A Butterfly, a Fan, an Egg & a Bottle…

First up, a quick shout out that my Shadow Lantern Kits are now available! Click here to read all about them, and feel free to spread the word. Thank you!

#55

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I’m participating in something called a “Folded Form Exchange” at the College Book Art Association’s meeting in January. The instructions I received were to submit an edition of thirty-three small, folded forms that will be housed in a 6″ x 9″ x 5″ paper box. In exchange, I will receive a collection of thirty forms from fellow contributors. Exciting! I’m sorry that I don’t have an image of what I created (yet), but it is a butterfly book. Above you see the remnants of the books, which I wove together (although I don’t think you can really call this weaving). The paper is elephant hide from Talas, and the marbled paper is one of Steve Pittelkow’s (doesn’t it look like he made it to match those papers? It was a happy accident, I swear).

#56

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These paper strips are a marbled paper by Tom Leech, and I wove them with strips of a batiked paper that I made in a class with Patty Grass at the Newport Paper Arts Festival back in the 90′s. The technique was so much fun: we used a white kozo paper, parafin wax, and traditional tjanting tools to apply lines of wax which resisted the Rit dye that we brushed onto the paper over the wax. We repeated these two steps several times to create layers of color, and when the paper was dry, we ironed it between sheets of newsprint to remove excess wax.

#57

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This is another van dyke print that I made on handmade abaca in a workshop I co-taught with Alyssa Salomon at Penland. It was such fun to combine images in the photographic process! The background didn’t print very well (there were some trees) but I think the weaving (featuring Graphic Product Corp/Black Ink’s Melook paper, which is 100% kozo with embedded strings, brings it to life.

#58

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Do you remember the other bottle image that I created (paper weaving #38)? This project is so much fun because I can use the waste from one weaving for another! This weaving features three papers: a NYC subway map, a marbled abaca paper and a light blue abaca (the strips are leftovers from the colophon for my artists’ book, Handle With Care).