cloth.paper.string

this weekend...

... the invites were gocco'ed, assembled, addressed and stamped (with postage, and too, a tiny stamp carved by me);


...ugly apples from the neighbor's tree were sauced and pie-d;

...a sweater was finished. 

A feverish child was cuddled.  A new cook book was discovered.  The post office line was conquered.  Spiced biscotti were twice-baked.  Jerusalem artichokes were tried (and liked).  Really Rosie was rediscovered.  

And a photo was selected for the Shutter Sisters' Daily Click (so many thanks, sisters!!).

A full weekend, indeed.  I hope yours was restful and rich.

autumn's arrival

Fall has rooted itself on my doorstep.  I put on a scarf this morning.  And used the windshield wipers to wipe away the fallen leaves.  We're feverishly lining the pantry shelves and filling the chest freezer with preserved bits of summer.  Bedtime stories are read now with the light on.   We have what will probably be the last camping trip of the year planned for the weekend.  I've been knitting.  And the crockpot came out of hiding.  Sure signs.

And over in the shop, there's a bit of autumn captured on gocco printed note cards, available in sets of four and as singles.

What harbingers of autumn are at your doorstep?

forward

Every now and then I steal away to my attic.  I bring out my gocco printer and paper, or bookcloth, and I pull prints.  There's something relaxing about the repetition.  About the making of many.  There's something satisfying about an orderly stack of notecards.  About the transfer of images from my natural environment onto the page, onto cloth.  Time passes, almost unnoticed. I know this is good for me.

Since I've been finding such peace in the making, and since I'm a girl who needs an assignment, I've decided to open a little shop over on etsy.  If you've tracked the gocco swaps, you'll see some familiar items.  And you'll see some new stuff as well, including hardcover journals with gocco printed bookcloth covers.

The cottonwood leaf screen is one that was retired - ahem, ripped - in the last print run.  There are three limited edition journals and a stack of cottonwood cards in the shop.  A portion of sales from items printed with this botanical rubbing will be donated to the Cottonwood Foundation, an all-volunteer organization that makes small, but significant donations to grassroots groups around the world protecting the environment, empowering people and promoting cultural diversity.  It seems fitting in many ways.

And in other sharing news, I paid it forward, finally.  I sewed up a batch of charlie bags -- three choclate brown linen bags with repurposed cotton lining, one greyish denim one with yellow seersucker lining.  I then paired them up with some gocco'ed cards, and sent them out.  Nine months late.  Many thanks to Marnie, Grace, Kate and Lisa for being so very patient. 

salud

Last fall we visited with great grandmother Ann in southeastern Minnesota.  She had been diagnosed with a rare form of a rare disease and had traveled from South Carolina to the Mayo Clinic for specialized treatment.  Just outside the window of her suite stood a full and vibrant ginkgo tree.  Eastern lore tells of this tree as a symbol of strength and longevity, a bearer of hope.  A fitting symbol, indeed.  I picked a leaf and tucked it in my book. 

Back home I made an impression of the leaf, and tucked it into another book.  When I cooked up the latest gocco swap, I knew I'd use the image. 

I paired the leaf with one word:  salud.  One word with many meanings:  to health and bless you and also cheers!

Since gocco supplies are in short supply I burned a flurry of leaves on the screen, but only used one in the printing.  The others will surely show up here and there in the future.

I printed notecards on recycled paper and paired them up with kraft paper envelopes.  Scraps of blue paper wrapped up sets of notecards, and more scraps of a lighter blue paper were turned into stickers to hold the bundles together.  They hit the mail today.

And so, a blessing to the longevity of the memory of great grandmother Ann.

made

The holiday gift making kept me up into the wee hours recently.  We decided to go handmade for our family and friends and created a bundle of goodies in which all members of the household participated in the making.  I'll share more on the collaboration once the last of the gifts are given next week.

For my daugther, I knitted a hat.  One I've made before, and one I'll make again; though sooner than I had anticipated.  I made a mistake in the measuring, or she grew considerably, so the hat is a wee bit small.  This one will be donated for an upcoming silent auction, and another will be cast on. 

I also sewed a dress from this Japanese craft book.  Pinstriped denim, elephant pocket, vintage button and orange trim.  I'm pleased with how it came out and too that it's such a hit:  the pachyderm dress is in heavy rotation.

The handmade holidays rounded out a pretty good year of sewing, printing and knitting for me.  These are the finished and photographed.

For 2009, I'm aiming to use more of what I have; make more of what I think about creating; finish more of what I start; and clean up as I go.  And too, to photograph all of it. 

Wishing you all a happy, healthy and abundant new year!

binding

I have a favorite glue brush.  It's pink, plastic and oh-so cheap.  I've had it for years and years, and I've never bound a book without it.  Each time I use it I end up washing it in the sink and leaving it nearby to dry.  In our last two homes it would find its perch on the windowsill behind the kitchen sink.  Here it dries alongside the toothbrushes on the bathroom windowsill. 

The brush usually sits out far longer than necessary once it's dry.  There's something about seeing it next to the dishsoap or the toothpaste that makes me smile, reminding me that creative ventures are indeed part of my day to day, even though it often seems otherwise.  It's 'drying' right now, even though the book I bound last week is hundreds of miles away, gifted today to my sister-in-law-to-be at her bridal shower.  

The book is another made using Paper Source's pre-made text blocks - this one a photo album with vellum sheets between each page.  The paper covering the book called out to me from the sea of fantastic Japanese prints lining the wall of their store.  Rich chocolate brown, as a backdrop for red, light turquoise and white plum blossoms.   Red bookcloth along the spine.  That beloved pink brush will surely be pasting more of this combination onto bookboard again.

gocco notes in the mail

It started about a year ago with a weed, the sun and some paper.  You might remember.  I placed a snip of a plant that reminded me of dill across a page of light sensitive paper and watched a bit of magic happen.  As soon as the cyanotype developed I knew I wanted to make gocco prints of their ethereal images.  I tucked the sunprints into a book where they'd be safe until I was ready to use them.  And then I returned the book - and the prints - to the library.  I can only hope the prints were appreciated by whomever found them within the pages.  But this post isn't really about that...

For the art of the note : gocco swap, I decided I'd forge ahead and print one of the cyanotypes, even though I didn't have the original.  I edited a photo of the sunprint and burned two screens of the same image with slight variations -- one is smaller, more crisp; the other larger, mirrored and more grainy. The differences were possible thanks to flickr's photo editor picnik and the light/dark setting on the photocopier.

Green ink was a given, connecting the prints to the plants.  I'm really excited about how this one came out.  The blue ink wasn't planned, but when I scanned through my inks I realized that blue would link the prints back to the sunprint.  The graininess of this image works for me in some places, but not all.  I think I'd like it better if it were tidier kind of messy, if that makes sense.  But, little did I know that the screen, once printed with blue and then cleaned, would bring me full circle, almost recreating the original lost in that library book.  This alone is winning me over.

Please check out the art of the note : gocco swap flickr group.  There you'll find more photos of my gocco'ed swap goods as well as many fun and inspiring prints by other participants.  Thanks again to all for making the swap a success.  I'm off to see what gocco goodness came in today's mail...

And for those of you scratching your head wondering what gocco is, you can learn more about this small Japanese screen printing device here.

art of the note : gocco swap

I'm a huge fan of handwritten notes.  Especially those penned inside handmade and original cards.  Seeing squiggling, swirling or scrawling handwriting of the sender makes the message feel closer, more true.  And, of course, there's that sparkle a personal note brings to a mailbox that is often crowded with uninspired form letters, bills and such.

Knowing that the card itself is unique and selected or made especially for you adds another layer of meaning.  And too, there are plenty of cards that are art in and of themselves.  I know that I am not the only one to frame a card that strikes me so. 

After the fun that was shared by so many through the mid-winter gocco swap, I've decided to host another swap.  This time around is all about the celebrating the handwritten note.  I hope you'll join me in printing and swapping gocco'ed notecards.  And then, in writing more notes to family and friends, spreading the gocco goodness even further. Here's the lowdown:
The sign-up deadline is July 21st.  Sign up by sending me an email at clothpaperstring AT gmail DOT com with the subject Gocco Swap - be sure to include your name, mailing address and a link to your blog and/or Flickr account.   I'll send out your list of swapmates later that week (again, you'll have 10-12 who you'll be committing to sending your gocco-ed bits out to).

Gocco print a set of notecards (4-8 cards with envelopes), send a set of your cards to each of your swapmates (you'll have 10-12 folks you'll be swapping with), receive cardsets from your swapmates.

The swap is open to anyone, anywhere with a blog and/or flickr account and access to a Gocco printer.

Mail your gocco'd bits to swapmates on or before August 21st.  Don't forget to take photos of your creations and post them to the art of the note : gocco swap flickr group.

And, feel free to spread the word.  You can cut and paste the HTML in the box to add a button to your blog or sidebar:   

<a href="http://clothpaperstring.typepad.com/clothpaperstring/2008/07/art-of-the-note-gocco-swap.html"><img src="http://clothpaperstring.typepad.com/clothpaperstring/swapbutton.jpg" border="0"/></a>

Happy gocco-ing!

Update:  the swap is now closed with over 50 gocco-ers on board!  See who's participating here.

folds and freezer paper

It's been a long time since I've made a book.  Too long.  But tonight that changed when I started on a  small book for a collaborative project.  I couldn't have been more pleased with the cutting and folding of paper, the assembly of flat into three dimensional form. 

I'll share more about this project in due time, but for now here's a little of the folds and the freshly freezer-paper-stenciled (yes, that's now a verb) book cloth.  The colors are all funky since I haven't gotten around to making that light box just yet; but rest assured, they're good.  Chartreuse and inky black-blue good.

And the leaves?  They're traced from the vintage fabric that is still in the midst of metamorphosis from skirt to bag.

on the mind

I have a tendency to over-think everything.  When it comes to making things I often spend more time in my head than I do with my hands.  Even with easy stuff.  Like the sweater that the wee one has been wearing in pieces lately because she's excited about it; meanwhile her mama can only think about actually stitching the sleeves to the body.  And there are those two simple holiday gifts I'm working on (still all in my head, mind you) for nana and great nana, which will undoubtedly be delivered into their hands well into next week.  And the solstice cards.  These are finally on paper thanks tonight's intensive gocco session, but they've morphed into a new year's greeting. 

I'm thinking seriously about resolving in the new year to not let things get stuck in the gray matter, but instead to make a practice of getting them out, of making them real.  I'm wondering if getting back to Julia Cameron's morning pages would help.  Or maybe making a trusty little notebook a constant companion, into which I could jot ideas and notions into as they came to me.  Of course I'm all still completely in my head about how to get out...  So the question for you, friends, is do you have a practice that keeps you moving from the mental to the physical realm, that helps you kick-start your ideas and bring them to fruition?