Minotaur

My tired old brain needed a rest after a few marathon thesis writing sessions so I thought I'd spend the morning finishing Jack's pop-up poem. The first job was to print the backing sheet with a fairly random maze and the title:

Then I printed the other side with a closer grouping of stamps because only a small area will be visible behind the pop-ups to provide a point of contrast:



Next up the four text blocks are taped into position and the backing sheet folded:


Then the nail biting moment of fitting the parts together:

So Close!!!! I knew that darn triple staircase would trip me up (no pun intended) - there must have been the teeniest discrepancy in my measurements so the two seams are not quite flush - but never mind - everything still folds out nicely so nearly perfect will just have to do.


and here's the other side:


Now I just need to make a nice slip case for it and Bob's your Uncle! (weird expression that one) I absolutely have to resist the urge to give it to Jack before his birthday, which is still two whole weeks away. It might seem like a lot of work for a tiny 14 line poem but I reckon it was worth it.

Chicken Scratches

Graham Fletcher, 'Ultraman' drawing

If I compiled a list of the top three things I'd like to be able to do it would look like this:

1. I'd like to know how to draw
2. I'd like to be fluent in written and spoken French
3. I'd like to be able to play the guitar or the cello

When we were putting together our Pania Press book Orange Roughy earlier this year, Graham Fletcher sent me through a selection of his marvellous drawings to go in the book along with the note, "Here are some chicken scratches for you".

Well, if I had to describe Graham's drawings, I'd never refer to them as chicken scratches! I'm so envious of the way that the artists I know and admire can just squiggle away with apparent ease and produce the most astonishing things. Like this strange little chap:

Graham Fletcher, 'King of the Wood' Drawing

or this melancholy flower face:

Graham Fletcher, 'Need Fire' Drawing

Here are a couple of my favourite pages from Mark Braunias's 1994 catalogue Praha containing reproductions of the sardonic suite of drawings he produced during a trip to Prague in 1991:

And now for a trio of drawings that I'm fortunate enough to own by the uber-talented Emma Smith:

Emma Smith, Untitled 'Chicken'

I love to travel around inside Emma's drawings. Every time you look at them you see something else. A chicken head becomes a whole series of mountain ranges. Just look at all these beautiful inky marks:

And eyes within eyes - I love the way Emma draws haunted, fathomless eyes:

Emma Smith, 'Merope', (detail)

Emma Smith, 'Have I been pardoned yet?' (detail)

Luckily I manage to make a virtue out of the naive quality of my draughtsmanship in the crafting sphere but I really would give the tip of my kitten's tail (sorry Zero but you did just savagely maul my hand for no apparent reason) to know instinctively how to get depth, volume, proportion, contour, shading and perspective onto a flat white piece of paper.

Textile Printing

Three metres of gauzy sky blue linen came my way during the week courtesy of my reliable local oppie and that determined the project for my weekly craft day - my first attempt at hand-printing on fabric.

Using Lena Corwin's Printing By Hand as a guide, I laid out a simple leafy composition of textured shapes and stuck them onto a piece of thick glass (a shelf from the fridge). Using a transparent backing means that you can easily line up your repeat patterns on the fabric.

I mixed a batch of ink in battleship grey and off I went...



While the grey was drying I added some smaller berry shapes to the design and removed the first lot of stamps. Then I mixed a batch of ruby red ink and went over the fabric a second time.


And there you have it - after an hour of ironing to set the ink, a pretty summer print to be turned into a floaty linen frock on my next craft day.

Secret Projects

I decided to give sewing a rest over the weekend and concentrate on some paper projects.

About this time of year a certain sign gets posted on my office door:

This means that preparations for Jack's birthday and Christmas are underway. Jack has promised not to peek at Mosehouse Studio for the next couple of months so that I can post my secret projects exclusively for your eyes only!

Every Christmas I come up with a couple of group presents as well as some special gifts for my nearest and dearest. For my group prezzie this year I'm putting together a small handmade recipe book with a selection of my all-time favourite cakes and puddings. I love baking and often get asked for recipes but for one reason or another I never get around to writing them down. So I chose 15 of the best including blueberry buttermilk cake, apple roll, cream puffs and cinnamon teacake, typed them up in a lovely font and laid out a 24 page A5 booklet, which will be off to the printers this week. Meantime, I started working on the cover design and envelope.

I really love Sarah Maxey's book designs for AUP and VUP. This cover for a collection of C.K. Stead's poems published in 2002 is one of my favourites. I like the roughness of the hand cut lettering and the graphic simplicity of text and image. For my recipe book I wanted to go for something similar so I'm using handmade rubber stamps on thick brown paper (so that it can be handled by floury fingers). Here's my prototype:

And here's my cupcake envelope prototype:

The liner card is the huntsman red you see on the table and the paper stock for the recipes is a cream Conqueror laid vellum so it should be a very pretty production. I'm printing 40 copies - some as gifts and some to sell.

I'll be putting up a special post of things you can buy in November but for now I'll just be getting everything underway.

I'm lucky enough to be related to a bunch of very talented writers - my beloved Jack of course, my sister Therese and her partner Lee - all three very gifted and very different kinds of poets. I've come to realise that all writers love to see their work in print and I like to show my appreciation for their art by making small gift editions of their work.

I've just finished making 20 notebook size books bound in red and cream striped ticking. I think I'll select a few of Therese's stunning recent poems and sew them into the covers for her present and I have an idea for a gift edition for Lee using a wonderful sestina that he wrote recently. The poem has a washing line as one of its central motifs so I can see some collage and printmaking potential there.

As for Jack, well his extreme poetic requires an extreme response so I've been labouring for some time to produce a concertina pop-up book to accompany his dark poem 'Minotaur', a translation of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, 'laberinto' [Labyrinth] .

Here's the poem :

The Minotaur

There'll never be a door. You're stuck inside.
These sunken casemates are the universe,
all the universe of signs: forward, reverse,
no centre to the web, no world outside.
Don't think the insane precision of your game,
monotonously counting every turn,
monotonously counting every turn,
will save you. The result will be the same.
Stop looking forward to the bloody charge
of the beast who is a man, who is your double,
whose shadow punctuates this seamless puzzle
of rubber walls contracted to a cage.
He isn't there. You're screwed. You'd better learn
not to expect the dark thrust of his horn.

This was my first attempt at the pop-up 'Minotaur' dividing the poem into four spreads: the first is a series of sunken casemates. The second is a trio of floating stairs. The third takes the concept of the double and features a pair of contracting cage or mask forms. The fourth spread is a group of geometric shapes that on second glance form the face of the horned Minotaur.

The problem I encountered was that there were too many seams and if one pop-up spread is even a millimetre off, it affects the entire concertina. To get around the problem I realised that I needed to produce all four spreads on a single piece of card. Here's prototype 2:



It was a devil of a job with absolutely no margin for error but the result is exactly what I wanted. I still need to work out a way of incorporating the text into the design without disrupting the purity of the pop-ups and then I'll make a backing sheet with a hand-printed maze using some of my simple rubber stamps. So that's Jack's birthday present for next month - just gotta think up something for him for Christmas!!! I tell ya - the handmade mission never ends ....