Embrace the Tea Pot

Among other things i am back to printing after a 18months hiatus and this term we are Out of Darkness. Making Collagraphs from emery paper* and carborundum.

https://www.morleycollege.ac.uk/courses?s=Out+of+darkness+

One of the images I wanted to work on was this tiny thing – originally done in colour pencil.

It probably is this blurry in real life

I’ve aways wanted a pantograph. I brought one during lockdown (as you do). And this was the first time I’ve used it …

This is the 1:4 setting

Finally I worked out how much to tighten up the connectors so it could move with out sticking or flailing all over the place, but I’m still disappointed.

Interesting but not what i was hoping for…

Perhaps the last image works best in terms of proportion, but will still need to be doctored!

It’s blue

*

I coloured over the lines a bit

• the technique involves painting over the textured emery paper to achieve a smooth/ ink repelling surface. As you can see i’m out of practice with my brushes.

So It goes

Congratulate me on not heaving my phone across the room trying to format this ❤️

PomPom

My coping strategies aren’t working at the moment so some one I trust suggested I take a holiday from my Ought To Do List.

Brilliant, I thought, I can get on with the Things I Would Be Doing if RealLife ™ wasn’t kicking back so hard.

Yeah. No. … …

I’ve slowly been collecting the different sizes of those pompom widgets, and the other day’s retail therapy netted me a 115mm diameter one. I have a good friend who uses pompoms to keep track of her keys and I missed her birthday recently.

So pompoms.

A larger fence that still stops

I cut a new plate of the same subject. to give more space for the fence, or lack of it to breathe. I wanted to see what adding colour would look like.

Here are the final prints on this subject for the moment. One day it would be nice to produce a small edition, once I’ve chosen the colours.

Tea Dragons say…

(Well it was going to happen sooner or later)

Have a warm and well feed mid winter season.

These three are host, tea and water. They are proofs for working on cutting techniques and to see the behaviour of he press. More work to be done in the new year (and over winter break).

MER

Fiery Pearls of Wisdom

Part of the narrative of the origami pot is that the Dragons have left off hunting the Fiery Pearl to stop for a cup of tea. Therefore the Pearl has to go somewhere on the pot and I’ve put it is on the lid.

The question though is how and where and when?

Hurry up and wait – crocheting

I’ve been doing a lot of hurry up and wait recently and taking up some of that time, when the brain isn’t up to anything more, doing even more crochet.

Nigel 3.0 has got rather boring (250 + stitches per row), but there are is also some amazingly hideous yarns out there to break me out of a rut.

Life still rather off course

So here is an update on Nigel 3.0. (Not a cat)

so about half way down you can see a pulled stitch. That’s where I got to last time with a circumference of 25 stitches. Now the circumference is about five times that length. 

I shall keep going until I finish the two balls of yarn. Then we’ll see what comes out of using such a small rate of expansion 26/25. I’ll post updates here because hopefully by next week I’ll have more of my life back (beyond being able to count to 25).
MER 

Yet another distraction…

I probably should have made oooh Shiny! a tag a long time ago. Admittedly I have been playing around with this particular Shiny for a while now but It’s only just reach peak Hyperspace. It took a long time for me to get into crochet (until I finally crumpled under the boredom of knitting) an almost immediately went off piste, and now I have succumbed to the hypnotic counting of Hyperbolic Crochet.

Maps VI

And what have we learnt this week?

That materials change when you use them and if you want to have everything nice and registered you need to make a master former and keep everything the same ‘age’…

Map IV

This week I’m slightly more on message than previous. I created a second plate for the Index sheet i.e. reifying the space between. It had mixed success. This post also contains a bit of house keeping for the overall project.