Blogging for Thor: It's Hammer Time

The countdown begins! Rather arbitrarily, I do admit. My work for the Community Supported Arts grant is due on May 18th, in just 10 days. It isn't that I can't do math, by the way, I'm just not counting the last 40 minutes of today as a day. So in 10 days, I must have thirty parchment prints mounted on wood, along with twenty pieces of cyanotype jewelry.

I decided that, after talking with a lot of other artists, I was going to compromise on the issue of how to fasten down the parchment. My current plan is to do a third of the parchments with brass nails, a third with steel nails and a third with the liquid hide glue I got from Woodcraft. Liquid hide glue, by the way, stinks horribly. It does appear to be holding a stable, very strong bond, though. It was recommended by the tannery that provides my parchment. It's doing far, far better than the E6000 or the Yes! Paste, both of which gave up within days.

So where do I stand, Spiders? Today I finished mounting and putting hardware onto 17 of the 30 parchment prints. I want to give the hide glue test piece a bit more time to see if I want to reserve 10 of those as glue-only, nail-free presentations. I finished 10 mounts with steel nails and 7 with brass nails. There's 13 prints waiting under a stack of encyclopedias, all ready to go. I'll assemble the other 3 brass-nails prints tomorrow.

The jewelry is almost finished, too. I have 1 set of earrings, 7 rings, 3 metal pendants and 9 wooden pendants. The last of the metal pendants and 5 of the rings are waiting for resin, which I'll probably be pouring tonight, after I finish this blog post.

In total, I have completed 62% of the project. The rest is all very close to the finishing stage. My only remaining concern is any mistakes in assembly or finishing that crop up. Today I managed to hammer one of the steel nails down wrong, and I may have to scrap that mount. Fortunately, I have extra wood and enough time to replace the piece. Of double fortune, it wasn't one of the best prints. So, not a terrible deal. Just annoying. I might end up replacing it with an extra piece of jewelry, assuming I can find the stash of first-run wooden cyanotype pendants I made. The second run, currently strung, is not as dark blue. The third run, now bleaching, was too blue. There's an unfortunately high failure rate with the wet-printed wooden pendants and tags. I can't figure out exactly why. I'm guessing that it's to do with the "wet" part of wet-printing.

Thanks to a lovely overcast sky, I was also able to document everything that I've finished so far. My lovely Flickr gallery grows as I near project completion! Y'all should check it out, Spiders!

My last bit of work will be ordering more burlap bags, getting some better raffia stuffing (this stuff is too long and stringy!) and then finish the insert that I'll be handing out. It should be the work of a day to stuff everything once it's done.

I'm so excited, Spiders. My first grant, and I'm coming in way under budget and right on schedule! I'll be so happy to finish this project, even though it's been very fun.