MiT book, finished printing Sheila's book! Yay!

And you know what that means! I'm finished printing for my RACC project! There's still plenty to do—binding 20 copies of this book and finishing the two room divider screens, but I'm happy for this milestone.

So here are 2 pages of the book. These are not going to face each other, I just randomly grabbed 2 pages. The spine edge (in the middle) will get trimmed down so the book will be not quite as wide as this. And since it will be a Japanese stab binding, it will loose another inch or so from each side along the spine edge. So the text and graphics will not be so far apart as you see here. The little graphic on the right is the pressmark for her Imprimery Graphics Studio, which I reproduced using a not very good picture I took with my cellphone.



And after much talking about, here are a couple of pictures of the pine shelves I put into the closet. Much more vertical storage space. Unfortunately, the legs of the shelves make them not quite big enough to store all the pillow books in there, so I'll have to figure something else out. Right now, I still have 2 of the pillows stored on the bed...but where else would pillows go anyhow? The pillow books will be out at the G&V Art Center for a couple of months Dec/Jan, so I'll take the opportunity then to get rid of the bed.

There's still some empty space on the shelves because I'm not quite finished cleaning/reorganizing yet. I'm doing that in between printing, while things dry. The shelves will be stuffed full before I'm finished.

Packing art is hard work, take two

Today was my absolute-must-pack-for-the-Abecedarian show day. The frames were ready late afternoon yesterday, and didn't take very long to put it together. I used plexi for these, instead of glass, and since the plexi comes with the protective covering, I didn't have to clean! Which is so much nicer than framing with glass.

Anyhow, I'm sending 2 framed prints, a bunch of matted/mounted prints, 2 pillow books, and a bunch of smaller artist's books. I had originally figured I could fit everything into 2 big boxes, but no such luck. So after much wrangling, and searching for another box, I wasn't able to ship them out today. But fortunately, shipping out Monday still works, and 3 big boxes it is.

Here's one of the boxes; I took photos so Alicia could pack it all back up again the same way. The other two boxes are straight forward — all prints, or just a single pillow book.

All the smaller artist's books are wrapped and packed on the bottom of this big box:



Then The Dog's Tale is set on top:



Then materials packed around it. Things still have to be taped down, but I'll finish that this weekend.



Looks like the newly updated web site does not render correctly on Windows IE—the padding around the images isn't working. Not sure why. Phooey, but I'm done fiddling with it for now.

Pillow book IV, day n+9

OK, Saturday's unexpected car shopping experience set me back a bit, and I'm not finished with book IV as I had hoped, but I'm close. The pillow form is finished and about 1/3 of the 'booklets' of words are now sewn on. Problem is, tomorrow is pretty full and my appt with the photo is on Wed at 11am. We'll see how far I get. I've also realized that with the die weighing down on the pillow so much, a deck of cards will probably not work very well...they'll just all slide down and snuggle up towards the die. At this point, I'm also out of time for making them. Lets see, here's the last entry on this book.

Tonight's Random Movie — The Savages. Interminable! I have no patience for irrational and dysfunctional people in the movies (not in real life either, but you have no control over that).

Pillow book III, day n+6...and poor Jeep is dead...

Had to rescue the Good Prince again. We thought maybe he could drive the Jeep just a couple of more times to use up the tank of gas, but no such luck. And this time, it was stopped at a most inconvenient spot. We had to push it (uphill, no kidding) into a parking spot. As the Good Prince shut the door, something underneath rattled. "The catalytic converter, it's about to go," he said. Sigh. 15 years of service, now the Jeep is all alone, left at some parking lot waiting for the tow truck to arrive. I didn't even get a chance for a last ride. It's funny, but I do feel sad. It's the first car I've had for such a long time. It's the first car I've had that was purchased new, and we've had some fun times going on road trips with it. Coming back from Texas one year, we had been given a giant container of Texas grapefruit by relatives. As we came close to the California border, I suddenly remembered that California had all these laws about what fruit you could bring in. Not sure that we would be allowed to keep the bounty, we stopped at a rest area right before the border, and ate as much of the grapefruit as we could! We ate and ate and ate, sitting in the Jeep, in the middle of the night, and we didn't make a dent in the amount of grapefruit we had. It was a very big box. Turned out, California didn't care about grapefruit, at least not that year.

I guess it was fortuitous that we got the Subaru last night. Here's a picture of the Good Prince removing all our things from the car:



The first not rainy day for weeks! I celebrated by going out for a long walk up Nansen Summit. Partly to walk, and also because I needed to collect some materials for the piece I promised for the Lake Oswego Chronicles. It was a misty, foggy day, but clear at the top:



Spent the bulk of the day trying to finish up book III. Although I'm not quite there yet, I'm very close. The pages are very loosely sewn down on the left, using little tiny gray glass beads as spacers to keep the pages loose. The first few pages are also not sewn down all the way, and the threads are all left loose and dangling. I want the whole thing to seem to be on the verge of coming apart. So here's a shot with the book closed:



With one page turned. You can see the first page is not sewn down on the bottom:



The last page. I used the glass beads to frame the image, and here on the last page, the framing is complete. As you flip backwards, the pages lose their framing. The first page, only a little bit of the beads are left on the upper left corner. You can sort of see it. Again, threads are left loose.



To see the previous day's work on this book, see this entry.

Pillow book IV, day n+8, and other oddities

Finally! Finished sewing all the little tulle pages together. Here they are, laid out (with 1 swiss cheese/die in the middle, more on that later), in the 'starting position' of the game. Except 1) the pillow case isn't made yet, that's just the piece of fabric laid out on the pillow form; 2) there will be 6 words along each side (5 on each side are shown, the extras are all piled on the left bottom corner there). Each word is 8 sheets of tulle sewn into 3 'pages'.



Here some of the pages have been turned. The words are still legible when 1 page has been turned, but becomes illegible when 2 pages have been turned.



See this entry for previous day on this book.

Although I had Sara make me 2 dice, I've decided to use only 1 for this piece. For obvious reasons, looking at the photo. Which means I have an extra die for another piece! So wheels are turning for that. I'm very happy with the way the dice turned out, and I think Sara was too. When I brought it to the critique group meeting last night, people's reactions were great — they couldn't figure out if it was a block of cheese or a die.

I have appt with Aaron (photog) next Wed, so much better pictures of all the pillows will be coming in the later part of next week.

Found a few different types of beads that I can use as spacers for book III, and also had the plexi cut for book II and III; I'll need those for display at the Tennessee show.

So, the odd bits.

Now, I always have strange dreams, usually of the down the rabbit hole variety and although things tend to be very involved, they move along pretty quickly without much time for me to think. But last night was a little different. I dreamed that I was considering buying a portable oven that's also a pet carrier, and it's all inside this suitcase, which looked suspiciously like this broken suitcase that I've been trying to figure out what to do with. In real life, I do have a broken oven AND a broken suitcase, AND a pet.

Anyhow, in this suitcase, half of it is an oven and the other half, a pet carrier. But there's only 1 door, and 1 latch. I kept on looking at it and looking at it. Whoever was trying to sell it to me kept on saying how my pet would be perfectly safe in there, all the while the oven is going, but I was dubious. I put a chocolate cake in one half, and a small dog in the other, but I couldn't bring myself to shut the suitcase, thinking why didn't they just put a door on each half, then I'd feel so much better about it.

I must've decided to not trust the oven/pet carrier — the last thing I remember was me eating the unbaked chocolate cake batter.

Somewhere along the line, a tipsy Mrs. 5000 also made an appearance, throwing yellow plastic cups all over a book arts conference!

Had another coyote sighting tonight. At this rate, I'll be able to do my own daily coyote blog. This one seemed like a young one, still had a bit of a puppy look.

Pillow book IV, day n+7

Oops, did I say that I'd have pictures today? I lied, apparently. Did a lot of sewing on book IV, and am about 1/2 way through all the little pages that need to be sewn together. Still need to sew the pillow case itself, and the critique group meet tonight help me decide which fabric to use (I had a lighter and a darker to choose from, and although preferred the darker, wasn't sure that the text would show...everyone thought the text showed just fine).

The group also had a great suggestion for how to finish book III, so that was great. So this was the previous entry on book IV.

The group reviewed the information the gallery at Austin Peay U sent; they had lots of pedestals, but I'll need to order 2 plexi sheets as support for the 2 larger pillows.

Pillow book IV, day n+6

Still no pictures (but I really should've taken some). Finished basting the tulle pages for book IV (took 4 hours!); decided the layout and orientation of the words. See this entry for previous day on this book.

Finally hemmed up book II (so the pillow form is no longer exposed on the underside). Still working on how I want to finish book III, but did make a couple of decisions on that today.

Pillow book IV, day n+5

Continued to hand baste the tulle pages today, but only got in an hour's work in the studio. It was, otherwise, a busy day for errands. Sara brought over the finished swiss cheese-dice today, and they're great! Picture tomorrow.

Random movie: Sweeney Todd. OK, so I've seen this a couple of times on stage, and enjoyed it both times, but somehow, the movie was...boring. And they way over-did the squirting/dripping blood thing. I thought so even during the opening sequence, so I guess I should've seen it coming.

Pillow book IV, day n+4

Time to get back to work. But first, a picture of Laura's inspiring coat, which she drew on to match her purse:



This is the game piece. For a list of all the words in this piece, this this entry. Here you see Brother and Recognize in 8 layers of gocco printed tulle. I had originally figured I'd only use 6 of the 8 that I printed for each word, but after stacking them up, the individual flaws didn't really show much, so I've decided to use all 8 sheets.



Here they're pinned up 2 layers each, to make 4 pages. But looking at these, I think 2 layers is too faint.



So I decided on 3 pages of 3, 3 and 2 layers, with the 2-layer being the bottom page. Here are the 2 3-layer pages:



I also now realize that the gray fabric I bought for this is too dark, and actually I'm really liking the pieces over white. So I'll be heading back to the fabric store tomorrow and see what else I find.

Pillow book III, day n+5

No pictures today, but I finished the edges of the tulle pages of book III. Again, took a lot of experimenting to get the tension right on the serger for this task. Of course, now that I have the edges sewn up, I see some other problems with the book which I'll have to deal with. See this entry for the previous day on this book.

Still decluttering the house. OK, I said I wasn't going to clean for the Sock Mending Party, and I'm not really cleaning. But really, there's a lot of old junk mail, old not-junk mail, old postcards, old magazines, old paper work of all kinds, that need to be dealt with.

OK, so here's a somewhat entertaining tale. This actually happened a few days ago, but it took me a bit to figure it out. We had a pretty foggy night, I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday, and I went out for my evening walk a little later than usual. Anyhow, I was walking along my usual route, and I looked up and saw this dog down the street. It had seen me already, and it was frozen in mid stride with one leg in mid air, just tracking me as I walked towards it. I thought perhaps it was tied up to the tree or something, and thought what a horrible night to leave your dog out like that; it was cold and wet.

As I got closer, I could see that it was not tied to anything; it continued to track me without moving. I thought about going over to check it out, but had second thoughts since it was behaving so oddly. At the corner, I turned onto the side street (away from the dog). I walked a few steps and turned to check on the dog. Well, it had moved and was walking towards me, but as soon as it saw me looking at it, it froze again.

I continued on my route for another half a block before I looked again. And this time, the dog had changed directions and was paying me no attention.

I think I've decided that it was a coyote. It was definitely the right size, shape, and color, although it was fluffier, but that might be a winter coat. They're definitely around in the neighborhood, and I heard one baying in the middle of the night about a week ago.

So that's my encounter with the "friendly" neighborhood coyote.

For a daily dose of coyote stories, check this out.

Pillow book III, day n+4

I got lazy yesterday and didn't document, but, I didn't do a whole lot in the studio and we got home really late from the movie and I just wanted to get something to eat and get to bed. So a quick note about yesterday — I was invited to submit a piece for the Lake Oswego Chronicles exhibit for 2008 and had to submit a proposal for what I was going to show, which of course I have yet to make. Anyhow, this all happened back in early December. My deadline for sending in an image is mid Feb, even though the exhibit won't be until June, so I figure I better get cracking on that. So yesterday was looking for materials for the piece I've promised. But mainly, I worked on putting the house back together after Portland Open Studios. Yes, that was months ago; and yes, it always takes me months to put all the furniture & artwork back to where they all belong.

So, today. Well, I'm now 2 issues behind on Pudding. The last two issues of Pudding, in fact. People have asked about PhotoEZ and StencilPro as potential replacement materials, should the unfortunate day arrive when we can't get Riso screens anymore. The two products seem extremely similar and it took me a little while to find where they talk about the differences. (I should note that their data on the Riso screens are NOT correct on the page!) Anyhow, ordered myself two different grades of the StencilPro to try for one of the two remaining issues of Pudding. Not sure what I'll do for the other issue yet. But the two will probably go out together as a double issue.

Anyhow, back to pillow book III in the afternoon. Decided on the text/captions for the pages, and printed them on Rives Lightweight on the inkjet printer. And here they are, sewn onto the tulle pages. There's a dreamy quality to this picture...I think it's the weird light combination (camera flash + full spectrum light directly overhead), and the way the pillow was just kind of sitting on a chair piled high with stuff.



See this entry for the previous day on this book.

Random Movies! We saw 2 in a row (2 nights in a row that is). So yesterday was National Treasure, the Book of Secrets. It was VERY BAD. The night before was I'm Not There, which was really interesting for about an hour and half, and then really boring for another 45 minutes — after I got over the ingenuity factor, there wasn't much else there. Not for me, anyhow.

Pillow book IV, day n+3

OK, the words for book IV were printed today. Here's the laser printer output that I used to flash the screen. All the words were crammed in there to fit the larger gocco screen (slightly larger than 6"x9"). I think the smallest gap is about 1/3".



I put down ink blocks between the words and printed 8 copies of each word. And here they are, all printed. They were printed one word at a time — I'd print a word, scrape off the ink, towel off the spot, and move on to the next.



And here's a detail of 'You.' This was not a clean copy (thus I needed to print 8, in order to get 6 good ones). When I peeled the print off the print bed, any movement between the tulle and the newsprint would cause these smudges, if I wasn't super careful. So this is one of the smudged ones. And on text, any defect is instantly detectable!

Pillow book IV, day n+2

Oh, the traffic! By the time I got home from my errands (and I didn't even get them all done) and did some Monday chores, it was 5pm! All I did on book IV was to choose the words for the game board, and layout the gocco screen; and by then, it was time to get dinner going. For some reason, I don't like to print at night (although I paint/bind/sew at night, no problem), maybe because gocco mistakes can't be undone, and when I'm tired, I make more mistakes. So anyhow, the upshot of that is that I did not print today. Although I'm all ready to flash the screen and print tomorrow.

Spent the evening signing up for audible.com and downloading a book. I figure I'd give them a try. Checking out the CD books from the library and listening on the iPod doesn't always work, some tracks get confused (like if they're the exact same length). It's pretty expensive, about $15/book, although the first 3 months is half that price. So we'll see.

Happy New Year!

Pillow book IV, day n+1

Took a break from book III today and gave book IV a think. Last I worked on this, I made the form for it, and decided to have a clay artist make the dice/swiss cheese blocks for me; I sent her a drawing of what I had in mind, and today, I got this 'status report' from her:



Don't they look great!? I think once they're sitting on the gameboard-pillow, they will look like both dice and swiss cheese.

And I also figured out how I want book IV to function. Originally, I'd laid it out sort of like a Monopoly game, with different words occupying squares along the edges of the board. Each word would have 1-6 sheets of tulle, making them difficult-easy to read. And the dice would just sit on the board. But it wouldn't really be playable.

So today, I figured out how it can be a playable game (although perhaps not a fun game to play) — each word has 6 sheets of tulle, but they'd only be stitched down on one side. There's a deck of cards. You roll the dice (but of course the clay dice would not really be roll-able either). Move your piece the number of spaces the dice indicate. You retrieve the top card, which tells you how many sheets of the tulle to flip over.

As you play, the words become less and less legible.

This means I'll need to print cards too, but that shouldn't be too much trouble.

So the plan is to print the words tomorrow, after I run some errands.

Pillow book III, day n+3

First, a little sidetrack. I found these old sheets of sandpaper when I was cleaning up a couple of days ago. These were used to sand some pastel pieces, a long time ago. I can't remember the piece I used it on. Anyhow, I thought they were really pretty.



Now, the business at hand. Last I left it, I didn't really know what to do next on pillow book III. Then I had this dream...I dreamed that my critique group and I got together (among some other nonsensical bits) and Rachel had a suggestion that I really liked. And when I woke up this morning, it still made sense and I still liked it! It's kind of like debugging your software in your sleep, although those always turned out to be bogus after I woke up.

Anyhow, I tried the dream idea, and I liked the way it looked, except I ran into two technical problems. After trying several different things, I decided to take a different approach. However, the main concept behind the dream idea still works — when I left it yesterday, I was stumped on how to deal with the fact that when more of the tulle pages are stacked together, the image was actually harder to read, not easier — well, sometimes when the same story is told over and over again, parts of the details change in each retelling, and the more you hear the story, the less sure you are of what really happened.

So taking that concept, here's a mock up of pillow book III. I'm keeping it pretty simple. Each 'page' is actually 3 sheets of the tulle sewn together. That gives each page some extra weight, which makes them lie down flat and easier to handle. They're just pinned together on the left:



Here the first page (3 sheets of tulle) has been turned:



And here only the last page (also 3 sheets of tulle) is left unturned:



There's a paper version of the print sewn onto the pillow underneath. The final image is the clearest image.

This format (just a basic 'book' structure resting on a pillow) was actually my very original plan for this series, except that the tulle pages had the tendency to stick together and didn't want to lie flat. Sewing 3 together is a solution for that, but I think I'll still need to finish the edges.

Right now, my plan is to caption each page with a story that changes in details as you turn the pages. Not sure how I'm going to get the text on there yet.

Pillow book III, day n+2

Sooooo, although the dog printed well enough on paper, on the tulle, stacked up, you can't really make out the details in the fur. And in fact, the more sheets of tulle I stacked up, the less well defined the dog became (all the definition in the fur pretty much disappeared, although you could still see the snout). So now I'm playing around with different ideas. I might have something to photograph and show tomorrow. For pillow book III day n+1, see this entry.

On other fronts, we tried a new restaurant today (new to us, it's been around for some time) — Pok Pok, Portland's own SE Asian street food restaurant. I think when they first started, it was strictly outdoors dining, but there's now a bar and indoor dining space. It was delicious. Afterwards, desserts at Pix, also excellent.

More generic pillow book work

Decided that the pillows needed to be deflated some more, I took out more of the poly-fil stuffings and sewed the forms back up. I can't do that too many more times...every time I open them up and sew them back together, the pillows get a little smaller. Pretty soon, there will be no pillows left!

The prints from yesterday are still not dry (the tulle prints, the paper prints have long since dried). So I went looking for fabric for book IV. Found some gray wool suiting on the discount table (has some markings on it, which is fine for my purposes), very nice fabric for $7.99/yard. Good deal. Then I experimented with the gray lycra that I had gotten from Susan — I cut it into strips and knitted a square, thinking that I might try knitting some pillow cases. With a knitted case, I'd be able pull stuffings through to the front, something I've been wanting to do. Not sure what I think of the results yet.

Today was a big news day, Benazir Bhutto's assassination. So spent more time reading the news and listening to the radio than usual. Went to an extra movie tonight (not randomly selected, but sort of topical), Charlie Wilson's War. Excellent movie.

Pillow book III, day n+1

Not sure which day it is on pillow book III, since I've already made the pillow case and pillow form for it. But anyhow, here is the print for pillow book III. This is printed on Rives Lightweight:



That dark line down the right side? That's what happens when you print one on the mylar, but the mylar isn't big enough, so the print goes over the edge, which is fine because I had a piece of scrap paper underneath it. But then I forget that some ink will pool on the screen where that mylar edge is, and I forget to print a scrap before I print on the Lightweight. So that's what that line is.

And here it is printed on a sheet of tulle. The tulle is attached to a sheet of newsprint. I actually made these a while back, and I wonder if that was why some of them were pulling off the newsprint as I printed today...maybe the double sided sticky tape wasn't sticking so well after weeks have passed?. I'm not sure, but as a result, I had a bunch of them that were no good — when the tulle pulls up from the newsprint, and I don't catch it, it gets smudged and the print is trashed. I printed way more sheets than I figured I'd need, so hopefully, I'm ok.



And here's the image I used to make the screen. Compare this to the next image (the original, untouched) which is extremely contrasty, except for the important parts — the dog's face and fur, and the kid's shirt. And even though, as a photograph, this looks very unnatural, it looks fine printed.



The original, untouched image. If I flashed this image, the dog will not be 'readable' because it will print almost solid in the face and front. The kid's shirt will print almost solid as well, instead of stripes. So the image above, the one I used to flash the screen, has 7 different adjustment layers to bring out the definitions in the various areas I want to see. And even still, compare the above image to the one printed on Rives Lightweight — the grass in the shade in front of the dog printed as a solid, even though you can see a pattern in the image above.

Still prepping

Woke up in the morning and the first thing that came to my mind was that I didn't like how I cropped the image (for pillow book III) yesterday. So after much goofing off (actually catching up on various papers and magazines), I reworked the image. That was followed by more catching-up reading. Then it was onto the Random Movie of the week...there were a whopper 13 choices tonight! Walk Hard was selected. It was amusing, definitely had a few good moments, but for the most part it felt like the same joke over and over again. (I must be getting old, I'm feeling that way about more and more movies. And soon, I'll probably not even feel like going to the movies anymore...perish the thought!)

We almost did the stereotype Christmas non-celebrants thing — Chinese food followed by a movie, but the ham in the fridge really had to be cooked up.

Ok, for sure, I MUST print tomorrow!

Prepping for Pillows III & IV

Finally worked on the image I'm going to use the pillow book III. Had to spend a lot of time adjusting for light and contrast levels. There are animals in the image (fur) and it was a very bright and sunny day. So lots of adjustments area by area to make an image that will gocco well. Then it was cutting the tulle and attaching them to newsprint sheets to get ready to print book III tomorrow. Um, no, we don't celebrate.