed for a fraction of the time have a deeper colour? It can only mean that the actual type of indigo used has a marked effect on the successful outcome of the exercise.

 So, here are the fabric pieces I dyed, the top one in the second vat and all the others in the first vat. It has to be said that we were not too particular about how we put the fabric in and removed it from the vat purely because we were just trying it to see what worked and what did not. In a traditional indigo vat trying not to disturb the oxygen in the vat is crucial, so fibres are slid in and out with great attention to detail. Today we just ignored that premise and it seemed to have no effect on the outcome whatsoever.

 I had a selection of papers to try. These are offcuts of Somerset Satin printmaking paper just quickly dipped in the vat and removed. Whilst you'd traditionally time the immersion and then remove or double dip, I literally showed it to the vat and took it out. I even put one of my papier mache nibs in and quickly removed it. It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination as the scum stuck to things but I really could not care about that. I love the marks and imperfections on everything. The alchemy of indigo never fails to deliver.

 The tough paper with holes is a mexican bark paper that I put in and pulled straight out and I did the same with the infamous banana paper but look at the wonderful marks on it. It looks like the results of mixing oil and water.It really does have an iridescence about it.

I shall use the banana paper in a book but may well print over it first. Similarly, I could have dyed the fabric with lots of stitch resists and then used it but I decided to make it solid colours so that I can then try screen printing it with discharge paste or bleach. Whatever we both do with our samples today we were both agreed that this is a great idea as long as all the necessary precautions that go hand in hand with dyeing are observed.

Vickie went home with her samples and I still have two active indigo vats that I'd like to try again  tomorrow to see if they work as well.  I'll try and refresh them and see what happens although I have a dentist visit in the morning for a new crown to be fitted and I'm giving a talk on moth trapping in the afternoon so I shall have to start early! Whatever happens we've had a great day and learned a new way of dyeing. Trying it with woad might be next on the agenda and Vickie wants to try something with cochineal too.... bring on the reds!

** I contacted  Jenny to let her know I wanted to put in a link and she thinks the dye I used was synthetic indigo grains rather than pure extract and that would explain the colour disparity.

Technically challenged.... or losing the plot

Ever since my morning with Cathy I have been practising layers in Photoshop and I am improving although I acknowledge that what I think is brilliant is probably beginner stuff for a lot of people. Nevertheless, my enthusiasm is high so I've been making up some textured backgrounds to use with my hand drawn images or photos. Whilst I was doing that I came across something called the bokeh effect, again new to me but old hat for some I'm sure. I followed this link and made a lens cover for my camera exactly like the one in the photo above but as you can see I have not achieved the bokeh effect. What is it? Well, it is a  photograph where the foreground objects are in sharp relief with the background, which in turn is all hazy and lovely. The heart shape lens is meant to create lots of little hearts in the background of the photo like twinkly lights.... not one blobby shape like I've achieved. Now it's either because my camera is not a DSLR (it's a halfway between type camera) or it's because we've had no decent light since last week here and you need strong contrasts of foreground and background for it to work.
These are the best of my experiments . The ones with the spots are random photos of a piece of fabric I compost dyed a long time ago. It's lying on the table waiting to be used for something after I retrieved it from a box last week so it was handy to photograph but it looks more like specimens under a microscope rather than anything else. I need to go back to the drawing board to crack this technique but there is no sign of the sun coming out here anytime soon so I'm off to practise more Photoshop but watch this space. I have to try this bokeh effect again and if anyone has done so successfully please tell me how!!

Sewing books

 I made this  little chap a few weeks ago as a present for my friend Joan. She hits a milestone birthday tomorrow and she is always someone who loves a personally made gift but I've got used to him sitting on my shelf and can't bear to part with him now so I needed a plan B. Earlier this week I travelled home to visit family and spend a lovely morning with friend and fellow blogger Cathy who had promised to explain how to layer images in Photoshop to me. Well, I knew she was taking on a mammoth task but she managed to get the basic process fixed in my head and I have been practising ever since - with varied results it has to be said, but I'm getting there Cathy... honest....

 Anyway, I had made Cathy a little book as a way of saying thank you for her time and the wonderful lunch she gave me and I liked it so much myself (words I rarely say!) that I decided to make a similar one for Joan's birthday. The only thing I'd bought for Cathy's was some tape from a local shop that looked like a tape measure, otherwise everything has come from my scraps bag and old stuff I've been collecting for that day when inspiration might strike and I'd know exactly what to do with it. If it didn't lie within arms reach of my desk I have not used it! I repeated a lot of the elements for Joan's book using pages folded from torn watercolour paper and stitched together later on the sewing machine. It's a bit wonky but I shall be convincing Joan that it is 'organic' and 'unique'. It is made from collections of old sewing stuff mounted and put into little tracing paper pockets. There was no plan as such. I just did what I felt like doing and luckily had enough tape and ribbon left to adorn the covers and enable it to be tied close.

I still cannot stop making books at the moment it seems and I have been asked to run a small workshop in St Davids next month working with a group of printmakers, using their prints to make their own books. I am really looking forward to that and it has come about because of Sheila and Deborah, two lovely girls I met on my last course module. The book give away was great fun too and I may do that again in the near future. In the meantime I need to go off and wrap this book up for Joan. Then I'm going back to practising those layers using some great photos of rusty stuff that I took the other day whilst out on a jaunt to the beach. I hope the memory holds out. Wish me luck.....