Shop update

Well, after being featured on Decor8 on Tuesday my shop and blog seem to have had a few new visitors! So Hello if that's how you've found me! 

Because of this, I've been spurred into a frenzy of collage-making activity and now have some nice new additions to the shop. I hope you'll have a closer look. Can you tell I'm dying to go travelling from these three?

I must really do some uni work now as I've not done a thing all week, will show you how I get on with the typography brief as and when I finish it...

New ceramic work

I've been busying in the pottery lately, and this is what I've come up with. 

They consist of a rolled out piece of clay which is then cut and left until "leather hard". I then set to work with a sharp knife and clay needle to engrave into the surface of the tile to make little reservoirs for the glass to sit. The tiles are bisque fired and then the glass is put in and they get a glaze firing so the bits of glass melt into a lovely gloop. They're now ready to hang on the wall with one small nail. 

I shall be listing the "Home Sweet Home" one in my shop this week, but the rest I'm reluctant to sell as they're my first go. I'll be whipping up some more soon though! There's already one in progress that features fir trees and a small owl. Twit twoo!

The big "O"

Yep, Organic. 

I know what you were thinking though, and might I say this is a family show!

Ahem. Yes. So I'm working on the word "organic" for this typography project and was thinking of using this wood block in some way. I've done prints in yellow like the suns in my book to put in the etsy shop. The design measures 8" across so would be a lovely ball of sunny yellow loveliness to frame and adorn your wall. The yellow ink was still wet this morning though, so prints might be a few days still... What do you think? Reckon I'd sell a couple?

In the meantime, Belinda over at gretchenmist has tagged me in the 5 addictions game. So here goes:

1. Tea. Up to 7 cups a day with a little milk and no sugar please :)

2. Making things. I'm doing something creative every day and that's the best part of being back in education after working for a few years. You appreciate the time you have and don't always come home feeling too tired to lift a pen or set the sewing machine up. It's truly a luxury.

3. I almost daren't confess to the blogging community that I smoke, for some reason I feel like I might get a cyber slap on the wrist! But hey I'm and adult and I'm putting it out there. And it's not as if I'm not a 40-a-day gal by any means...  if it helps I'm more early SATC Carrie than Dot Cotton. Okay?

4. Eating! Well more specifically, cooking and eating. Whenever I'm feeling happy, sad, mad, bad, glad, tired, grumpy whatever - some sort of cooking cheers me up. Which is rather handy for the boyfriend who is one of those annoying skinny people who eats LOADS.

5. Hoarding. Unfortunately it's a family trait. I not only hoard the leftover bits of stuff that knock around my house because one day I'll make them into something really cool, but I also actively collect pottery from charity shops, car boot sales and occasionally ebay.

 

So there you have it, I hope you feel like you know me a bit better! I'm tagging 5 others to find out their addictions: Lucie, Francesca, Joanna, Jodie and Louise

Something beginning with "Me"

Our current brief at uni is typography-based and we have to experiment with letterforms and ways of making them convey the word they spell out. One of my words is mesmerising (I think. I may still change my mind...) and I got looking at Ishihara tests. They are for testing colour blindness but are amazingly beautiful in themselves I think. So I thought I'd spell out the word in one set of coloured dots and surround it with an opposing colour scheme like in the tests. Do you think this conveys the word though? My other main idea was to make the letters out of card so they're 3D, then photograph them from two slightly different angles and make them into an anaglyph to be viewed through red and blue specs. Whaddya think? I had already looked at Bridget Riley but sort of wanted to steer clear of spirals and swirls...

In other news, I've been featured on two gorgeous blogs in the last couple of days, firstly on Jess Gonacha's Treasuring blog and then on the beautiful Art and Light blog by Teresa Roche. Thanks so much for the kind words you two! It was very exciting to wake up to this morning!

Kettles Yard

There's a lovely exhibition up at Kettles Yard until March 15th called The Roundhouse of International Spirits. It features work by Ben Nicholson, Hans Arp, Julius Bissier amongst others who were all living and working in Switzerland during the 1960s. This image is by Ben Nicholson and is really inspirational when I think about the technique called scraffito that you use in pottery to scratch through a layer of slip to the underlying clay. I feel experiments coming on. Also, I've just applied to be a volunteer so I can help out at Kettles Yard, exciting!

Happy weekend

Just a quick post to say I hope you're all doing something nice in the sunshine! Things just look so beautiful when it starts getting sunny again, I forget how important daylight is sometimes, to my work and to my general mood. Also, I've been really enjoying Heather Smith Jones and Alicia Alferman's Noticing Project lately so did a pair of my own. I love pink and orange together.

Hello Sunshine!

Today the sun came out! It was glorious here in Cambridge and so I whipped out my new pack of sun-print paper to have a play with. It's great stuff, you expose it like a photogram for a couple of minutes and then develop the paper in tap water for a minute and let it dry. Easy peasy. And although some have been more successful than others, the blue is just so yummy I almost don't care if things are out of focus. Wouldn't that last one make the best river in a paper collage? Hmm.....

The olden days

I was just rooting around in one of many boxes of stuff in my room, looking for old postcards, and found some old work. These were from a couple of roughly constructed scrapbooks that I made (5 whole years ago!) when I was on my Foundation year. That time was pretty exciting for me creatively speaking. I had set up a darkroom at home and had just got into finding old books in charity shops. I was making little flickbooks with graph paper and moving dots too. My tastes in stuff haven't changed all that much since then I don't think which is interesting but it's nice to see where certain ideas started that I feel I've picked up again since I've been doing my degree. I guess the gap in my education hasn't made all that much of a difference.

What a crock

Without being too melodramatic, this week has been the worst ever.

Well for me anyway. We have this project where we're to draw strangers, or half-strangers and develop their characters through drawing them in different contexts, like them at home (or how we might imagine their home to be). It's soooo hard I'm really tearing my hair out with it. I've made my life difficult by choosing a guy with facial hair and glasses, neither of which it turns out I can draw any better than a child could! So I'm pretty stuffed. 

If anybody fancies doing it for me and me taking all the credit in class on Tuesday please step forward... otherwise have a good weekend :)

Piet Grobler

The South African illustrator gave a talk about his work at uni a couple of days ago and I've just been looking at his work online. During the talk he showed us a video I think he said his brother helped him make of his book Het vogeltjies ABC  (Little bird's ABC) and it was so funny and charming! Piet uses inks and watercolours to get a beautiful lightness in his work, just perfect for the children's books he makes. Here is a tiny snippet for you to enjoy, there seemed to be a bit of theme of farting, pooping and burping birds, so it wasn't too cutesy!

Freaky Friday...or Wednesday.

Ta-da! This is the finished poster for my freakshow project at uni. It's A1 in size and the various components had to be printed separately (which involved coating and exposing the screen twice as it wasn't big enough to squeeze everything onto). I was initially a little furious about this, as it's just so much more work but it meant that I wasn't having to squeegee into any pokey corners of the screen, or be limited by not having enough room for the "puddle" where the ink sits two or three inches from the design. 

Using one of those gun-style jetwashers to clean the emulsion off the screen was a bit scary as it feels so powerful it could quite easily rip the mesh off the frame, but luckily all went to plan. I'm quite chuffed as I think I could happily do screen printing unaided now, so perhaps you shall see some in my etsy shop soon...

Weighing on my mind

Happy belated Valentines Day everyone! I thought this rather gorgeous set of vintage scales (found at a car boot sale recently) was the exact red that I would try and use for a set of cards if I'd got round to making any. The photo will have to suffice I'm afraid.

On a slightly strange note, I keep waking myself up in he middle of the night thinking about printing, or actually saying things out loud and waking the boyfriend up! It's quite mad, the night before last I sat bolt upright and (hands turned skywards) said "What do I have to do?". I can only ever vaguely remember what I was dreaming about by the following morning when this sort of thing happens but this time I knew it was about the technicalities of screen printing. Seriously, I'm obsessed. I think the sooner this circus poster project is over the better, it's starting to affect my health...

Makey makey

I am officially knackered. I've spent 5 solid hours screen printing today!

I'm making this circus/freakshow poster and its A1, believe me, not an easy size to handle, and consists of 4 colours, one of which is now printed. I simply do not know where the time to do the other three will come from from before 10am Tuesday...we shall see.

Anyway, how yummy are the inks and medium that you have to mix up to print with? 

Answer, very.

My Old China

This was the finished set of book pages for my cockney rhyming slang project about the expression "My old china plate" meaning of course "Mate". I really enjoyed the limited palette of the 50's feel I was going for, and looking into geometric designs and how european travel was becoming fashionable especially in the deigns by Hugh Casson for Midwinter. Yes, the pottery geek within well and truly took over, which was great! Designing it to look like a crockery catalogue for a department store had its own charm too, I even made a hardback version and stuck red tape on it saying "STORE COPY - DO NOT REMOVE", which made me giggle.

Apologies to Francesca for totally accidentally ripping off her bowls print on the front cover of the book. By the time I realised why it seemed so comfortable and familiar-looking it was too late to change. I hope she's flattered...I think it looks great!

Last week

I spent a lot of time cutting letters out with a scalpel to make this A1 original for me to screenprint this week. We'd been given a brief to come up with a sideshow attraction and devise an eye-catching poster to publicise it. I went for the typography-based option (although there will be two six-fingered hands at the top of the poster and twelve yo-yos at the bottom) and really enjoyed all the fiddly cutting out. I'll print it in colour and show you how it works out...

Kind words

Nina van de Goor over at ninainvorm makes the most beautiful ceramics, decorated with her own ceramic transfers, and yesterday she was kind enough to mention my work on her blog. She's got a really great eye for colour and design and her etsy shop is definitely worth a look. Thanks Nina!

Ice Ice Baby

I wonder how many people have blogged today with that title?

Anyway, one word.... SNOW DAY!!! 

Ok, that was two but you catch my drift (Hehe drift, geddit? Snow drift?) Uni was shut this afternoon is what I'm trying to say.

I'm now on a bit of a high as I like snow and my workroom and bedroom have the best big velux windows looking out onto neighbours gardens and rooftops, which are covered in snow. It only occurred to me that I never really noticed the shapes of roofs but when they're covered in the cold stuff they become really really exciting. 

I like seeing which houses have good or bad insulation and where heat escapes from the house and melts some areas quicker than others. Also I guess they are always the last places to have snow as nobody tramples across them. It's nice to have time to ponder these things instead of sitting in seminars! Ah well, I'll be back to it tomorrow...

Vintage treasure and stuff

I've just finished my first week back at uni and am knackered! 

We've got a brief to be drawing people that we don't know, so I've been to the hairdresser, the local library, bus station and greasy spoon to try and catch interesting types. The results are ranging from bad to awful so far... fingers crossed I'll improve!

We're also now doing a Photoshop module which seems quite fun, again we have to do character studies of strangers which we can then digitally manipulate so I anticipate lots of sitting in coffee shops with a sketchpad over the next month or so. I guess it could be worse!

I'm also in the process of designing a poster for a freakshow attraction for a typography project, and also need to research graphic novels for a seminar talk I have to give in 7 weeks! Erk. Anyway all's well and good, and I'm still loving the course :)

Hope you have a lovely relaxing weekend. 

Shop Updated

After far too long I've finally added some things to my shop. It was looking a little sparse...

So, new on the list are some mini collages and a couple of pencil cases which have been SO fun to make! I went with the whole "back to school" theme as I am finally back to uni next Monday! Overall I'm pretty pleased with the last two days' work, fingers crossed for some nice sales now!

Tomorrow I've got to pop into uni and collect my grade for the printing module we did before Christmas - which in my case was the lino printing I did, and bound into a book. Fingers crossed for that too! Eee! It's been years since anything I did got marked, it's quite a weird feeling!

Fore!

Ok, well I know people don't traditionally yell "Fore" when playing squash, but maybe they should. These guys look like they take themselves pretty seriously which is why I've surrounded them with pretty colours. Y'know, to make them chill a bit. 

It occurred to me, don't sports make us do the oddest things? After finding the book these chaps are from entitled "Squash Rackets (Completely Revised)" and wading through the tactical diagrams and shot angles I realised that maybe it's the fact that I do little to no exercise which makes this all seem so alien! Maybe there's a New Years resolution to be found amongst all this. 
Me...and sports. 
Hmm.

Goodness me.

I'm going mad. Mad with rage. I've spent the whole of this week waiting for a replacement window for my broken-into car to arrive from a breakers yard and yesterday found out that the courier (Citylink, yes I'm naming and shaming) have lost it. It's just vanished between them collecting it and it getting to their depot. Just marvellous isn't it? All the while my car is sat out on the street with a poorly constructed perpex bodge-job to keep the snow out. If someone nicks my car the insurance won't cover it as it's not secure. The breakers yard won't send me a replacement or refund my money. Seriously, is it so hard for people just to do their freakin' jobs properly????? Grrr.

OK, rant over.

More

Couldn't help put these up too, I think they're amazing!

Mucking about

This week is turning out to be quite fun. It started badly with my car being broken into at the weekend but now that's on its way to being sorted out (expensively I might add) I can concentrate on experimenting with new ideas and materials. 

Blotting paper is currently on my list on best things ever! How fun are these chromatography tests? You draw a half-inch circle of colour in felt tip onto a circle of blotting paper, cut a little 'leg' that will drop down and act like a straw in the water that you've got the circle resting over - I used a wine glass - and about 2 hours later you have a big circle with the different 'ingredients' of the ink split up. I've got a black dot on the go at the moment and its producing a bright cerise pink, very strange!

Other proper work is going OK but I keep getting distracted by these things! Must knuckle down today... 

Old china

All this sitting about being on holiday is getting me a little bored so I'm going to get my teeth into my "homework" this coming week. We're continuing the Cockney Rhyming theme but I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent which will allow me to draw pottery (I know, any excuse..). 

You see the genius lies in the expression "Me old china" meaning of course "My old china plate" = "Mate". So today we went to Emmaus, which I love, and I took lots of pictures of pottery to work from and give me ideas for china patterns. I will post how I get on with this, my plan is to make screen-prints and maybe emboss bits of them to add texture but we shall see...In the meantime I've just rediscovered watercolour and am LOVING using it! Oh yeah and I've been drawing old men in pubs too... it's been an interesting week.

By the sea

Happy New Year!

We spent a magical afternoon on the beach today at a really weird place on the Suffolk coast. There's lots of coastal erosion happening there so you get oak trees suddenly finding themselves right on the sea front, roots exposed. It reminded me of the opening to Polanski's Macbeth with the witches on the heath, it was misty and cold today so lighting a small fire was exactly what the doctor ordered. And we had marshmallows! What a lovely start to the year. Hope you had fun welcoming in 2009!