a new journal page

I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now......

I have declared that it is spring!

One of us has been looking like this.  I think this was right after the word "BATH" was mentioned in her presence.  Doesn't she look delighted in the prospect?  Unfortunately, she is cream colored.  However, if the word "BATH" is not mentioned very regularly in her presence she becomes greige and that color doesn't go with her eyes.  Besides, she sleeps in my bed and there are limits to what I will put up with.

Another of us looked like this.  BATH has not been mentioned in her hearing when this photo was taken.  Dirt is harder to see on her so it generally gets mentioned less often in her hearing.  She still sleeps in her crate, too, so the cleanliness limits are in a different place.  

After last Saturday, this is what we looked like.  

Clementine watched from close to the ceiling just in case water gets sprayed around.

On Sunday, this is what we all looked like.  Nobody laid a hand on Romeo, but he was determined to be included.

It is COLD out there today, and maybe tomorrow, but I am just telling them to move fast and keep warm. 

What to do with these?????

These pages were part of a baby photo album that I took apart and saved because of the paper.

From the closeup below you can see that the texture and the color etc. of the paper is great.  Only problem is that it cracks when folded... aarrrggghhh.

 I really want to use it in a journal, but it can't be coptic bound, as the cracks will not be strong enough.  I know I can just stab bind it, which is how it was bound originally, but that has never been my favorite way to go.

so here I am, still pondering what to do and meanwhile running my fingers over the paper.  It is really lovely paper... sigh.  Would love to hear other ideas of what could be done with it....

what I have been doing lately

I have been making yet another Journal.  I am crazy about making these and I had all these pages, so I decided to do another one. This is what the exposed spine will look like except it will be sewn together.
 

When I cleared out a lot of things from my parent's apartment, there were things I just added to the box and took along, having no idea what I was doing it for.  Now, several years later, the task has grown cool and I am looking through the boxes of things.  I ended up with an Important box, a Might Be Art Usable But Are Not Really Highly Familial box and a Use This Any Way You Want To box.  If you tend toward hoarding, like me, you will note with relief there was not a Toss This box.  As far as photos go I did decide that 300 photos of me lying on my back at age 3 months were probably 298 pictures too many, so I have created/am in the process of creating one journal with photos of everyone I can identify and only one or two of me at the early stages.

That is, however, not this journal.

The second box is probably going to be scanned and made into printing plates, stencils and transfers, they will remain "whole" for now. So I rummaged about in the third box and found a little book called Daily Food with a pretty cover and in reasonable shape, though the cover and the pages were no longer connected.  I separated them totally and just stared at the cover for a few days until it became, in my mind, part of the cover of my new journal.  So here it is, inset into the cover....

The back cover of the little book is inset into the back of the journal cover even though it is just a block of the nice green color.  I wanted to use the whole book.

I had some foamcore board that I used for the cover and cut the space for the journal out of it, then covered inside and outside and fitted the little green cover into the space.  The paper on the outside of the cover is some paper I brought back from Italy years ago.

The inside of the covers is a collage of some of the pages from inside the little book.  It was a book of daily devotions, so they are all ruminations on bible verses.

This is the first real journal page, though what is going into this journal is still a mystery to me. I am still working on the music of my mind journal  Actually I have done 2 pages there I have not yet posted, but that is another day also...

When I made/painted these pages, there were some that had holes where they were formerly attached to a spiral binding and I decided to use them holes and all, so some of the interior pages look like this.

The spine of the Daily Food book was gilded a little bit by me, though it looks like ocher paint here it really is gold, and I am going to use it as the central binding hinge, the other two hinges are dark green silk cord. 

The pages are punched already for sewing, so this week sometime maybe?  We shall see.... but at least you have an idea where I am going here.

Temple of Dendur at the Met

Went to see the Matisse before it closed and wandered through here.  This and the Scholar's Garden are always my faves

More Prints from the Gelatin Plate

These are some more of the prints that I made.  The plate is about 7 inches by 7 inches, I made the plate in a brownie pan.  Now I know that people go all spare about the idea of art stuff in food utensils, but after all, this is just Knox blox carried to an extreme, and no paint touched the pan.  If I ever make brownies again I am using this pan. 

I had read that the homemade Gelatin plate would last 2 to 3 days.... well, this one lasted 5 and it might have been good for a while yet except it was beginning to smell funny. Not awful, just funny, and I thought it was time for it to go.  I had taken it out of the pan and put it on a sheet of plexi, so it was not refrigerated or preserved.  I just covered it with an upside down box and left it sitting on the table.  The cats left it alone.



The red piece is a linoleum block that I cut ages ago trying to see what I could do there.  I never loved it, but it does look like some sort of cryptic symbol. I did a lot of stenciling from photos that I cut out, they don't last long, so that is good, once they're over they're over and for me that is important.  There are some photos I have been using for 30 or more years.  Having the stencils disintegrate means that I have to move on, or use what I have...

 I am going to play with working back into it with something like neocolor crayons or something.  I want to make another plate the same size, but I need more gelatin and so I may just play with what I have this weekend...

Well, we had snow... a LOT of snow

And Blogless Nicki came up here to the northern reaches of Manhattan so we could have an artsy craftsy weekend.  What we decided to do was to make a gelatin plate......
 

We really made it from gelatin and water, inside a square baking tin, which we managed to get it to come out of the next day.  It took a little persuasion, but actually it came out really well.  We had some of the purchased Gelliplates, but we decided to make our own while we figured out how to use them lest we damage the much more expensive purchased ones...


We had the usual excellent supervision.  and we just played for the afternoon.  The plate held up beautifully and we made about 11 prints.  Then we took a break, made pasta and cookies and broke out the wine.  Or maybe the pasta was Friday after we made the plate... (it has to sit overnight to gell up) and on Saturday we had Chinese food.  In anycase we had cookies both nights and wine.  The important elements were the same.  It snowed 11 inches or more up here and the wind was really blasting...

Today, Nicki went home.  The snow is cleared off the sidewalks really well up here so she went off to watch dancing and eat more Chinese food and I went back into the studio with the supervisor and nade some more prints. The plate held up perfectly overnight and  I am sure this is not their final state, but here are some of them.  This is really fun!!