It's not just like walking

What we thought was an 'introduction' to snow shoeing turned out to be an advanced back-country snow shoe trip. Back-country as in lots and lots of up, down, and sideways on hills at 35deg inclines while wearing shoes 5 times as big as your feet and walking on 5 feet of snow, sometimes with holes underneath that you fall into. We managed ok and didn't fall behind, but now we're pretty tired.

Here's a view of Mt. Hood right before we walked down one of those steep inclines. I would've taken a picture of the incline except that I had no idea we were about to walk down it. That's the head of our guide, Doug, at the bottom of the picture there.



The weather was perfect, not too hot, not too cold. We had periods of very heavy snowfall with big, fat, beautiful snowflakes, and then periods of sun break. A little bit of wet snow too here and there. Mostly it was too cloudy to get much of a view, except for this view of the mountain.

Of course, no working in the studio today, and I'm not about to get started in my current condition.

Pot stickers and hot & sour soup

Mike decided to demonstrate his prowess in the kitchen today so we went shopping for all the necessary ingredients. I managed to get a little work done on Calypso (printed 1 more layer, rewrote some of the text based on the feedback from last night, laid out and flashed the 4th screen but didn't get to print it) while he made and rolled out the dough, mixed the filling, & cut all the ingredients for the soup. (We cheated, we bought chorizo sausage and added chopped napa cabbage for the filling.) I made the potstickers and cleaned up. Then it's getting ready for going on the snow shoeing trip up Mt. Hood tomorrow, preparing food/water/extra clothes. I guess I'm calling it a day...we have to be up at 5:30am tomorrow!

The hairball

When the critique group last met, I picked up 'the hairball' as my part of the round robin that was already in progress. I knew within a week or so exactly what I wanted to do with it, but then I completely forgot to actually do it! While I was washing up, I suddenly realized that we were meeting tonight, and it was time for show and tell. So the afternoon was spent working on the hairball.

The piece was very soft and fuzzy, very tactile -- the original knitted ball was stuffed with something very soft (Anne did that), in addition to the soft yarn; Diane then added the hairs to the surface of the ball, which gave it even more of a soft, fuzzy glow. So I wanted to add a contrast. Here's the result:



I had the rose thorns left from another project, and the red silk. I made little roundels of the red silk and attached the thorns to them, and sewed the roundels on the surface. I really quite like the result. I'm thinking that I'd make up more of the little roundels, although I don't have a particular project in mind.

The meeting tonight was fruitful -- got good feedback on the shadow book, especially about the texts that I have yet to finish. We talked about the collaborative project some more (the current round robin is the warm up session) and decided to meet at Helen's next month to work in her paper studio and see where it leads us. I recorded the evening's meeting on the ipod as part of the documentation process.

Allure/Desire

Starting from this page on, the words and their shadows are physically closer together but the words themselves diverge, but expressing sentiments along parallel trajectories. So here's Allure/Desire and Acquire/Acquiesce.



Here are the 3 screens used so far. I love how the used screens look. I've photographed some screens in the past as I cleaned them. I put them on the lightbox and photograph them at different stages of being cleaned. Especially if I use vegetable oil for cleaning, they look so beautiful on the lightbox.



There're more photos on the goccoing on page of my web site.

The Chinese cooking class took up almost 5 hours this evening. This was Mike's idea -- signing up for a whole bunch of classes. Tonight was Chinese appetizers, next week will be Chinese stirfry. The week after is rice and noodles (although I'm not taking this one). We also start tennis lessons next week, for 4 weeks, then we have taichi! And this Sunday, we're going on a field trip -- snow-shoeing!

Sexy, Sexy

Bad news first -- I just got the news today that I got rejected from the All Day Snacking show. They sent out the list of the 31 accepted artists to everyone (I assume), with everyone's email addresses on the To: line, so we can all see who got rejected! Sigh. There were 150 submissions (not sure how many artists, as I'm sure some submitted multiple pieces). The good news is that I recognize several on the accepted list and really like their work, so it should be a good show.

Little by little, progress is being made on Calypso. This was the page I was laying out when Mike walked up and saw it. He's been calling this 'the sexy sexy book' ever since. Not a bad nickname for the book.



This is one of the (probably) 7 screens that will be necessary to complete this project. I cram stuff together pretty tightly.



This page will have another layer on top before it's finished. Tomorrow. I'm getting pretty good at retouching flaws on these prints. The fake Estee Lauder logo at the top was missing some bits which I had to manually fill in, same with the circles, and most of them came out ok. A couple were smudged, mostly because I was resting my hand at the wrong place.



Here's the sequence from the top. Each sheet of paper represents 3 pages in the completed book.

Promises & Seductions

Between dealing with Portland Open Studios and the Print Arts Northwest March show, once again, I didn't get as much printing done as I hoped. I finished 2 more pages, 2a & 2c.





The words are supposed to sort of look like they're casting shadows. The colors are slightly more intense than the photos (I used the flash on the camera at a fairly close range), although they are pretty soft colors.

Power outage

We lost power late in the evening last night, while we were out on our walk. It was out for quite a while, so we lit a few candles, enough to see to get ready for bed, and went to bed. I wasn't able to continue printing, just as well, I got some pretty good rest instead.

So, today, I finished printing pages 1b, 1c, & 6c, and printed the backgrounds on 2a, 2c, 3b, 4a, & 6a. This is the set up for printing 1c. That's a page template under the mylar:



Here's an actual printed page:



And here's the opening page (1b) and the next page. Those are supposed to be 4 little containers of eye shadows.



A shot of the background on some of the inside pages. Those are the same eye shadows after the containers have been opened. And they're closed again on the last page.



The Painted Veil turned out to be a very lovely movie. Wonderful scenery and acting. And we're off to see Letters from Iwo Jima tonight.

The power of suggestion

I've been listening to A Dead Man in Istanbul on my iPod at the gym, and while I was on the elliptical yesterday, the protagonist '...walked into a cafe...', and I thought, 'wow, that sounds soooo gooood'. From then on, I couldn't stop thinking about coffee. Finally I got my cup at Papa Hayden's last night. And today, the effect still hadn't quite worn off (the suggestion, not the coffee, the effect of that was long gone), so we went to Peet's this afternoon.

Mike's taking the weekend off again (2 weekends in a row without working, yay), so we went for a long walk, coffee, and a pizza. And I still managed to get 7 hours in the studio.

I had more of the BFK than I thought, so I ended up cutting enough paper for 29 books. They're all trimmed, marked, and ready for print. It took probably 11, 12 hours to do that, even with the guillotine cutter, which worked quite well, so I'm happy. Now we're off to see The Painted Veil.

A couple of shots of the mock-up, printed on the laser printer and taped together:

Paper, paper, and more paper

Made a few changes to the postcard and continued with paper cutting, which sure does take a long time. 30 sheets of BFK...I'm still not finished.

If it's not one thing, it's another

Finally did the postcard for the Print Arts March show. The book is Karen Kunc's Evocation. (Isn't it gorgeous?)



Finished laying out Calypso and put together a mock-up. Even took a couple of pictures, but the media reader is refusing to read the camera's card. So here's a spread from photoshop instead. Got about half of the paper cut. I was hoping to get them all cut tonight then I can just start printing tomorrow, but it's not to be.