Cup 12/01/09

Cup 12/01/09

Oil pastel, bleach, ink wash

Cake of the Weekend

Carrot cake to be gobbled by me, M, role players and colleagues. Trying out recipe from this month's Delicious Magazine.

Itajime Shibori

Cup 09/01/08

Itajime shibori paper using folded Japanese calligraphy paper into brusho watercolour. This paper was created when I was doing some practice prior to a college dyeing day. I had been inspired by a series of posts by Karen K Britto, a textile artist and maker who is the author of a book on Shibori. She hasn't updated her blog Entwinements in a while, but her previous entries still hold a wealth of information and discussion. This post and this post got me started with the paper folding. Hmmmm its tempting to give it another go......

Peekaboo!

Cup 08/01/09

Cut out of the museum newspaper I picked up when I visited the MAK in Vienna during the summer (that seems so long ago now - especially as I only really experienced a summer in Vienna). A Julien Opie exhibition was on at the time and this was on the front cover.

Cup 07/01/08

Cup 07/01/08

Stamped masking fluid, brusho and metallic ink.

On board chilling

Cup 06/01/09

Cup of the day today features a oil pastel scribble with a black ink wash. Today I swapped lids with another cup and poured a smoothie in there instead of making a coffee. There were grainy bits (due to the raspberries) but this time no spitting was necessary. My smoothie was kept nice and cool due to the onboard chilling feature of my transport: the bottle cage of my bicycle. Yes, on one of the coldest days of the year I hauled my carcass onto my bicycle in the pre-8 o'clock gloom and pedalled into work. The cold wasn't too bad after the putting on of: 2 snoods/scruffs, 3 long sleeved tops with various thermal, windproof, thumb loops (thx G) features, cycle shorts, fleecy cycle tights, woolly socks (thx Mum), winter gloves and liberal smearing of vaseline over my cheeks (thx G, again). Everything stayed reasonably warm except my toes which were painfully defrosted in the lovely warm work shower.

Cup of the day

Cup 05/01/09

At Christmas I found one of these kindly left by my sister under the Christmas tree (not forgetting the rather nice pile of overlocker feet left by my other sister). Over the holiday season I found myself doing a little tidy up - tidying up I really should have done in the summer. I found myself with boxes and boxes of design papers left over from my college course. So I decided to sort them out. I got rid of some of the plain ugly bits of modroc, plaster of paris lumps which were created for some reason or other (texture? hmmm, not sure, and if it was texture than what I was trying to convey was dubious at best) and other scrunched grot that I no longer wanted. Some of the paper I put to one side for possible greeting card manufacture. Other bits found the internal cardboard from my new travel mug/press being drawn on them and then cut up. An hour or so later I had 8 boxes compressed down to 3 and a pile of cup inserts. Almost one for each working day for a little while to come.
This design paper was from part 2 of the course when I was designing using armour as my theme. I had hand carved a stamp taken from the shape of a Japanese helmet ornament, stamped acrylic paint on some textured cartridge paper and then washed over brusho watercolour. The coffee wasn't too bad either - mental note don't push press down too hard otherwise grounds come up over it and the last mouthful of coffee ends up being a leeeetle gritty and you almost end up spewing it up over your esteemed colleagues.