Mid-January geese, quilts and cards

     This Friday I am planning an intensive soak for my hands. Between carving linoleum blocks stress on my fingers, and printmaking stress on my wrists as I have no formal print press but instead improvise with a full metal water bottle... (the plan is more improvisation to make a simple press eventually) Until then however, I have one last block to carve. So far this week there have been little hobbit doors and just now a goose triangle.



     A few days ago I mordant-ed and dyed fabric with willow bark and a few old black walnuts. Using diluted soymilk for mordant, I was impressed with how well it turned out and I'm excited to experiment more with natural dyes. Soon if I can find a red cabbage I would like to try to get a blue-green dye. And when it's all said an done, print some of the brown fabric with the little goose and sew a flying geese table cover.


Sorry for the blur, took this quickly with my phone

    While Canada geese may be extremely aggressive and territorial (I've been bitten myself... admittedly when I was young and interested in exactly how soft a gosling is...), after growing up with several dozen residing in the pond in front of my parent's house they now remind me of home no matter where I am. In using local dyes, the little table cover will be a way of bringing a piece of home with me wherever I am, especially next year when *fingers crossed* I will be in Virginia.



     Shop news: In the next few days I will have Tom patches, Hobbit thank you cards (in a different color scheme), and hobbit door cards and patches up. Next week I plan on having goose cards and patches as well as pomegranate cards and patches if my fingers survive until Friday.

     It's 5pm here and still light out, so I hope everyone is able to enjoy this. If you have a garden, I have heard that some people are already starting seeds- indoors of course- so have any of you started yet? We haven't here, but I'm beginning to look for medicinal wildflower seeds, especially yarrow to sow when it's warmer. 

Pictures that should have been here yesterday

I love how these turned out

Allowing the patches to dry

Hobbit thank you cards!

     Exciting news, I should be opening my shop on Etsy in a few hours and list some items that I have shipping materials for :D
And again, 1/11: I thought this had been published

SHOP IS OPEN

Time for celebration!
     You can visit it here.
     So far I have several photo print options up (more tonight/ tomorrow morning), and my Hobbit thank you cards. Soon I hope to include patches and some other card designs, so keep an eye out over the next few days. :D

Working away...

     First off, if you are in the US, I hope you don't have too far to go and are able to stay warm in this cold! It makes me glad I won't have to return to Syracuse in a week and a half, but it is giving me an excuse to work inside all day and get significant chucks of work done, although my cats sometimes make this difficult; Smokey managed to slip out yesterday and spent the night outsides (he'svery shy and we had guests) and I had to coax him out from under the porch at 7am. He spent the rest of the day pawing and mewing for my attention. And clawing up my yoga mat...
     With the opening of my Etsy shop just around the corner, I spent the day working on little hobbit "Thank you" cards, patches and got some 4X7 prints of my favorite photographs. I am sad to say that while I did order some small prints of some of my paintings from a local shop, I was not pleased with the results (too much saturation, surprise cropping and the like), and hope to order some from a different place soon. I will also have original drawings and paintings for sale, and a more wide variety of patches available after tomorrow/Friday and those should be up sometime next week after the ink cures.
     It appears that at the moment photos aren't attaching to this post, so if anyone would like to see them, they'll be showing up on my tumblr over the next day or so, and if you'd just like to see shop stuff, you can go here instead. There will probably be another post along or an edit with pics soon when I get this figured out/ open the shop officially. :D
Edit 1/11: Oh no! I thought this posted...