no cover yet

This is the first time I have actually sewed a "book" from start to finish...... not that it is finished, since I have no cover. I have a Journal Maker Crush on LK Ludwig, especially her book Creative Wildfire, though her Nature Journals book is a really close second.  I'm not a nature journalist, but the journals are way creative and fun.

If you look too closely at the spine you will see that I changed my mind about how to do those center stitches halfway through in an attempt to make the pages snug up against each other better than they were.

I used her method of adding color to the pages before binding them. It is detailed in the book but she uses old credit cards and scrapes acrylic paint deep into the paper, two layers, and uses a variety of things to make patterns and shapes. What is nice about her method is that the pages do NOT stick together, which has always annoyed me about journal pages or any kind of page with acrylic.

I am planning to use my huge backlog of photos in these books, not scrapbook style but more integrated into the pages. We shall see how successful I am, but I am quite happy with my imperfect binding. All I have to do is find a cover piece I want to use. The ties go onto the cover and are sewn onto it. Once Inspiration (with a capital letter, no less) strikes, I will post the next phase.

cautious

I showed you a version of this before the onset of Irene. Behind these loosely connected cones lies a swath of pea gravel. A single line of yellow tape connects them all.

After DOT arrived to secure them for the storm they looked like this. They now had 2 strands of yellow tape running through them. No other change but I guess they were being doubly cautious.

Groan away, I couldn't resist.

still waiting for Irene....

My favorite restaurant seems like it is going to be open. Hmmmmmm I'll bet I wouldn't have to wait for a table tonight.

Then again, this line at the local deli went all the way around the store! I have NEVER seen more than 4 or 5 people and that was when the train just arrived.

The city, on the other hand, has left all of these potential missiles in place guarding a project better left undiscussed. It is important to know that behind all these unweighted cones is an expanse of pea sized gravel! 60 or 70 mile an hour winds and peasized pellets. Sounds like an interesting corner to stand on.

I went to Target last night

Anyone who knows me knows that I went just for the entertainment, and there WAS some. I loved this Target employee who was working away with the answer to the most frequently asked question on her back...

2 cats, 1 dog and me... we are all snugged up, there was an honest to goodness run on the bagel store this morning, and the normally calm Deli had a line all the way around the store. The subway etc is closed down, the bridge is still open, but there may be some great pictures. Also the rain has started as of 1 pm, not buckets but definite rain, and it is still a long way off but we have had over 11 inches of rain so far this month, so the rain is going to be hitting oversaturated ground. That is the big concern, I think, the amount of water pouring down seeking its own level. Since I am pretty close to the highest part of the island I am not too worried, but my subway station is one of the deepest, so that lends it a different level of concern. More later if the power holds up.

Pairs - revisited (Not Paris though I wish)

I am often a victim of "Second Sock Syndrome". I love knitting sock --- not socks --- sock. I love a different heel, a different toe, the way a pattern wraps around the leg. People get so creative with their sock patterns and each one presents an interesting possibility for outcome.

HOWEVER, (you knew this was coming, didn't you?) I hate doing it twice. The very fact that there is a term for it (SSS) says that there are a lot of other people with the same issues.  

OK, I have conquered it. I did it, I can sit back and admire it, so why do I have to do it again? I have given up wearing pairs of earrings. If I like the look of it today, I wear it. Rarely do I like both the same, so unless they are just spectacular together and say different things on each ear, I wear whatever suits me and frequently they don't even look alike.

As of August 2011, I have declared myself in the same mind where socks are concerned. I divvy the yarn up into two equal balls, find a pattern or two that I like, and march on to the drummer I am hearing. Now I am not insane, these two vaguely resemble each other....

On the left, New England from Knitting on the Road by Nancy Bush.
On the right, Nain from Silk Road Socks by Hunter Hammersen.

Did I have fun knitting BOTH? You bet I did! Besides, from a height of 5 feet or better, you can't tell they are not exactly the same. 

If you are closer to my ankles than that, you better be a child (and therefore not interested that the socks are not exactly the same) or have some other intent, in which case if you notice the socks don't match you are not paying attention to the important things.

These are not blocked, blocked they are the same size. The patterns are the same gauge, which is, I think, helpful.

New England close up.

Nain close up

left heel New England, right heel Nain (Nain heel fits me better, by the way)

OK, any converts out there?

Another process from the class at ICP

The "tattered" edges are deliberate, as a matter of fact, I am wishing there was more "tattering"

This was shot at the Chelsea Market, and it uses the DASS Special Sauce and Stone Paper. I am not sure where Mary got hers, but I ordered some from Etsy. What this photo can't show is how translucent the image is on that paper, it looks like it is floating on it. I think the surface of the image is a bit "soft" or fragile still, and I am thinking that I may frame it but will for sure use a mat to keep the glass off it.

Overall, though, it is one of my favorites.

Purell Transfers

One of the easiest transfers uses Purell as the transfer medium. The hard part is maybe finding a brand of transparency that will "give up" its ink to the paper. I was playing around with some that I already had, and found that IBM Injet Transparencies worked like a charm. Having made the transfer, however, I had to work back into them ... why? Because I COULD! I liked these two tries.

The sunflower has the following added to the Purell transfer: Peerless Watercolor, Lyra watersoluble crayons and some beeswax crayons that I found in my stash.

The Koi has the same except no beeswax crayons.

In printing terms, this was a second. There was still ink left on the Transparency sheet so I tried it again with fresh Purell to see if it would come off. Especially interesting to me was the pink where the blue had been before. I didn't add that, it was what appeared in place of the blue. I did go back into the Koi with watersoluble crayons and used the watercolors to smear stuff off the edges.

This was an insane attempt to use the "wrong" side of the transparency sheet to see if it would work. The answer was no and this is prettymuch a total re-creation of some smearey ink... but cute, so I kept it.

I am excited I got this to work.. Hooray!

So many circles in my life!

I had noticed before that sometimes one part of my life looks a lot like another part of my life....

Above, some of the pins I make and sell on Etsy. Below .. mini cupcakes that students brought to class as a treat. Maybe I should take up baking?

Class project

Gill has been posting about the class we took together at the International Center for Photography last week. She is SOOO much more organized than I am, but this was one of the most interesting parts for me and I had to finish it at home because I was not lugging the "substrate" AKA Deco Glass Block all the way from 181st Street to Midtown to apply the imagery. SO, here it is, a partial success, not quite what I had in mind.

The project involved creating a "skin" using acrylic medium and inkAID on a flexible polyethyene sheet AKA a kitchen chopping mat. There was where I went a bit amok. I used a pearlescent inkAID and I should have used clear. The vision was that after I printed onto the skin I would end up being able to use clear acrylic medium to attach the prints onto the block (up to here it worked fine) and you would be able to see the bridge through the trees and vice versa (that's where the pearlescent inkAID did me in).

However, that said, the block is still interesting no matter which side you look at, and I can do it again as I have another block and some clear inkAID on its way.  The first set of pictures have a regular light bulb on the block and the second set have daylight.

I am showing it here so you can see how it came out and maybe have a sense of where my brain was going when I started this project.  Besides, I think Gill would email me once a week til I did it, sort of like a Tickler File Memo!