here's my second decent attempt at joomchi - these candleholders are made of korean hanji (mulberry paper) rather than rice paper. you can see the difference in their hues - one is made with three layers of red paper, the other, with two layers of red with a sheet of black between them. while they were still wet, i fluffed and tweaked the folds, and they dried just the way i wanted them.
valentine's day at home is the best.
i currently have the honor of preparing for an interview with jiyoung chung, a practitioner of the ancient korean art of joomchi. there is not a lot of information about joomchi on the web, but i wouldn't be surprised if it grows in its appeal: it is, more or less, felted paper, which in its end product lasts much longer than regular paper (hundreds of years longer) and over time acquires a more lovely finish the more it is handled and worn (hence its early use in making money purses.) i am always interested in textiles that get better with age. and, after receiving some preliminary information from jiyoung chung about how joomchi is created, you can see what i did: i sat down and made it.
the other nice thing about joomchi is that it takes a molded shape very well. this, of course, is pretty primitive, but it was dry by morning and i put an LED tap-light inside of it to make a luminaria. frankly, i love it!
i'll not go into the details or the how-to here: you'll just have to buy the spring issue of korean quarterly. but if i make anymore joomchi i'll be sure to share it here.
my ex-husband bought me a lokta papermaking kit for christmas. lokta comes from a renewable plant source and makes a very pretty, very strong paper. the lokta pulp can be purchased in compressed blocks which are then soaked in water, and give off a sweet, spicy smell. you can mix small additives into the pulp, or just press in larger enhancements once the paper is drying in its tray.
my first piece of handmade paper contains: a praying mantis molt, some leaves from the bonsai maple plant that i gave tim for christmas, a dried chinese lantern bud... and dirt. you can see the artistic smattering of dirt in the upper portion of the paper, and it was not me who added it - but the squirrels in our backyard who tried to make off with the whole paper tray, then abandoned it when they couldn't climb our wall and carry it simultaneously.
i enjoyed this and have plans to make more, and to involve yarn and knitting in some future projects.
what i don't know could fill a book.
i needed to break a twenty to get on the bus today, and went into the vietnamese shopping mall on the corner to do it. i'm never sure what's going on in the little "gift shop" there, but i never feel very welcome. there are things in there i've been wanting to photograph for this blog; namely, some large, ornate paper dollhouses. but i'm afraid. the vietnamese shopkeepers don't seem happy to see me in the first place, so i doubt they're gonna like me with a camera.
today i bought these two lumpy packets marked "joss paper". i figured that what was on the outside was what was on the inside, too, just folded up. i picked a red one and a green one, thinking, well, here's some xmas wrapping paper - it's completely bizarre and out of this world, it's got nokia phones and ugly cars and houses on it, as well as dragons. also, each packet had a little foil wristwatch attached to it, but i didn't wonder why; why bother to wonder?
when i got home and inspected the packages, i noted that i had paid $1.25 for one of them but only .99 for the other. i wasn't sure why - until i "unfolded" them.
what i had been drawn to was not a folded sheet of paper, but an envelope - containing (in the more expensive of the two) a paper set of clothes, shoes and a hat. the cheaper packet had all these items but no hat. i said to ben, "are we supposed to burn someone in effigy?" and
ben
replied, "i'd be surprised if they made a kit for doing that."
we were flummoxed. but really, i was closer than i thought: i've been seeing the words "joss paper" all my life and never bothered to ask what it might be, or be for. i looked up "joss paper" on wikipedia and, well, now it all makes perfect sense - in fact, i saw the hell bank notes when i was there today, too. i saw a lot of packets of paper "toys" that all looked vaguely, well, aspirational - credit cards, jewelry - but all made of paper. are the "dollhouses" for burning, too?
i need to look more into all of this. the guys at the pho place are friendly - almost to a fault, as whenever i go there to work through lunch at least three waiters need to come over to ask me both what i'm reading and what i'm writing - but i'm not sure that anybody there can explain to me in english what all this is about. i'm not even sure what my questions are, which puts me at my usual disadvantage.
i'm still using the envelopes for holiday gift wrap. can i make some joss paper items for a dog who's dead? like, joss paper biscuits or squeak toys?
but does that mean, necessarily, that i should put this very kind review of philly fiction - which singles out my contribution to the book in very complimentary fashion - on the walls of the powder room of literary rejection?
i'm afraid not. i'm more of a purist than that. but it did earn me breakfast at the oregon diner, and also, in tribute,
ben
asked me what i would like to do today, and i said all i wanted was for him to not take too long when we were in lowe's. done and done!
i've been making my dad mix cd's since back when they were actually cassettes. which are still in his glove compartment. (new car though.) but i haven't made a mix for anybody since... wow, since the one i mailed to
ben
in france when he turned 25!
some people think it's posh to have a room with a skylight. not me. they get all clogged with dead bugs and frankly can be rather ghetto. our skylight gets dirty, and in the summer, it makes the den very uncomfortable to be in during the afternoon, even with the UV blocker on it. i have never been a fan of bright light - even since i was little, i liked cool, dark rooms.
at some point in recent weeks (around the time the temperature in philadelphia went from a steady sixty-five to a steady ninety-five over the course of a day) ben asked me what we might do that would maybe make summer a little less... punishing. for me. (and thereby him.) i said, something about that skylight HAS to change. afternoons are my ebb; i don't write then or even function very well with cutlery. if i had my way, i'd sleep between noon and seven pm every day - they are utterly pointless hours. night, and morning, is what i like. but since i HAVE to be awake, afternoons are a very good time for me to knit, with a movie on the television. everybody knows how uncozy it is to watch television in a bright room -- it's ridiculous!
we decided to make a paper pojagi-style cover for the skylight.
when we set out, i warned ben that i would be making some unquestionable aesthetic decisions as we went along. he assured me that he was there to climb the ladder and cut paper, nothing else. but halfway through the project, i left him to his own devices. he was obviously enjoying piecing the thing together.
this photo does not let you see, in the areas where the most light is coming through, that there are muliple pieces of "seamed" organdie there - blue and green, like the rest. they are actually my favorite part of the piece and i will have to try to get a photo at another time of day.
it's definitely going to help me through those few hours of every midday where i'm just a zombie. i will be much happier to recharge my battery for dinner-preparation and an evening stretch of printing or errands, if i am comfortable in the den. we figured out how to make that happen, and it took just under two years!
if you are interested in pojagi, i have recently been working on an interview/feature piece with chunghie lee. i first posted about chunghie's work last august, and recently read the interview with her in selvedge, and decided to write about her for korean quarterly. i spent about a half an hour on the phone with chunghie a few weeks ago, have been exchanging e-mails, and this feature should appear in KQ's autumn issue. (if you wish perhaps to subscribe, you can still catch the summer ish, at press now, for which i have contributed book and film reviews, a feature on how to make a cake that looks like a bowl of dolsot bibimbap (this is a writing-photographic-handmodel collaboration with pals kathy and louis), and an interview feature on korean-american punk rock photographer jim jocoy.) check it out! check it all out.
every year i get very involved in my valentine making -- i always have (as an adult anyway.) there are years where all friends and family get valentines, but this year isn't one of them, since these pojagi-style valentines took a lot more time than any i'd ever made previously. the one on the left is for ben, and the one on the right is my dad's. i based the dimensions around a package of blank cards i have here for use with the press, so these cards fit perfectly into the plain envelopes.
there is a specific kind of pojagi that is made of paper, in fact, oiled paper, but i am sure these papers are nothing like what is used traditionally. some pojagi were made entirely of oiled paper, but others were cloth on one side and paper on the other side.
since i had other february birthdays than just my own to commemorate, and had so much valentine-making paper left over, these gifts also got rather pojagi-inspired packagings.
this year as we often do we are avoiding the restaurant cattle call for valentine's day; we are staying home for a meal of homemade gravlax, pot roast, oven fries, a salad, and creme brulée; and a stack of MST3K episodes on bootleg DVD. sounds like glamour and romance to us.
ben
and i are two peas in a pod; we have been from the day we met.
i have been meaning to get photos of this for a few weeks now but it's a hard little room to get photos of. guess what The Most Wonderful Guy In The World did? remember the huge job he had ahead of him in attempting to save our little monument to the proving grounds?
it's a lovely rosy color now, on the walls, with a dark wainscoting (almost black, but with a little green in it.)
ben
also retiled the floor -- lovely, old-fashioned, looks like the tile floor in some old restaurant ladies' room, doesn't it? -- and put in a tin ceiling and new fixtures (although we still haven't found sconces we love yet.) we hung a lovely portrait of a young truman capote on the wall -- and we reinstalled the rejection slips. and i'm anxiously awaiting some new ones! i LOVE this room.
outside of this room, a large heavy-duty AC unit has been recently removed from the wall (we just had ductless AC installed throughout the house.) where the unit used to be is now rather a hole. to fill it, or to make it a window -- that is the question. now that the powder room of literary rejection is a fantasy fulfilled, i do have one other bathroom related fantasy to chase down: i've always wanted to hang a neon "kosher wines" sign over a bathroom.
we often have stacks of extra knitting tarot cards -- cards that might have been too inky or too light in places -- lying around.
ben
learned to make an accordion-fold book insert in a book about japanese bookbinding, and, using two KT cards as front and back "covers", we made some little ledgers.
this one features the moon, who, in the KT, is looking at a mysterious pair of socks. so that the socks i make are not too mysterious, i am using this little book to write down the measurements of people for whom i might knit socks. i can keep all the measurements on hand, as well as preferences for cotton versus wool, how tight a fit is preferred, how tall a sock, stripes or not, stuff like that. this way, i have all the info -- and nobody is clued into getting a pair of socks as a gift by me asking them their measurements and preferences!
everyone's prayers have been answered! my failures will continue to dog me for all the years of my life! while i am peeing!
ben managed to save each and every one of them through careful surgery. he is amazing!
i didn't know he was going to be undertaking such a project yesterday. in fact, i was just sitting here writing, and he breezed by me with a buck knife, saying "i want to see what's under the drywall in the ceiling in there. do you mind if i make a little hole?"
"i think," he then said, looking delighted, "that i am now officially a marauder." okay, ben, you're a marauder. a cuddly, sweet little jewish marauder.
so now, it's underway -- the powder room of literary rejection is going to be repainted, get a new ceiling, a new tile floor, and some new towel racks and TP holder. possibly new light fixtures, definitely new medicine cabinet. how fast this will all go, i don't know, but i better start submitting short stories to periodicals that do not accept electronic submissions. (but we're still going to paint. i think we are going with pink and black. and maybe i can do something exciting as a shade or curtain for that little window.)
we were at a picnic today for the 21st century korea-america-china alliance, and although this event for korean paper dresses happened a few days ago, there was a fashion show at the picnic today, too. not that we saw the paper dresses in person; the fashion show was scheduled for the very end of the day, on the stage where seating was something like thirty degrees hotter than it was under the pavillion, where all the lovely korean food was.
how the dresses did not go up in flames upon contact with air, or why they didn't look like sopping paper towels, is anyone's guess.
it's safe to suggest that a little something was lost in translation here, but people who make paper dresses, regardless of their first language, are still going to be better at explaining why they make them than i am going to be.
i've never worn a paper dress but have often thought about one. actually, you know that stuff you see in big rolls out in the trash sometimes -- it's like, sheets of foam made up of other various multicolored little bits of foam? i actually always fantasized about having a dress made out of that stuff. (when i say "always", i do mean that i thought i might make this dress for my senior prom, which, surprisingly, i did not choose to attend.)
this collage was used multiple times in the two brochures i have. why do you suppose marlon brando rates so many uses in it? count the brandos.
here are some of the dresses themselves.
i had meant to blog about this months ago -- it's just as well i didn't, since the status of the project seems to be in flux.
i had decided, when we bought the house, that i would paper the downstairs powder room with short story rejection slips.
ben, who almost never says no to anything (because he is the SINGLE most subversive person i have ever met in my LIFE), thought it was a great idea. we weren't even moved in yet, and i went at the room with the mod podge, a brush, and a few saved rejections that i particularly liked.
i had decided to use only my "best" rejections -- the very personal rejections, both positive and negative. i had saved only a few, though, all with handwriting on them. some were from magazines i never published in, some i eventually did (or had beforehand).
and, rather slapdash, and with the unbridled excitement of being a homeowner -- and thereby being able to glue any shit i wanted to glue, right to the walls, i went at it.
a few things slowed the project down. first of all -- i just don't submit the way i used to. i used to submit PILES, shooting blind, like my life depended on it. there was a time i must have been getting ten manuscripts a week rejected -- and a nice, wall-covering slip inside with each of them, maybe even handwritten. but i didn't save very many when that was happening.
i submit a lot less now -- and, frankly, have a higher rate of acceptance when i do submit -- and, and a lot of this now happens electronically, and is only going to continue in that direction. there just aren't as many rejection slips on the planet as there once were, thanks to the internet.
the whole joke behind wallpapering a bathroom with my rejection slips was supposed to be that it was easy. but i don't have any to add to what i started.
an additional problem has arisen. while most of our house was deemed "a fortress" by our home inspectors at time of purchase, the first floor powder room never was. it was an add-on, built by the previous owners, and, as we soon found, it leaked.
we have plans to redo the powder room, now that the roof has recently been replaced. and i do not think my plans include these rejection slips anymore.
i hear my dad screaming. i see him holding his big round charlie brown-head in his hands. no! no throwing away documents! my dad also plays "show and tell" at his house by pulling random envelopes out of random boxes and coming out with things like my grandmother's report card from when she was six years old. dad, that is why we have your house. i am not sure these can be saved.
we're gonna give it a try, with an x-acto, when we take off the wallpaper. i was too charmed by the idea of slapping stuff over the wallpaper when we moved in, to realize it might not be the prudent way to go. i can live with the loss. honestly.
i wonder, if the rejections had continued to spread across the walls -- let's just say there was a paper one for every story i submit to a magazine or journal, from now until doomsday -- how many different magazines and journals would be represented? how many repeats of the same magazines and journals? why do writers of short stories send to the journals they send to? why do they send repeatedly to certain ones? why are they always willing to try out new ones, often sight unseen?
i have wondered this both as a writer and as an editor. here is my answer: because writers are looking for a love match. it's more than just the contributors' copies, the "credit", or anything that tangible. i have come to believe that writers are always hungry for new places to submit because writers want to connect with editors who will make their stories better. an editor who makes your story better is one who understands your story; an editor who understands your story is halfway to being, even if only for a limited engagement, an intimate. i think that is the dream-connection that writers submitting in the periodical market are often trying to make, whether they realize it consciously or not. it's not the acceptance of the story. it's the editing of the story. it's not the person who buys it and reads it who we wish was the target of cupid's arrows -- but the editors.
i have had my stories edited by people whose legs i wanted to cling to for the next six months. i've also had them edited by people who i knew were just sitting around thinking, "well, my job is to change something about this, so let's change it." that's painful. that's what makes me never want to submit to a particular magazine or journal again -- an editing experience where there is no connection. writers want a love connection.
isn't it appropriate then that a bathroom should be papered in literary rejections, just like the stalls in the bathroom at a club or bar are marked up with phone numbers and documentation of couplings -- more failed than not?
i like the short story market because i like lingering in the proving grounds. that sort of makes me a barfly slut, if you want to follow my analogy all the way through.
paper: a textile.
for father's day, i assembed -- with ben's help -- a photo album. it's based on schematics from a book about japanese bookbinding i got for christmas.
i covered bookboard with japanese mulberry paper for the back cover, and with my first blackwork sampler on the front. i glued and cut, and ben folded, accordion-style pages out of heavy cotton paper. i included a few photos and a package of photo corners -- very modern -- they just come off on a strip and you can peel them one at a time.
it was hard to get a great photo so i went with the moody one. the shiny thing beneath the book is a bubble-wrap envelope that i put the little book in -- which smells like frozen shower gels from LUSH, since that what was in it up until i pulled it out of the freezer. (the freezer is now a new place i can look for recyclable gift wrapping. please pretend to be surprised and charmed when all your xmas presents from me are arranged under the tree, wrapped in a "frozen vegetables from trader joe's" theme.)
in sims news...
after an extended "illness", queen jane seymour went down for good.
i tried to make her get "sick". everybody else's sims do it. i sent her out in the yard. i underfed her. i worked her hard. not a sniffle. i wanted to be historically accurate -- even if in a very general way. but alas, it wasn't taking, and edward was just growing and growing, and i had to get rid of jane, so she developed an unusual "malady" that makes one want to swim in a pool that has no ladder for getting out of it.
also, somewhere along the way, james V died. a little later than he ought to have, considering how old mary queen of scots was at the time. and frankly, we missed it. he must have been running with scissors. he may have been particularly low on reserves since he and marie de guise had been going at each other with these evil magical aspiration vaccuums.
anne of cleves left henry at the altar; i got bored and moved everyone into much larger homes, then again into much smaller homes. i gave the pre-queens a taste for television that i now really regret giving them; and edward seems to be a rather hale and hearty little boy, already far older than he ever should have gotten before expiring. part of what is keeping me from playing now is trying to resolve within myself what appears to be the inevitability of edward not dying at all, or just being removed from the game by social workers. (anything that would normally cause a child to expire is simply intervened upon in the eleventh hour by social workers.)
sometimes, when i get to a difficult point in the game, i let
ben
take over until it is solved.
ben
is the eradicator. he makes problems go away.
it was a year ago today that the press came to our apartment. who knew at that time that a year later we would be up to our eyeballs in knitting tarot cards?
in the beloved style of the early DIY movement, the gorgeous ladies of 1223 wharton sent valentines to those they adore.
cats can't send valentines. everybody knows that.
i'd have sent knitting tarot valentines myself, old school-style, but in the grand tradition, there were none left for me. you'd think that there'd be power in owning the means of production, wouldn't you. like, i could just go make some more. it doesn't seem to work like that though.
a little more on valentine's day, vaguely crochet- and spinning- related. for valentine's day this year, among other things, i got ben a dvd of the colorized carnival of souls, with audio commentary track by mike nelson. SIGNED by the man himself. i mean, talk about cool. i could do without the colorization, but we do love mike.
we did love mike. a little idol-toppling has occurred for me surrounding this whole adventure. i found the carnival of souls deal through mike's website, which also features some of his "random" writing. (those of you who know me are already cringing at the ooze of acid with which i pronounce the word so disingenuous and overused in the blog "writing" worlds, "random". well, mike didn't use it, but this is random writing if i ever saw it.)
the link may not stay active -- who knows how often mike nelson randomizes -- but if you scroll to the bottom of the current page, you'll find the "Stupid Hat Round-Up". o ho ho ho. so mike trolled the internet for pictures of hats to which he could attach his zany commentary.
he has an ana voog hat there.
big mistake, mike. once again -- for many, many years i have adored mike nelson. those straight-world good looks, the top notch MST3K writing and host presence. he had it all. but apparently i had it all, and was just applying it to my vision of mike. because what my mike nelson would have said about an ana voog hat is, "this hat is so fucking sexy i can hardly stand it."
mike didn't have the sense. i LOVE ana voog's hats. anybody worth their salt would know better.
i'm sure we'll enjoy the dvd, as we will continue to enjoy our MST3Kfests. i don't think i mentioned on this blog that, this past christmas, we had a "gift of the magi" moment surrounding MST3K. i went to one of those fan sites where they make bootleg episode tapes for you for a little money, and got ben a bunch for a gift. i was SO excited, i could not wait to give them to him (and watch them), so i suggested that we each give each other ONE gift, early, on xmas eve. so excited was i about giving ben his tapes, that i did not notice the telltale size and shape of the gift from ben that i myself was opening, which was in fact... a big stack of bootlegged MST3K episodes.
out of sixteen episodes total, we only doubled up on two.
which brings us back to valentine's day, by way of true love.
(and my sister's boyfriend got her a llama -- whose care is being paid for in megan's name for the next year at the lehigh valley zoo.)
a belated birthday gift from my ex-husband: he made a lino print of our animals, flannery (whom you know) and the cats shuler and zooey.
he gave me the lino, for use in the press, wrapped in this intaglio print (much like the holiday card he made this past christmas.)
charming!
a fabulous message from the universe, a day early for my birthday.
if i were a doll -- the kind of doll with a string that you pulled, that said a limited assortment of things -- one of the things i would be programmed to say, i think, would be "why didn't i buy that r. crumb 'heroes of the blues' trading card deck back in 1985, when it was available in every little record store i ever went into?"
because i have said that a whole lotta times in the past 20 years. in fact, i can think of two times in the past week that i've brought it up. for twenty years, twenty, i have been scouring the surface of the earth for the r. crumb 'heroes of the blues' trading card deck. i have looked on e bay. i have queried kitchen sink press and begged them to reprint it. (and they said they had no plans to.) my dad has bid online for copies. no avail. no hope.
last week, discussing the knitting tarot via e-mail, i was commenting on the deck-of-cards format in general as a "delivery system" and how it is particularly pleasing to some, and lamenting, once again, on how sorry i was that i had not purchased an r. crumb 'heroes of the blues' trading card deck when i'd had the chance. then i brought it up again over the weekend, looking at some crumb and harvey pekar stuff on my dad's coffee table.
lament lament lament.
an unexpected chain of events: last night, ben showed me a short digital movie inspired by an m.c. escher woodcut, and i fell in love with the soundtrack, which turned out to be erik satie's trois gnossiennes no. 3. i went to tower records this morning to find a satie disc featuring the six gnossiennes, which i did, and while waiting in line, turned my head to the right, towards one of those shelves with "living dead dolls" and marilyn manson action figures and candy and other stuff piled all over it.
it was just one of those things.
i bought two decks. and the satie disc. happy birthday toooo meeeeee.
over the holiday break i made bookmarks. two kinds.
these are two favorite quotes of mine, by two wonderful mavericks of the literary world: nelson algren and sinclair lewis. algren's quote on how the best books get here -- and at whose behest -- is a real shot in the arm. and i think it's nicely augmented by a can of split pea soup from canada.
i like to think that crappy writers around the world -- with three-book deals -- are sitting at their macs write now, maybe even eating canned split pea soup from canada, trying to drum up a book with which to pay the mortgage. shame on them. nelson algren knew far more than they did. i would make him an excellent split pea soup if ever i had the chance. (he's dead though.)
the sinclair lewis quote is taken from his famous "letter to the pulitzer prize committee." lewis had been awarded this prize and refused to accept it, and the reasons for that are right here in 10 pt modern italic and gold ink. augmented with vintage vines and insects recently cast by the also incredible writer/maverick/typecaster theo rehak.
by the way, after spurning the pulitzer, eight years later, lewis would, however, be the first american to win the nobel prize for literature. nelson algren, for his part, was the winner of the very first national book award, for the man with the golden arm.
two great guys, who wrote great books. i have this rather detailed fantasy of taking these bookmarks and sneaking them into really, really crappy books. like those awful marian keyes novels or whatever "professional women" are reading these days while they take the train into the city.
knitting tarot bookplates are available in sets of five on the store right now.
i have had personalized bookplates for years, usually done with artwork by friends and reproduced at stationary stores, onto commercial papers with adhesive backings. those have been nice, but using a nice archival acid-free paper and paste -- paste in handy stick form and easy to come by -- is much, much better for the life of your books than the sticky-back kind of bookplate.
to begin putting in my knitting tarot bookplates, i assembled all the things i needed -- the bookplates, a pen to sign them with, a good acid-free glue stick, and the books i wanted to accentuate.
for me, it felt most comfortable to put my signature on the plates before i affixed them to the books. i used a my favorite regular rollerball pen, and gave it a few moments to dry.
with the rampaging popularity of "scrapbooking" these days, it's easier than ever to find a nice acid-free, archival-quality fixant. of course, "book paste" applied with a brush is a quaint idea but knowing me it was bound to get lumpy. this is the brand i chose, found at an a.c. moore crafts store. i think the "stick" delivery system is best.
what is particularly nice about this one is that it applies as blue, but dries clear. you can see exactly where you've put glue already, and where you need more. this lets you get a very even, thin-as-possible coat.
place your bookplate onto the page, and then RESIST the temptation to rub, smoosh, et cetera. simply close your book and walk away. in every instance, mine dried completely flat, without a trace of glue, without a single smear of ink. and they were attached solidly as well. hands-off is the key.
just knowing they are there makes my books feel more special to me! i have, in the past, also particularly enjoyed giving away a book that has previously been mine, because my bookplate was inside for someone else to remember me by. by the same token, when i buy old books, i get very excited to find someone else's bookplate!
i have a scrapbook in which i keep all the handmade, and other favorite, christmas cards i receive each year.
this is an intaglio print made by my ex-husband tim. he's always been good with this kind of carving, and is also excellent at jack o'lanterns.
although not handmade, i had never seen this roy lichtenstein holiday card before. it was sent by the much-mentioned lisa (known around here as "bread lisa", as opposed to "yarn lisa" and "dog lisa").
we wish we could have sent a card to everyone, but, with letterpress, once they're gone, they're gone -- and we never seem able to make quite enough of anything.
but here is how we'll share with you all. happy holidays to everyone, from all of us!
we printed these on ludovine -- halloween/change of address flyers. because i was loathe to fold them, we mailed very few out. mostly we put them in mailboxes of our old block-mates, and handed them out to friends and office people.
there's a bit of an interesting story behind this "aubrey beardsley" image.
i found the image on a digital collection of "scary" things. the beardsley was the only one i REALLY wanted -- beardsley and letterpress were something i wanted to combine, and the digital collection was "copyright free". so i bought it, for sixty dollars or so. i still held my breath when i sent the image to the photoengravers, because i was worried they'd red-tape me over the copyright, but they didn't.
a few weeks ago, at a flea market in a nearby park, i found a nice big hardback beardsley book for five bucks, so i bought it. thumbing through it in the car, i noticed a whole section of consecutive drawings that i didn't like at all, and had never seen before. it was as though beardsley had drawn them with his left hand, or while drunk, or something -- they just didn't have the magic.
i went to the front of the book to see if there was any special chapter heading for this section. there was: it was a chapter entirely devoted to beardsley forgeries! i was rather proud that my untrained eye had in fact sniffed out (to mix sensory organ metaphors) these forgeries, and was about to express my self-pride to ben, when i flipped back to the section in question...
...and saw the image that i had just paid sixty dollars to own, and fifty dollars to have made into a letterpress engraving.
so.
it's still cool.
this was printed with the image first, then it dried, then we had to lay the words out so that they worked their way around the image itself. that was fun. as they say, a hard thing in letterpress is inking large expanses of space, and there are plenty of those here. we see why it's hard.
i hang out at
rosie's yarn cellar
and they are very receptive to ideas there. (they are also receptive to people coming in and hanging out and eating their candy when they have it.) and i asked lisa, how would it be to let handspinners sell the little bits of their wares here? i bet they would like it. and lisa also thought it would be fun. and it is she who is capable of implementing it.
i have a few small skeins of stuff i've been working on this summer, and i letterpressed the outsides of some little tags for the purpose.
on the insides of the tags, i have pasted a small inkjet-printed description of the yarn itself, and what it might be good for. i'm quite the novice, but i know that i would buy the yarn of other novices, because those are the yarns that have heart! (or often do. they have more heart than R2, i know that.)
if you are a
rosie's yarn cellar
person, and a handspinner -- whether you want to get some local handspun or put some in the store -- or both -- check it out!
poor neglected little knitting blog! i actually did more knitting this past week than i did either writing or printing. i am starting to see a pattern where one or two of these emerges in a strong lead over the remaining, as a theme for the week. it keeps the roses in your cheeks, that kind of unpredictability.
i originally didn't consider this entirely bloggable, but now i see it in action and would be sad to have ignored it. it is a little scarf that i knitted from the same sock yarn as made the straithairn socks. it isn't as "deep" as a normal babushka, and sorta stands up on my head, but it's purpose is for wearing during printing; one gets warm, and i didn't want my head covered, i just wanted all my hair -- which these days, it takes a forklift to move -- held back. one hair can mess up a letterpress job in a big way. you want to keep 'em out of the press, for sure.
we did a lot of printing yesterday. we are doing small items lately, notecards and tags and such. we just did a "big" (for us) typesetting job -- a gift for my mom -- and will be working on some other projects involving more typesetting after this week, when our new 18 point baskerville arrives. yesterday, just playing around with little cuts and compositions, we worked with black paper and silver ink -- which was mezmerizing. not much to show yet because we haven't scanned much, but a webpage devoted to the press will be up by fall. and of course, by fall, i think the knitting tarot will be possibly the only thing we are working on with relation to the press.
so you see, this "cap" is more like the type seen on waitresses in tea houses in england. it would be an act of mortification to wear it in public. but now the sight of it on my head -- like the smell of naturewash and ink -- reminds me of good stuff. mmmmm, i like good stuff.
having recently made the statement that i'll be focusing my knitting energies on larger projects, you see i have posted twice consecutively about projects that could fit in your pocket. well. but what about what you don't know? what aren't you seeing? think about it...
i don't often post links to outside sites, but for heaven's sake. there's one named albertine. (i take this as a possibility that this guy has read proust, and i am always on the lookout for that.) and they are the way i will recycle my own handknit socks when the time comes to do so.
well, there's no question about it. put electrodes on my head, check my blood chemistry. i am in love with the handpress. and it feels a lot like the people kind of in-love. i go to bed at night thinking about ludovine. i wake up in the morning thinking about ludovine. and she's actually pretty huggable.
still in the give-me-something-to-practice-on phase, i decided that knitted gifts are particularly nice to give when adorned by a hand-printed gift tag.
tamsin's baby's bear is all wrapped up and ready to go. the package is decorated with the ducky booties, and a little nametag i made on the press. the images are of a mama turkey and a baby turkey. why, you may ask. we haven't bought a whole lot of type or cuts yet, of course -- that is the answer. i didn't have too many applicable images. i like how this turned out.
tamsin, these days, can be mistaken for a therapy ball with legs and long curly red hair. her shower is friday -- i am excited.
a card featuring this image -- and a little swatch -- goes along with lisa's socks. lisa just e-mailed me that she was eating mashed sweet potatoes with espresso and rum in them. maybe the next pair of socks i make her will commemorate that.
the printing press is here!!
i will continue to post some printing exploits in the "paper" category of this weblog, but i'm sure the press will be getting its own page soon. right now, here is a somewhat more comprehensive account of our first printing experience, on the "album" page.
oh, the issues. i had intended, first and foremost, to make gyotaku -- japanese fish prints. i did this a long time ago, and had a lot more success with it then. don't know where i went wrong this time -- wrong paper, wrong ink, wrong fish -- but it was just icky and strange. none of the prints really took, there was a problem with bleeding gills, and i ended up laying waste to numerous postcards, envelopes, and tiny little plain-white jigsaw puzzle-cards. phooey.
trying to stay away from EITHER a) hearts or b) red and pink, and having exhausted my fish and mercilessly screwed with their reincarnation process, i ended up doing a traditional hearty-thing in browns and greens and silver ink. for the record, those little jigsaw puzzles -- good in theory, hard to use. two out of four went into the trash, and not just because of the fish. i think, unless you really know what you're doing and can anticipate the problems, they are a little unpredictable.
i have always liked this holiday, whether single or coupled. i wish more people made valentines. i wish grown-ups gave them out at work, just like we did when we were kids. all homemade. i would save them all.
i came away from this holiday season embarassingly well-appointed for knitting. i have a new set of denise interchangeable needles. (i hear they get mixed reviews, but i am THRILLED with mine -- it's like having lego and knitting needles all at the same time, and i find them sturdy and smooth and light.) i also have a brand new ott-lite, which is not only good for both knitting and letterpress work, but for plants!
speaking of things that combine knitting and letterpress -- not to mention my beloved 19th century -- you are seeing here pictures of a beautiful, small-print run, letterpress "receipt" book of dye recipes from a shaker community.
ben
and i are now into futsy little things like bindings and whatnot, but i won't bore you with that. this book is lovely and historical, and filled with good dye recipes -- and samples of wools dyed with those actual recipes!
it's a beautiful little keepsake, and makes my fingers itch not only to dye yarn, but to set type. (with any luck, the printing press we have named "ludovine" will be here by my birthday in early february! we received a call from utah recently. she is receiving finishing, loving touches there.)
ben's an awful good gift-giver, don't you think?
today
ben
and i celebrated our second anniversary. i made him a memento from our first indigo dyeing session. i had given away a lot of the yarn we dyed that day, but had made swatches of each type.
the little handmade book, on beautiful paper and fastened entirely with brads, no glue, and with a gold-marbeled cover, was given to me in a swap. i traded the woman who made it a big stack of chinese fortune-telling fish for three of these little books.
we in fact did a little more indigo dyeing this weekend. one of our plants was stolen a few weeks ago, giving us 25% less to work with, but i am satisfied with the knowledge that the person who stole it probably thought it was a basil plant. how i would have loved to have been there when the spaghetti sauce was being brought to the table. we still have plenty, and are getting more accustomed to the process and the smell.
ben is fond enough of my little handmade presents (i am lucky in this) that he says he will be devoting a space on the bookshelf to them. i would give him the world.
i went ever so SLIGHTLY outside the lines for valentine's day, from my "only knit for us and the house" rule of 2003. if that's wrong, i don't wanna be right. i knitted a little swatch valentine for both
ben
and my dad. and had, for that matter, started one for tim, but didn't like how it was coming along, and decided to make a speshuler valentine instead using kikkoman. (my favorite thing about this picture is the little ink stamp of the name LEVIN that is on our kitchen table.)
i seem to remember tim doing the bulk of the work with these strings of tapdancing guys. we made them to celebrate the year 2000, and got the fancy papers from kate's papierie in soho. i put this strand up for new year's this year; it's not been taken down yet, and i'm not sure it will be.