Collaging My Life

 Shuffling all my old sketchbooks around as I moved and organized my new studio got me thinking about what was happening in my life when I was making all those notes and drawings.

I thought about how much space they took up too. So I started tearing out some drawings and some of the more enlightening notes. Once I had nice assortment, I began collaging the pieces of paper onto an old mirror frame. And I'm adding colored papers from my stash.

When I have time to sit for a few minutes, I enjoy looking back. And it will be fun to see the present me in the mirror framed by my past interests and passions.

Now I'm looking for more old mirrors. So much material!

What is Paper Silk?!

Paper silk is a mysterious material that first showed up in my life when I saw Carol Boyer this past summer at the Quilting By the Lake workshop I attended. She shared some of it with me, and I took it my studio where it became the perfect material to become the sky in this little silk collage above.

Carol offered to show me how she makes paper silk, so a couple of weeks ago I went to visit her in her studio. Basic materials: silk sliver, GAC 900, acrylic paints and inks, nylon net, and plastic sheeting.

To get started, put some plastic sheeting on your work surface. A length of silk sliver is pulled off the rope, then the fibers are separated and placed on top of some nylon netting. More layers of the fibers are added in a different direction, and other materials can be added between silk fiber layers. I added paper, colored threads, feathers, and fabric scraps.




Carol recommended ending with a layer of silk to kept the "sandwich" together. Color can be added by using colored silk fibers, the inks or paints, and by the other materials used.

Carol's piece, with her signature gorgeous colors

Once the fibers, colors, and additions are complete, another layer of nylon netting is placed on top, then the liquid GAC 900 is spread evenly over the whole piece. Once everything is dry, the netting is peeled off top and bottom. You may like the texture made by the netting; Carol told me she sometimes irons it to smooth it out.

Cris' first piece, with the card I used to spread the GAC 900

And here some of my creations. I'm not sure where I'll use them yet, but they might work with my newly printed fabrics.

Thank you so much, Carol, for teaching me how to make a beautiful material and for the out-of-sight soup you served me for lunch!

Here's Carol. Doesn't she look like fun?!

Findings #6

What a find! A Spoonbill feather on the beach. Have you ever noticed how similar leaves and feathers are?

Findings #5

Water oak leaves and some southern red cedar, stitched and with some watercolor. What will I find today?

Findings #4

These are two different Florida epiphytes - one is Spanish moss, which is lush and beautiful right now. These were in Lake Seminole Park. Some curlicues still need to be stitched down, then I'll add the watercolor.

Findings #3

The whole page of stitched live oak leaves, with its watercolor ground.

And another gorgeous sea grape leaf, with very different colors from the first two I chose. Part of the leaf tore as it dried; I clipped it away with scissors.

Findings #1

 Finds from my first beach walk of this Christmas trip to Madeira Beach, Florida. Two sea grape leaves, combined with embroidery threads and watercolors.

Luscious colors, yes?

Fresh Snow and Introspection

Fresh Snow II

We had our first real snow last week. It transformed everything into a pristine, soft, bright fantasy - as if we hadn't seen this world at all before. The rain and warm breeze over the weekend erased all of it, but now it feels like winter and the snow will return.

I love the promise of quiet and introspection that comes with this season. It's a time to take in all that happened in the past year and process it, keeping what is constantly nourishing and learning from the rest.

The piece above, Fresh Snow II, is part of a diptych I made after a ski into Grass Pond last winter. I was experimenting with textured stabilizer as a substrate for printing digital photos, as I did in April. I am still learning how to prepare the substrate for printing, but I love the effect so much that it is a very satisfying process.

One of the best experiences of the past year was the coming together of a small group of spectacular women to paddle every Monday evening. We began in August and continued into late October, when the lakes and streams began to return to their solid forms. As the days got shorter, we paddled by headlamp and made campfires at our destination each time to warm our hands and to heat whatever food we brought to share. The experience of being with these adventurous friends in beautiful wild places was expanding and miraculous for each of us. Our thankfulness for each other and for the amazing place in which we live became our name: Gratitude Girls.

I started a Gratitude Series of collages, using some of photographs I took of our adventures. They are hanging now in the holiday show at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts. Here are a few. Make some Adventures of your very own!

The Holiday Flurry

Here it is December already! There is a dusting of snow this morning, with more on the way tomorrow. I love the earliest of the snow falls, transforming the landscape.

The Big Holiday Celebration is beginning here in Saranac Lake - art openings, The Nutcracker, school chorus performances, craft fairs, little and big parties. I am involved in three of them this weekend - an opening at NorthWind Fine Arts on Friday evening (from 5 - 7 PM: a collaboration with The Left Bank Cafe, right next door), the opening of the Big Little Show at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts on Saturday afternoon (1 - 3 PM), and the first Saturday (of two) of the Enchanted Christmas on Helen Hill. 

This morning, I was delighted to see that one of my "mountain collages" entered in the LPCA show was featured as the Artwork of the Day on North Country Public Radio's website. Here it is - a study in complementary colors, based on a view near the ADK Loj road outside of Lake Placid.

In the Mountaine - mixed media collage

                                       

Fun with Paper and Dye

This week I am at the Quilting By the Lake extravaganza in Syracuse, New York. I'm not quilting and the lake is not too close, but this event is in its 31st year, so the name seems kinda beside the point now. I'm taking a workshop with Hollie Heller and about 15 other people and it's all about collage - of papers, fabrics, threads, you-name-it. I haven't done much surface design work before and I am soaking up a lot of information. The pieces above were done with dyes and wax batik on wasa paper. Others were done with shibori dying of folded paper, batik on waxed paper, discharge of dye, etc. Here is a little gallery - more details later.         

                                                  

Cris' Collages at LPCA

These collages (each 8" x 8") were on my November 24th post, with information on how they were put together. Now they are the Lake Placid Center for the Arts in the Big Small Holiday Show, along with lots of small works by area artists. Worth the trip!

Trust the Trail

October Pond Lilies

Hints for the Cook - Girl Scout Series

In Using an Ax or Hachet - Girl Scout Series

Warning for Windy Days - Girl Scout Series

Calling All (Long Ago) Girl Scouts

Warning for Windy Days

I was a Girl Scout for a long time - age 8 to 18. Much of the time, I was jealous of my brothers, whose scouting experiences involved camping in the rain in leaky pup tents, learning to use jack knives, and tracking raccoons - great stuff! Meanwhile, I learned to make hospital corners, to dance the Hava Nagila and the Mexican Hat Dance, and to occasionally cook over an open fire, identify wild flowers, and learn to sail in my own little boat. So, taken as a whole, it was very worthwhile, even in high school when it was quite uncool. (That was when I learned to sail. That was also when I melted the toes of my vinyl boots while on a GS camping trip on a very cold rainy weekend by standing too close to the campfire. I think my tent fell down during that trip after becoming completely waterlogged.)

My fondness for so many of those experiences led me to collect a modest number of old Brownie and Girl Scout manuals, including two elderly versions of the Girl Scout Handbook, third (1936) and fourth (1938) editions. For quite awhile, I have thought about using those books in my art pieces to pay some kind of tribute to what I owe Juliette Gordon Low and all my troop leaders. The materials above are being made into a collage with the pages from one of my books, fabrics, embroidery thread, paint, and some of the buttons from my friend Joan's vast collection. Below is one of the pieces that is a bit further along.

Hints for the Cook

Tomorrow I will take three of these Girl Scout collages (with their metaphorical titles) and a couple of other collages to the Lake Placid Center for the Arts for their holiday exhibition of small works. I am looking forward to seeing the response to them. How many other white-haired Girl Scouts would like reminders...?              

A Lovely Mix

A lovely mix this week of birding, paddling, work, and art-making in the Adirondacks. In spite of the apparent health of the Star Flowers and Canada Mayflowers, it has been very dry (until this weekend). While paddling down the Saranac River with Myra and Tony, we frequently ran aground on the sand bars - usually not even a glimpse of them, especially this early in the season. The water level was at least a foot lower than normal. Lots of birds and other wildlife out there though - A Hooded Merganser mother with 10 scuttling little ones, a Wilson's Snipe at a nest site, several warbler species, a muskrat, huge Snapping Turtle, among others. Wonderful!

In addition to all this outdoor fun, I continued my daily art practice with my fabric embellishment experiments. This piece with the moth was made by printing a digitally-altered moth photo onto an Extravorganza printing sheet, then sewing it onto an altered fern image on rayon, along with other stitches and fabric scraps. The letters were stamped onto twill tape to spell the moth's scientific name - Grammia virgo. 

I learned how to make a fabric window in this little bird piece - the sheer embroidered fabric was sewn into a 4-piece square and faced with turquoise cotton. Inside the window is a bird and piece of a scientific article on a background made with a CitriSolv-altered page from a National Geographic magazine. (Really fun and interesting to make!)



 
The waterlily was my "printing on fabric" lesson. I used some stamps I made awhile ago (to print waterlilies in my bathroom) on batik-printed cotton. I like the way it looks but I really prefer the collage pieces. In any case, I plan to make some kind of wall quilt once my experiments are finished. (Well, they'll probably never really be finished... So much to learn.)