Yearly Archives: 2012

July 22, 2012 · 10:14 am

Wood Carving at the John C. Campbell Folk School

Last week was spent playing with wood and hanging out with my granddaughter,  a combination of two very enjoyable activities.  The John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina has an Intergenerational Week every summer when parents or grandparents can share  a class with a child aged 12 to 17.  I’ve been taking classes there for years by myself and my granddaughter was very excited to learn that she could come with me as soon as she was 12.  She chose the wood carving class so we set off to learn how to handle sharp blades without cutting ourselves.  Here is a photographic overview of the class.

The entire class started with the goose so that the instructor could take us through all the different stages of carving.  Once we had finished the goose, we were able to chose the next project from the many blanks that the instructor provided.  I chose a mouse in western red cedar.  My granddaughter chose the cat in redwood.  Both of these woods proved to be a bit of a challenge for beginning carvers, but we were happy with the results.  My third project was my own design.  I put a flower, maybe a daisy or coneflower or black-eyed Susan, on top of an egg-shaped blank, wrapped the flower stem around the egg and put three small ladybugs on the stem.  I’m still playing with it and tweaking the design.  I don’t know exactly how I’ll finish it, but I had fun and learned a lot with the carving.

As our last project, both granddaughter and I chose to make gnome heads. She did a large one and I did a little one.  Both were re-engineered from Santa heads! For both of us, these last projects were a very successful conclusion as they felt as if we had some command of the project rather than having the wood rule.

My puzzle over the next six months is how to incorporate the wood into my books and if I really like carving enough to spend the necessary time and effort.  Stay tuned!

I’ll be back to working on my books and marbled paper soon and may even be taking another class on marbling.

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July 7, 2012 · 10:44 am

Accomplished! Pickles & Portfolios

The last few days have been very productive, both for me and for the garden.  When  I was in the garden, I started picking cucumbers and got seven or eight ripe ones.  Many too many to eat, so it was time to make bread and butter pickles!  This is the first time in about ten years that I’ve had enough cukes to make pickles, so I was happy.  Took them inside and got them sliced, but didn’t have any onions.  Unfortunately they are not quite in season yet so had to get them at the grocery store rather than the local farm stand. Sliced the onions and put them with the cucumbers to sit in the fridge and do their thing.  By late afternoon they had sat long enough, so I started cooking up the syrup.  I had forgotten to check on the canning supplies, so a frantic search for rings and new lids took place.  I knew where the canning jars were since I have boxes and boxes of them from the years that I canned in a major way.  I grabbed the canning kettle and a box of jars just in time to add the cucumbers to the syrup.  Everything worked out in the end and I now have ten pints of pickles for the coming year and I’ll probably have lots more, if the raccoons don’t get the cucumbers first.

On the Portfolio side, I finished my next set of portfolios.  I design a way for them to hold a pad of paper that I hope is strong enough!  There were, of course, some hiccups on the way – like cutting paper the wrong size – that happens when I’m pushing to get something done.  They all worked out in the end and I’m pleased with the final results.

These are all for sale at Long’s Cards and Books in Penn Yan, NY.

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July 1, 2012 · 1:40 pm

Gardens, Portfolios and Vacations

I haven’t taken time to write about my activities recently, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been quiet.  I was able to plant a garden this year in spite of the cold April weather and it was off to a beautiful start.  Now I just have to keep it watered in all this heat.

Here’s what it looked like a week or so ago.

It’s not very big, but it gives me all the  tomatoes I can eat and delicious potatoes.  I try cucumbers every year and I think this year I will actually be feeding myself instead of the deer and rabbits.  You can see my rather makeshift fencing.  Although a determined deer could easily jump it, it seems to be enough of a discouragement that they don’t bother.  After I found a rabbit sitting inside the fence which has only 2″x3″ openings, I wrapped the bottom with chicken wire and that seems to have kept them out.  There are lots of other wonderful things for them to eat on the rest of the property, so they have to stay out of my garden!  

There is a nearby farm that has U-pick strawberries and every year I plan to get some to freeze.  It works out that I do about half the time!  This year I picked 14 quarts and was very glad I did.  It was a wonderful strawberry season. We had a lot of rain followed by hot dry weather at the perfect time.  The strawberries were luscious! Big and sweet. I’ve found that the varieties that are  huge can tend to be tasteless, especially when frozen.  These are a variety called Sparkle and they have a wonderful flavor no matter their size.

Enough of food, so what have I been doing with my paper?

As I mentioned in my last blog, I’ve started making designer portfolios and last week I finished a set of four.  Here they are:

I’m very pleased with these and there was only one real problem.  On the red one somehow I made two left sides and so I could either throw it all out, have the cranes flying upside down or have the “pocket” on the wrong side.  I opted for the latter.  My next set of large portfolios will have replaceable pads on one side like the smaller notebooks do. Not sure I like this, but I’m trying to sell them in a local office supply store and the owner suggested that might help.  We’ll see.

In mid-July I’m taking off for one of my favorite places – The John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, N.C.  My granddaughter and I will be taking a course in wood carving, so that will be a whole new world for me!  I don’t know how the blogging schedule will go for the next month, but I’ll try to pop in with pictures occasionally.

 

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June 22, 2012 · 11:14 am

Portfolios, for people who still find a need for paper

Carrying real paper documents these days seems hopelessly old-fashioned, but there are times when nothing else will do.  Sending someone a resume doesn’t need a stamp, but when you are sitting in a job interview, I’m not sure that handing out flash drives to all the participants is the way to go.  So in the hopes that someone, somewhere still carries paper and wants to make a statement at the same time, I’ve designed some portfolios that fit standard 8.5×11 letter paper.

I posted the prototype a few weeks ago and last week I made the first batch.  I forgot to photograph them before I put on their shiny packaging, so please excuse the shiny spots! Here they all are:

The outside paper and the side strips are all my hand-marbled paper, but I found that using marbled paper on the inside also was just too much, so I’ve used commercial, printed papers there.

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June 12, 2012 · 9:38 am

Notepad Covers Join the Party!

A few posts ago, before being distracted by the Clay books, I was playing around with designs for portfolios and notepad covers. Last week I got down to business and lined up the materials for four of the notepad covers.  I finished three of them, but not the fourth.  I was unhappy with the choices I had for the spine of that book.  I had a bit of the color of bookcloth I wanted to use, but not enough. Of course, instead of just gong with a lesser choice, I decided to order more.  My rationale was that I had hardly any brown bookcloth left and I’d need it for other projects anyway. The result was that for want of a 3″x12″ strip, I ordered three yards (brown, black and cream) and some headbands that I needed.  I try my best to keep bookbinding supply companies in business!

Here are the three finished notepads.

 

Below is a gallery of  the three notepads with various views.

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June 8, 2012 · 6:43 pm

Finished Books

I finished the books that I had started in the last post.  No major disasters and I’m happy with the results.  You can see the complete process in photos on this page.

Here are the completed books.

Finished Books

The three in the back row are the ones that have Clay themes.  The first is “Lady Luck”, for the duet that Clay and Dee Snider did of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”  It has an Italian paper with antique playing cards on the covers and endpapers that I hand-marbled.

Lady Luck

 

Lady Luck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book with title and endpapers.

 

 

 

The second book was a tribute to the version of “Lean on Me” that Clay sang on the finale.

Always Tomorrow

I titled it “Always Tomorrow” for the spirit of always going toward the next thing.  I think the pattern on the marbled covers reflects  upward aspirations.

Always Tomorrow

The endpapers are made from some wonderful Italian decorative paper that shows all the months of the year with typical activities for each month in various Italian towns.

The last book has a cover of papyrus, so I had to give it a a desert theme.  Of course,  papyrus actually grows along rivers, but I associate it with desert countries. The only song I could think of was “Get Here” which has the line “…cross the desert …” so that gave me the title for the book.  The endpapers are a yellow and brown swirl pattern that reminds me a sandstorms and deserts.

So this was a good week for me.  Now I think I’ll move on to those portfolios and notebooks I was playing with in my last post.

 

 

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May 28, 2012 · 6:49 pm

New Projects – Notebooks and Clay Books

I’ve two new projects this week.  I have no idea which one I’ll finish, but here they are.

The first is my new portfolio and new cover for a replaceable note pad.

 

More pictures and information about the notebook and portfolio can be found here.

 

My second project is in honor of Clay Aiken’s outstanding performance on the recent Celebrity Apprentice show.  I have done some Clay books in the past and have given them away, sold them or donated them to the National Inclusion Project.     Here are some of my older Clay books.

This week, I’ll be working on four books.  The first one is for the duet Clay recorded with Dee Snider on “Dee Does Broadway”, “Luck Be A Lady” and it is titled “Lady Luck.”

Lady Luck

The second book is a tribute to Clay’s song on the finale and it is titled, “Always Tomorrow”.

The last Clay book is a throwback to a song Clay sang at a Golfing for Inclusion event. It’s titled “Cross the Desert”.

Cross the Desert

Only dedicated Clay fans will be able to identify the song or the occasion.  The fourth book in non-Clay and is a holdover from an older batch.

 

I’ve set up a separate page for the books so I can comment and show you the books as they develop.  For general information on how I make my books, please see my pages on making books which start here.

If you have any ideas for themes or titles for more books, please add them to the comments.

 

 

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May 16, 2012 · 9:44 am

Comedy, Tragedy, or Just a Mess?

I had, what I thought, was a brilliant idea as I was marbling last week.  I have been marbling pages from an old coverless copy of Shakespeare’s plays and I thought I would use the title page of “King Lear” to make a Treasure Tower. It had an interesting line drawing and the beginning of the play.  I then would marble one of the text pages in a similar palette to make the inside.  I was so enthralled with the idea that I did “Much Ado About Nothing” also.  The pages came out quite nicely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since these pages are smaller than the paper I usually use, I had to figure out new measurements for all the parts involved – boards,  outside, inside, boxes and lid – plus a bit of trial and error and I was ready to roll.

After cutting the board, I started to paste out the outside paper.  As soon as I started working with it I knew I was in trouble.  When any paper becomes damp it begins to stretch and it also becomes weaker and tears more easily.  The pages I was using were old, cheap paper and they became very fragile as soon as the paste dampened them.  They had gone through the marbling process with some care, but now I was just asking too much. I went ahead, laying the pieces of board in position, but as I folded over the edges, the paper began to fall apart!  Whoops.

By the way, you should always apply the adhesive to the paper and not to the board.  The paper stretches, the board doesn’t.  Let the paper rest for a few seconds so it has time to fully stretch before putting it on board.

I soldiered on and put the inside piece on, but the old paper just wasn’t strong enough to take the folding and unfolding the design of the Towers need.  It would have been fine as the cover of a book.  So now I have a tower that can sit on my desk and only I can see where the folds, cracks and tears are!  From three feet away, it looks great.

Second mistake.  I decided to try to reinforce the remaining paper by adhering another piece to it, just like using interfacing in sewing.  Only problem is that instead of using Japanese tissue paper, which probably would have worked, I grabbed a piece of light weight modern paper.  Another disaster!  As I’ve said a couple of times already, paper stretches when is becomes damp. If you put a pasted piece on top of a dry piece, the dry piece will try to stretch as it absorbs moisture from the pasted piece.  The result – wrinkles, lots of them!  Sometimes you can get lucky and the wrinkles will smooth out as both pieces dry and sometimes they are just a mess.

In spite of everything, I tried out one of the laminated pieces and the old paper just cracked along every place I tried to fold it.

Some pictorial proof to come, if I can bear to take the pictures.  I just hope my next great idea works out more smoothly.

As promised here’s a gallery of the disasters.  Can you spot the problems?

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May 1, 2012 · 12:33 pm

Finally, Back to Marbling

I’ve been out of commission for a while and have lots to catch up on here.  If you remember the crown I groused about, well, it turned out that the tooth needed a root canal.  Yuck!  Fortunately,  while the temporary crown was still on I knew that all was not well and went back to the dentist.  He checked things out and told me the bad news.  The only good news is that they could use the permanent crown that had already been made.  My mouth is still not back to normal, but at least it has calmed down enough so I can function.  On to better things!

Saturday I decided I had to get back to marbling.  Not that I don’t have enough paper to cover hundreds of books or make dozens of towers, but just because I love doing it.  Marbling does, however, require a lot of setup and preparation time.  I did the prep work on Saturday and started off marbling on Sunday.  Because the carrageenan breaks down over time, it’s most efficient to cram as much marbling as possible into four or five days.  After five days, results of the breakdown begin show on the paper and it’s time to pack it up.

Look for a new page on marbling soon.  (I hope!)

Not the greatest marbling session ever, but there were some successes.  That’s always the fun with marbling.  What looks great in the tray may be a mess when printed or, what frequently happens to me, the process of laying down the paper messes up. I catch a bubble or there’s a hesitation line or big speck of paint I didn’t see.  If it were easy, it wouldn’t be fun!  Above are two of the good pieces from this session.

For a slide show of this marbling, go here.

 

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April 23, 2012 · 3:34 pm

Absurd

Heavy snow on April 23rd?  Totally absurd.  Light snow that melts quickly I can handle, but a snow that stays on the ground all day, just not right.  Besides, my lilacs really don’t like it.  They are just starting to bloom.

Here’s the view out my front window this morning.

Fortunately, the big trees – maples & walnuts – haven’t leafed out yet.  I was able to shake the snow off my small fruit trees, but not before getting a load of snow down my neck.  Happy April Everyone!

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