Sunday, August 4, 2019

Paste Paper with Madeleine Durham

Two hot, very hot, days in Sunnyvale, and we Pacific Scribers were so excited to learn to make the beautiful papers that Madeleine produces, it was OK. She taught her techniques in a very organized and understandable way. She had lots of different designs she shared with us and, as a colorist, she would whip up something beautiful in 5 minutes.  It's the swing and sway of the brush, with control of course, that is the secret. It intrigued me that I would put two colors together, that I probably wouldn't usually, and produce a nice piece. It was so much fun but exhausting because of the high temperatures of the day.

This is just half of what I made.

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Another Botanical Printing workshop at Pence Gallery in Davis, California

A workshop of one day to introduce Botanical Printing to 8 great participants. It is harried but fun to squeeze in as much as possible to this wonderful craft. I surprised everyone with a Sun Hibiscus for each. These magenta flowers were 8" wide and gave a blue purple print. I had no time to photo and am relying on participant's photos.  The following were from Joan Jarvis.











Rendezvous International Calligraphy Conference

What a wonderful time at the conference in Sherbrooke, Canada, at the Bishops University. This was just a few hours from Montreal. However, only as the crow flies. It took over four hours to get there on a shuttle and three hours to get back to the Montreal airport.
I was fortunate to have a fantastic workshop with Georgia Angelopoulus with her study of pigments and inspiration from William Morris. Following are some of my work examinations and experiments.
We first made squares of our own made paints with all natural pigments. Using William Morris as our inspiration, we each made our own designs and without copying his work, we painted our designs with gouache, watercolors and our own made paints.

My first piece, done before the rest of the work below. Georgia mentioned that it wasn't a square but she really liked it.

Three pigments, each row of four squares, turquoise, buff and red ochre

All squares with a base version of indigo

Metallics of different golds and silver and added debossing.

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Make Your Own Alphabet Book

This last weekend, Friends of Calligraphy invited Julie Wildman of Chicago to show her stuff. The exercises she gave to the class was to make our own alphabet with those exercises and finally making a soft cover book with the 26 letters. To find a form, we scribbled with our dominate and then our non dominate hand. Then we took these strokes and used various tools to make more with them.  Wet walnut ink with added metallic watercolors made amazing colors. Also adding metallic powders to it was also beautiful. When we made our pages for the book we had to decide if the letters could all be of one found form or each different. After making a few different full alphabet letterforms, I chose to do mine all different for each page.


The preliminary scribbles and alphabets


...different strokes for different folks. I didn't quite finish..but here it is;





Had not finished N-O-P........and RSTUVWXYZ.


Friday, March 8, 2019

Old work in photos and memories

A post on Facebook showed up today and my head began to remember my days in Uruguay. So I thought to post some work I did there with my one and only. We traveled there in 2000 to check it out, as our friends from various Embassies in Lisbon, told us to go. I wanted to first stay in Buenos Aires, as I liked the big city feel of it. But we fell in love with Montevideo and its people.
Here are some images of what was done during our time there.


building before renovation, one of four buildings we worked on
building after renovation, I studied old photos and old plans to do a faux front..each front surface has only a 2-3 cm. difference to the surface next to it. I worked on the outside and hubby worked on the inside.



Before old corner building in the old part of town
After we renovated, through lots of city paperwork.  We had to add steel beams to the first floor ceiling.





Thursday, January 3, 2019

Button Up Buttercup


At SCRAP-sf there is a huge assortment of buttons. So I thought to give a button necklace workshop to use some of them. I taught three versions to 12 students. (Knot Again, Hi Wire, and String Along.) Some thought the assortment wasn't very colorful until I had them take time to get themselves a small box full. I first showed them the ones I had made from the bins, gave them some advice and them let them go to it. The first image is the sampling I made. The rest are the students with the Hi Wire technique. They all did a great job.

These three necklaces were made from the bins.


Carol Heard
Nora Chun Oba
Regina Gibson

Dorothy Reinhardt

Dotty Garone

Evelyn Eldridge

Kay Harris

Laura Waterman

Megumi Inouye

Valerie Franco


Buttonhole Bound Books

It has been a while since I had taught this workshop. So, I made a new set of instructions and took out my samples. After so long I almost forgot how to do the stitch. As a seamstress, I made them for my tailored pieces very easily. You would think it would easily translate to a book. Well, I was surprised that I had to practice. Teaching it again June 15, 2019 at San Francisco Center for the Book.




Nametags for the students

Eco Print !!

This second part of Eco Printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book included more info and practice with tannins and blankets and edibles. Everyone seemed to have a great time and a few have already signed up for my next one in May 2019.








Joke Bouden's workshops David Jones and Concertina book


We were so fortunate to have Joke come all the way from Brugge to pass on the David Jones letterforms and also to show us how she produces her wonderful Concertina books. We practiced the letterforms from David Jones pieces and were asked to make a piece using only a few words using gouache or fine tip pens. Mine was Ready, Set, Go. For the Concertina; we had to do our own by picking a theme and researching images and words of that theme. She inspired us by showing her originals from a special box she made. She handled them with cotton gloves and we were not to touch them. They were so wonderful. The intricacies of her work was out of this world. She gets a lot of her images from the internet but makes them her own way. She says she never makes an outline of where her images are going to be placed but adds as she finds them...filling in here and there, balancing the whole.


Daavid Jones workshop piece.

First image I did with fine tip pen and watercolor.

some words from my verse added..I did not like and have since changed this part with a knit image.
Coat of many colors and fringe edge of a rug.


Take It Away

This Sacramento Center for Fiber Arts workshop was really fun. We used bleach on fabric and paper and made some amazing things. Here are some of the pieces my students made;
Kit and her T shirt

bleach on paper

bleach string pull

ready for book covers

Learning Calligraphy never ends.

Rick Paulua, a former White House Calligrapher, gave a great workshop for the Friends of Calligraphy in September. It was called The Truely Flexible Pointed Pen. Here are two that  I produced in the workshop....roughs, first draft;

The first rough. As I finished my pen dropped a blob....guess it was telling me it wasn't good enough and to do over again. I knew it anyway....
This is the second one, losening and less control.  Trying to have some fun with this.