Paper + Craft

A lovely book I came across while looking for something else in the library. 

The photographs are clear and the projects are quite easy-looking.

They have two nice birdy-related projects too.

These would look lovely for Christmas ornaments.

The bag template is going to be rather useful for packaging gifts.

The marvellous thing is that the templates are available for free download online here: http://www.chroniclebooks.com/papercraft

Chroma Chronos I-VI

A while back I posted about a project I was working on, dyeing postcards with tea and matching them with my naturally dyed wools. It was actually for an exhibition called Pameran Poskad which I took part in. The exhibition was held from the 17th April to the 01 May here in Singapore. Anyone could take part so I decided that since it was my new year's resolution to make some art, I would take part. The exhibition was interesting and gathered a huge response from artists from different places around the world. You can see some pictures at the website of works submitted. It was nice for me as a 'little' person to participate with all the 'grown up' artists. And to my surprise I sold 3 of my works! Woo! I'm a selling artist! Hee hee!

Here's what my works were about:

Chroma Chronos was a set of works about time and colour (hence the name chroma=colour, chronos=time (yes its deliberately mis-spelt to emphasis the link between the two)). I wanted to reflect the process, the hidden dimension of the work, which is the time. Each of the four colours on each postcard took up to 2 weeks to develop, meaning that the total time spent for each postcard was up to 8-9 weeks. This is not fast art, not the quick and dirty colour of the inkjet printer, digital photography and the instant download, but the slow, painstaking (and often frustrating) art of time. With time comes colour. The two are tied together. Time itself breathes into these works. The works are circular to reflect the nature of the clocks which rule our days, hands going around and around and around. The circles also stem from my preoccupation with geometry and philosophy (but I wont bore you with that too!). Without further ado, I present Chroma Chronos I-VI:

Someone brought this one

And someone brought this one too

Someone brought the small yellow one too!

Chroma Chronos I - VI

Paper Dyes

Continuing on from my experiments the other day, I've dyed a whole stack of postcards with tea-based natural dyes. The colours are so lovely and turned out really well on the paper as my earlier experiments had indicated they would. Paired with my naturally dyed wools, they look amazing and promise to be something really beautiful...

The naturally dyed postcards with some of my previous woollen experiments.

The postcards alone. Each postcard has a different depth of colour and different dye mark.

Another view of the wool and postcards, just because they are so lovely.

And the balls of wool do remind me of scoops of icecream...

Another sneak peek...

These are two experiments from a new project I'm working on. The left is dyed using black tea, the right is dyed using Starbucks berry tea. The paper is a delicious heavy-weight watercolour paper that absorbs my natural dyes like they were made for each other. The wonderful thing about this paper is that it absorbs the dye over 24 hours without turning into a soggy mush like most paper would. Unfortunately the berry pink doesn't last and it fades to a musty rose brown. Still nice, but not so pretty. Such is the way with berries. Their delights are fleeting!

Card Making

Tracing paper Christmas Trees made by the mr. which I love (both the mr. and the trees!)

Sneak peek at this year's Christmas cards in progress

Its a tradition with me to make my own Christmas cards. I can't possibly buy gifts for everyone (and ensure that its not another white elephant gift thats not used), so I like to give cards. I find handmade ones more special and more personal. Each card is different due to being handmade and I make only a few of each type (as I prefer things to be unique). I like the slightly imperfect quality of the handmade, what the Japanese would call 'wabi sabi'. There is a beauty in that is held because of the flaws, not in-spite of them. I made some of the cards on handmade paper as well, so there really is a sense of making with the cards. In the paper, in the print, the artists hands are visible. Its not like the mass-produced card, where the precision of the machine cut and the sharpness of the printing are evident. The mass-produced is about speed, about minimum effort, a results-oriented product, precision and economics. The handmade is almost counter-cultural (in fact, it is counter-cultural). It makes little sense to spend hours making cards when you can buy them in under a minute. But I find a connection here with slowness. Here are slow cards for a season which should be marked with slowness. Slowness of spending time with family, of lingering over the dinner-table chatting, of making space for reconnection with the spirit.

Notebooks

Recycled paper notebook

Red embroidery thread

Front cover. The cover flaps are sewn in to give extra strength to the front & back covers

Notebooks for the un-recognised animal super-hero lurking within us...

My alter-ego: The Squealing Squirrel

5-hole stitched spines with the cotton thread

I've enjoyed making my own notebooks and journals since secondary school. Recently I decided to run a workshop for my students and thought a little practice may be in order. Here are the results of my endeavours.

The recycled paper notebook was made from paper from a Tasmanian lady named Joanna Gair. The cover paper has an autumn leaf sandwiched between two layers of paper. I was saving this piece for something special where its leafy beauty can be seen and appreciated, so the notebook is a perfect way to show it off.

The other notebook covers are watercolour paper (160gsm) with some letraset transfer lettering on the covers left over from my architecture student days. I used crochet cotton to stitch the notebooks. Paper inside is a 120gsm pastel paper so its good for drawing and stapling dye samples to.