Spanish Water Dogs

I make a calendar for the Spanish Water Dogs of America club every year.  It is a labor of love, the owners send me pictures and I polish them up and make calendar pages out of them.  This is the first year our breed.... you have, if you look at this blog seen my girls many times and the breed is a delight ...has been AKC recognized and the first year we will have dogs at the Westminster Kennel Club Show.  SO it is a big year and the culmination of a lot of work and hoops jumped through.

The Calendar makes money for the Club and it is generally put into the Rescue fund should it be needed.

This is the link to follow if you want to see some great looking dogs

http://www.cafepress.com/spanishwaterdogclub.1442928447

enjoy .. the Queens of December thank you... and Diego is oblivious....

I have been knitting....

I decided that I have to use up the yarn in the house.  The issue for me was that what I succumbed to every time I walked into a yarn store was a single skein of varigated sock yarn.  I have been knitting socks but it will take the rest of my natural life to knit up all those skeins, one pair of socks at a time.  I decided to knit a scarf and just start putting the skeins together and hope for the best.

I knitted this on size 3 US needles, with sock yarn, rarely a solid color. Once I got started and had a good bit of a "scarf" done, the largest strip with the yellow and white section in it, I realized that it was not going to be filmy enough for a scarf.  I am always warmer than average, so I started just adding to it, picking up one side, knitting that way for a while, then binding off and picking up another side etc etc.  I finally decided to quit when it was a large lap blanket.

Then I decided that it needed knitted on I Cord edging.  Hmmmmm It was 1200 stitches around, each stitch of icord was really 4 stitches.  4800 stitches later I had edged it all.  Now I am lost because I am not knitting and I am thinking I might start a second one.

Journal 4 Cover

The covers were blank, and ended up looking like this:

Front Cover

Back Cover with a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that I love to look at.  The last line of The Great Gatsby.

Journal 4 Last two pages

These were the last two pages in Journal 4

The background were some Appalachain Trail maps that had elevation lines drawn on them.  That was the background on the left and I added a bigger MOO card separation.

The right side was a last MOO card separation and I wanted to leave the background print visible.

Journal 4 Pages 21 and 22

This "Before" gave me a problem by not matching until I realized this was the other side of the place where I removed the small page.   So, you will have to imagine that the little page with the red squares is not there. 

Another separated MOO card started this page out. 

And this was the other side.   I struggled with wanting to make the space behind the figure darker.  I wanted her to be walking into the light, but maybe it needs a darker space behind it despite the "story" I see here...

Journal 4, Pages 19 and 20

Lots of dark colors here to use,

This was another MOO card separation on the left, but I do like what I did there better.  The integration is a bit more effective to my eye.  It is from a photo I took years ago of the Coney Island Wonder Wheel, and the woman on the right small insert page is from an article I tore out years ago from somewhere about suffragettes.

The flip side is not so compelling, I think I got seduced by the idea of the Central Park map, when I cut away all but the paths inside the park and the water bits, I HAD to use them, maybe not! But there they are.  And the insert page is just there..

Journal 4 Pages 17 - 18

This book was the last one I made from the leftover prints, and I think there were more plain vanilla pages in it than in the other 3.  It is interesting that I really did find this book to be a struggle. It wasn't a quick book by any means and a lot of these pages are heavy with glue and more glue.

I have been pondering it a while, as I haven't yet got a "next book" going.

This set of pages are really an example of how much of a struggle I had here.  I love the left page..

It uses a lot of things I like to use and it feels like it tells a story.  That is me in the photo, by the way, age about 4.  It is one of a series of pictures I keep coming back to, using and re-using.
The insert... not so much and the other side of the little page was sort of OK.

and then there is the other side.  The background is some wallpaper I found somewhere, a MOO card separation and a piece of an older sunflower print. The paper at the bottom came from some paper that I rusted using some old New York Waterworks parts that came available when a lunatic driver up here ran over the fire hydrant on the corner late one night.  It was pretty exciting for about half an hour before they got a cap on it, and there were lots of rusted metal parts lying around, so I picked them up.

Japanese paper for toughness and rust for color.

Journal 4 pages 15 and 16

 Another one that went through a number of iterations:

and then didn't change markedly from the original print, I guess

Journal 4 pages 13 and 14

Plain vanilla start pages....

I was pleased with this group once it came together.  Experimenting with having the grid lines cross all the pages in all the stages was fun and the Sienna drawing is one of my favorite things.

Journal 4 Pages 11 and 12

This went through many many changes to become this:

Heavily taped over, image transfer, the red proved to be more than I could work around so I finally got rid of most of it.

Individually these were hard but I liked the final effect of the two pages together...

Journal 4 -- Pages 9 and 10

This was interesting because the paper on the right page was both smaller and different texture from any others in the book.  Crunchy textures, have no idea what it is.

Orchid, actual flower, prints from found leaves, photos and, on the right another MOO card separation

Map pieces and ink drops.  I liked carrying the map lines across multiple pages.  You'll see it again..

Journal 4, Pages 7 and 8

 This was clear on the left side but the colors on the right were pretty strong. The little page had squares on one side of it and so it was an interesting thing to address.

This was done early on and the little tree helicopters were all over the place and I incorporated some of them as well as some old envelopes again
I also cut out some of the squares in the little page.

The image on the page above is from the 9/11 memorial in 2003.  I was in Washington Square Park and this young girl was tending to a group of candles.  I keep coming back to this picture, and have used it in many other places.  When I fall in love with a picture I just keep on bringing it back.  This time it was from a MOO card that I separated. 

This is just to let you see how the cutout squares interact with the full pages. 

Journal Pages -- Book 4 pages 5 and 6

This was where the next pages started, it was a bit of a mess with the ticket stub glued onto the page with paint rather than glue of any sort..

And this is where it ended up.

The boy etc. is a photo I took, the letter is one of millions to my father when he was in the US during the war and his family was in Germany.

The girl is a flea market photo, and Romeo is an old Polaroid that has been hanging out for a long time looking for a home. . 

Journal Pages - Book 4, Pages 3 and 4

These started out like this, but the little page got ditched somewhere along the way.  If I remember right, the other half of that page was in a bad place and I finally decided that it was MY book and if I wanted to get rid of something I could and I tore it out.  As a result I lost the other half too which was on this spread.  Artistic license?

So this spread became this spread:

and in closeup:

An image transfer using gel medium of a picture of the George Washington Bridge taken from my window that I played on top of  including a coffee cup stain 

and just a play page.  The Romeo picture on the top is from a picture book I wrote about my cats a long time ago and it is a MOO card separation... the rest are just found whatevers...

Journal Pages -- Book 4, Pages 1 and 2

As history.... I created 4 "books" out of gelatin prints I made while playing with a home made gelatin plate.  I made a lot of prints just playing, some came out in ways that I liked, others not so much.  I was left with a bunch of prints that weren't "keepers" as they were, so I sewed them down the middle and made them into books. If you search this blog for "journal" you can see a lot of the first 3 books.  This is the last one and I am going to go through it showing "before" and "after" so I will have a record.

This is the first page spread.  Since I only did gelatin prints on one side, there are blank pages interspersed with half prints.  Makes a bit of a challenge.

I don't work on the pages in sequence, so I can't really tell you when this was done.  It hung around for a long time, and I am not sure how well it resolved but this is how it ended up:

and these are close ups of the two pages.  I think they will blow up bigger if you click on them.

Bits and pieces about what I did.. the image in the center is a MOO card that I made several years ago.  The info on the back had totally changed, but I just couldn't make myself throw out the picture. It's a miniature of a photo I took of the view from my parent's porch in upstate New York.  

I discovered that with appropriate use of fingernails you can peel the MOO cards apart and be left with the picture on a fairly thin background.  AHA!!  You will see more of this further on in the book. 

I found some architectural drawings in the trash somewhere and this background is one..
More tomorrow....