Mosehouse leaves the house

printed recipe books drying

Lies has invited me to share a table with her at kraftbomb this Sunday so Mosehouse Studio will be getting its first public outing. Very exciting!! My week has been a frenzy of folding, printing, sewing, taping, and binding in preparation for what I hope will be a fun and profitable market experience. Here's what I'll be selling:

24 page 'cake' recipe books featuring 15 delicious cake and pudding recipes - printed on Conqueror laid vellum paper with guardsman red liner card, hand-stitched red binding, hand-printed manilla cover, and cupcake envelope.

Hand printed cards with a pop-up Christmas tree and cherry and kiss envelopes

sets of 5 manilla gift-tags with brown string

sets of 5 manilla and vanilla cards in striped wallpaper envelopes

Assorted collars made from my final batch of gorgeous1970s ties

Fingers crossed that people like my stuff and that some of it finds a new home otherwise everyone I know will be receiving recipe books and pop-up cards for Christmas!

Our First Year

It's our very first wedding anniversary this Sunday. Gifts made of paper traditionally mark the first year of marriage, which is lucky really because precious metals are way beyond my student budget. Paper, on the other hand, I can definitely manage. I had a little packet of beautiful deckle edge cotton rag paper that I'd been wanting to use for ages so I went for a sneaky fossick through Jack's storehouse of poems and found another of his unusual translations, "je donne a mon espoir" by Apollinaire. The hopeful and romantic sentiment of the poem seemed the perfect choice to celebrate a first wedding anniversary. This is how Jack's version of it goes:

I give for hope my eyes
semi-precious stones

I give for hope my hands
victory palms

I give for hope my feet
supermarket carts

I give for hope my mouth
this kiss

I give for hope my nostrils
sampling spring flowers

I give for hope my heart
keeping its promise

I give for hope the future
flickering like a candle
far off in the forest

What a beautiful poem! As an extra surprise I took the idea of a light shining in the forest and made a miniature paper theatre that is assembled on the base of the gift box.

Using photocopied images by Jack's favourite illustrator, Gustave Dore, I made a series of cut-outs in each piece to create an illusion of depth that leads the eye through the dark forest to the light shining from the back panel.

An aerial view so you can see how it's constructed:

Here's to the first of many more happy years to come!

The Kwalic Archive (Part Two)

The mature Allogee Kwala dressed in a robe and woolly hat that June made for him.

What began as a two-volume illustrated account of the capers of the young rascal Allogee Kwala, inspired in part by Anne and Jack's avid devotion to Donald Duck comics, grew over a period of years into a vast Kwalic kingdom entirely of their own devising. The second part of the Kwalic archive records, with maniacal attention to detail, the imaginary world of Kwalaloompa invented by two of the amazing Ross kids. Let's look first at the maps:

(Map detail)

Next we have the genealogical records of the Kwala descended from the 'Great Kwala':

(detail) I love the 'three fools' at the bottom

I was intrigued by the note in red biro referring to 'The Great Shrat Incident'. Following the arrow across the chart we find the unlikely coupling between Wide Handsome Spacious Rat and Samantha Sheep.

When I asked Jack about this he explained that he and Anne thought it necessary to corrupt the pure Kwala blood line by introducing a rogue element. They reasoned that the offspring of a rat and a sheep would look something like a koala and would easily be able to infiltrate the Kwala clan.

When I consulted the pages and pages of Kwala descendants carefully itemised by generation, year of birth and death, a summary of significant achievements and cause of death, I saw that Samantha Sheep died in 1684 at the age of 69 of foot and mouth disease. She outlived her rat husband Wide by 22 years who was killed by a dog at the age of 58. On another page I noticed an entry for Jek, a Kwala who travelled to China 'where he learnt strange arts' and Entelope (1755-1837), the first black shrat. One of the final entries is for Shallogee, the last king of Kwalaloompa (1718-1798) who was rumoured to be 'the illegitimate son of a sheep' and who had 'little power and no personality'. Apart from old age the second most common cause of Kwala mortality recorded in the archive was death in battle. Anne preferred longevity for the members of the kwala clan but Jack much preferred to pit them against each other and their various foes in bloody conquest. He alone was responsible for devising and documenting 'The Kwalic Battles' - a succession of civil wars among rival clans, coups, and wars waged against other species including a terrible war between the Kwala and the Sock Dog Tribe called 'The Battle of the Barkers':


This is what a Sock Dog looks like:

The Battle of Australia:


The Revolt of the Koalas:


The Great Battle of Ayers Rock

All battle drawings by Jack Ross aged 8-12

In the midst of one bloody civil war the last surviving member of the Mackwaas clan composed a brief chronicle of his race in Kwalic Gaelic on an illuminated scroll (a piece of wallpaper curled around a pencil). Sadly the enemies got to him before he was able to complete the chronicle, his words trailing off dramatically in the final section and what appears to be a splodge of blood below.

These two blog posts have only been a sampling from the family treasure that is the Kwalic Archive. I hope you've enjoyed the Kwala story as much as I've enjoyed presenting it to you here albeit in an abridged form. Let's finish with a little verse from the budding young poet Jack Ross:


And a last lovely little kwala by Anne:

Getting Ready

Just a quick update to let you know that all my prototypes are now completed and I'm getting ready for an epic making frenzy next weekend followed by an online product launch by the end of the month.

My first Mosehouse mini-collection is called manilla/vanilla and will include sets of six assorted hand-printed cards in striped wallpaper envelopes; hand-printed gift tags with brown string; manilla covered 'CAKE' recipe books in cupcake envelopes; and collaged cards with a pop-up stairway. Busy busy...

The Big Day

Yay, Jack's birthday arrived on Thursday so I finally got to present him with the Minotaur pop-up poem.

He loved it! Here's a moody evening shot of it in its newly created display space in the lounge on top of our gorgeous Katy Wallace shelf.

The Kwalic Archive (Part One)

From the various stories that I've been told about Jack's childhood I've concluded that the four Ross kids were brilliant eccentrics from an early age. I'd glimpsed evidence of this in the strange invented languages and code-names they had inscribed into the fly leaves of their picture books and in the fragments of a large blackboard mural buried behind Jack's bookshelves in his old bedroom. By removing rows of books I could make out a menacing army of chalk ants about to lay siege to a castle being defended by a band of stick figure patriots. But the full extent of their extraordinary imaginations came to light recently through the discovery of the most amazing archive of Ross family juvenilia.

When I was clearing out a camphor chest a few months ago I came across a number of little packets of pattern pieces for toy koalas made by Jack's late sister Anne. As a novice toy maker myself I was amazed by the intricacy and variety of the pattern pieces and the unusual markings on each one like 'real' and 'yes'.

When I noticed the names 'Hothair' and 'Dodey' on two of the packets my curiosity was piqued. I asked Jack about them and he told me that there were many more koalas and that what had started out as a simple game between Anne and him with toy koalas that they had brought home from a trip to Australia grew over time into an elaborate story of the 'Kwala' kingdom of 'Kwalaloompa'. He introduced me to Balthus and Bibulus, two handsome Kwala specimens that Anne had made and when I asked June if she had any others that I could look at she dug inside her cupboard and pulled out a box load of Anne's Kwalas and handed me an envelope marked 'Kwalic Documents'.

Having spent much of the past four years laboriously trawling through an archive of 400 of Rita Angus's letters for my PhD research I've become a fairly seasoned archival researcher but I can honestly say that nothing could have prepared me for the contents of the dog-eared envelope that came into my hands yesterday. What a treasure!

The Kwala story begins innocently enough with a two volume illustrated account of the childhood of a certain Allogee Kwala.

All drawings by Anne Ross

Allogee, whose main form of expression is the word 'Nay', is a mischievous tot who gets into trouble from an early age, knocking over the precious family heirlooms and leaping into muddy puddles whenever he can.

As he gets older Allogee's main interest becomes the location and consumption of huge amounts of pies, chocolates and sweets. On one occasion he demolishes an entire feast intended for a gathering of 7000 of his relations much to the chagrin of his long-suffering guardian Tabatha.

Needless to say, when Allogee starts school he sits at the back of the class taught by Miss Grump and smuggles his dog Bonzo into the schoolroom.

Allogee's scholastic achievements leave something to be desired as the results of a spelling test illustrate.

As a consequence, Allogee decides that playing truant is a better way to spend his time.

First he goes fishing

and then he comes across a gypsy camp

and decides to run away with them.

But Allogee's fatal flaw is his greed, which gets the better of him once again when he spies a café and decides to pop in for a bite to eat. A squad of truant officers are there waiting for him and Allogee's adventures on the road come to an abrupt end.

Fortunately, love is in the air for our beleaguered young kwala, taking the form of the delightful Susy.
but some complex contretemps occurs during their first date and true love is thwarted.


And so ends Volume One of the life of Allogee Kwala - more to come soon...