The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow!

I think I mentioned recently that my long hiatus was due to a bunch of stuff. First, late fall and winter are terrible times to do anthotypes or lumen prints and I haven't been working on much illustration lately. I've got some ideas there, mostly inspired by some great bands, but currently still straightening those ideas out in my brain. I hope to be deep into an illustration project sometime in the next month, though.

Anyway. I also had my largest set of students this spring semester, so I was adjusting to that. But now it's summer and while I've got some camps and workshops to keep me teaching, I have a lot more free time (and light!) to experiment with. So, I figure I'll bring y'all (no one reads this blog, I'm talking to myself) up to date on what I've been working on.

Stumps!: Over the winter, my Dad had to get rid of a tree in his front yard and after cutting it down, discovered it was a cedar tree. In case you don't know, cedar trees have a rusty red, almost purple, heartwood and pale, tan sapwood. He saved the resulting logs for me and I turned a couple slices into some nifty coasters. It only recently occurred to me that I could coat the untreated slices of cedar with anthotype dye and use them to expose on! So, right now I have some blackberry covered cedar sitting in my workshop, drying. It's supposed to rain all weekend, but I should have some results from those wood prints in a couple days. At least, I'm hoping for days, but realistically it might take two or more weeks since the wood just loves to suck up the dye and hold onto it. We'll see what happens!

Paper!: I tried making my own! It's messy and annoying, but the project was successful. I used shredded documents and some dryer lint to mix up my slurry, screened it with an old picture frame and dried it in the microwave because I have no patience. The resulting paper is blue, because I wear a lot of jeans. Next time I'll skip the lint and just add in some wool that I have laying around. I'm not the biggest fan of the blueness of the paper (which is weird, I love blue things), but the texture is great! See? Isn't it great? I think it's great. Normally I deckle the edges of the paper I use for 'finished' anthotypes (as opposed to dye-tests), but since I made this paper myself, the deckle is just a product of the imperfect production process. I like that a lot. The other nice thing is that the resulting print is mine. I mixed the dye, I made the paper, I did pretty much all of it. I might be selfish, but I enjoy making things that are mine from start to finish when I can.

Wool!: As I mentioned, I have wool laying around. A few pounds of it, actually. In college I took a textiles class and loved dyeing and manipulating the chemistry involved. That knowledge and experience has been invaluable in working with anthotypes, so I started to wonder about combining them. This whole thing was inspired by my friend Deanna Januzzi, who did some great work combining textiles and alternative photography to make cyanotype pillows and furnishings. I'm taking raw wool, felting it into cloth by hand, dyeing the felt and then going to use the dyed felt to print anthotypes on. The resulting felt is way too thick for me to fit into a picture frame like I normally use for anthotype exposures. So, I've come up with this incredibly sleek and sophisticated solution: put a glass-only frame on top of everything and hold it down with spare weights.

The really nice thing about using this wool felt? Madder root dye may not work on paper very well, and it's only so-so on muslin, linen and silk... but dayum it's awesome on wool. The felt soaked the madder up like a sponge and turned a bright, bloody red. I can't wait to see the results!