Painting into my old leaf prints

Earlier in the spring, I made some leaf prints by boiling botanicals between sheets of watercolor paper. I am having a book making workshop in about a month and wanted to get my leaf prints done so I could incorporate them into a book.

On this print I thought I might outline the shapes of the plants but it just looked awkward so I stopped.

These leaves were so plain I thought the outline might work. Not so much. Then I decided to tint them with watercolors. Meh.

Painting the negative space was slightly more successful but still not great

Now I was getting a bit better at it.

While I was painting these I was boiling another set of prints. Stay tuned....

MidSummer Maine part 2

We spent about half to 3/5 time working on our cloth books

A vintage find

Everyone did such a great job with these books. So much time and thought was put into selecting a theme, fabrics and design. It showed in the results.

Studio purge

I have spent a week purging everything in my studio. Poor Marcella went home with two loads of fabric and supplies. I don't think I will ever use most of the things I gave her and I was suffocating under the weight (and height) of all my stuff. Some things went into the garage which I also had to purge and sweep. I made two trips to the dump and that's just what I threw out. Here is the result.

If you remember old photos, I had another unit on top two high and four wide on the wood 4 x 4 unit and a smaller shelf on the white 2 x 4 unit.

I moved my ironing table to the space vacated by a 40" wide and 6 foot high storage unit 18" deep with things piled on top to the 10 ft. ceiling. Along the far wall is the 2 X 4 unit from the other room with all kinds of white wall above it. BREATH!!!!

   

A close up

Work table (clean)

Dining room table with serger and small shelves with sketching, inks and other sketchbook supplies.

 CLEAN garage

organized purged shelves from one side

and the other. Now my friend from Belfast (Maine) is praying for the purging faerie to visit her.

MidSummer Maine part 1

MidSummer Maine 2019 was good fun and a great success.

The Art Greenhouse (now white) was all ready and stocked with materials for a fun three days.

We went over gelli printing again. We did this last year as well but a few people wanted to repeat the process. As you can see we had happy results.

We also did some ecoprints on paper

And then on to monoprints on paper and fabric

Sample for MidSummer Maine

This will post after the workshop so expect another post of all the wonderful things folks made during the workshop. One of the "samples" I made for the workshop sold at my exhibition

So this time I decided to make a complete cloth book with Cas Holmes as the inspiration.

This is just one of the great projects in store.

What Marcella and I did after the silk screening workshop

Marcella's are the first two.

 These are some rayon infinity scarves pre-washing.

Play table

Some of the scarves I made

I've made 20 s0 far, gave one away and five are available at the Grasshopper Shop in Searsport.