A Little More Greek Stitching

It has been Half Term this week so I made a special effort to finish off two more Greek Stitched books.  The covers are Shibori fabric which I dyed some time ago.  I subsequently backed the fabric with layout paper ready to be used to cover some books.

The fabric above was dyed using Procion Mx dyes in blue and rust.

The fabric for the larger book of the two was dyed with Indigo and the fabric was ruched up a plastic pipe. All the stitching on these has been done with waxed linen thread.

I have also been trying to finish off an A3 portfolio to store papers in but have got myself in a right mess so may have to wait until the next class to finish it off.

Feathers

At last I seem to have got something which I like! This is a collagraph print created using filler, PVA and carborundum.  It has two very small pieces of chine collee on it too.

This week I viscosity inked the plate using Prussian Blue as the base colour, with a pale blue hard roller and then cadmium yellow dark on top using a soft roller ...

followed by a second print which was largely a Turquoise background with bits of Prussian Blue in it.

It's all Greek to me!

Over the past two weeks we have been learning a new binding technique at the bookbinding class I go to - Greek Sewing.  I managed to get it wrong but the end result looks okay.  I covered my boards with some of the paste paper I created a while ago and used two shades of 4 ply waxed linen thread to do the stitching.

 The book is roughly A5 in size.  The binding is created using 2 needles at a time.

Don't we all love the sea ....

After spending a very brief period near the sea last week I came home with a bag of wet seaweed which has slowly been decomposing in the kitchen so yesterday I thought I had better do something with it whilst it was still useable.

I got out my two Gelli plates plus some nice Golden acrylic paints and pulled a few prints before some of it eventually got that bad I could not get it off ....

(a)  The Gelli plate, and
(b)  Even worse .... the paper I had printed onto!! What a slimy mess I had.

The presence of seasalt may have added to the blotchy images above

I did not take off the background paint with a piece of paper for these three images

The seaweed I did not put in the bin has now dried and wrinkled up so I may able to get yet more prints from it?

Gardener's Retreat

Found this chap having a rest in the garden at Rosemoor.  He was looking after some strangely shaped gourds on the table beside him.