Explorations

In the past week I have been exploring new creative ideas.  I've been looking at Alisa Golden's very informative texts, playing with inks, folding, cutting, and scoring.  I haven't done a lot of painting for over 12 months but I felt very free and relaxed as I washed and brushed the inks over the paper.  What a lovely feeling!  The ink colours are pure bliss and beautifully transparent so they create deep layers of colour and movement.
Also this week I joined fellow Impress Printmakers members at the Queensland State Library for a viewing of artist books from their extensive collection.  My favourite book was "River, plants, birds" by Peta Lloyd. Layers and layers of monotypes, sewing, stencils, text - wonderful!
This was followed by a visit to the Queensland Museum to see an exhibition of Tasmanian Aboriginal Baskets, 'Tayenebe'.  I particularly admired the kelp water carriers, and already I have some thoughts on how I could incorporate this into my work.
Such an inspiring day!  No wonder I bought armfuls of 'stuff with potential' from Reverse Garbage on the way home!

Woven Accordion Book  - a sampler I created this week

Another happy group of monoprinters.......!

Today I held another of my Magical Monotype Workshops, this time for a group of 8 enthusiastic printers.
It was a energetic and productive day, with heaps of  'WOW' prints but as usual a few challenging, thought-provoking ones! 
Thanks to all that came and allowed me to share my enthusiasm for monotypes.  And I always appreciate the feedback - this time I had made a few improvements based on my last workshop, including allowing more space for 'inking up'.
And the day is always a pleasure with the help of my Mum, Jan, who is turning out to be my very valuable assistant on the press.  She even created a couple of her own prints today!

Above - A few of the beautiful prints hanging up to dry
Below - The monoprinters after a hard day's work!

'Masterchef' Fibre Cookup

This week I fired up my new electric cooker to prepare some fibre for papermaking.  It worked a treat - I cooked banana stem and leaves, corn husks, and onion skins.  The new cooker is certainly easier and safer than using a pot and Craig's gas camping stove (which unfortunately will never be the same again after the boiling-over incident - sorry Craig). 
The smell of cooking fibre is rather unique.......there's a good reason I do this cookup outdoors! 
It took a couple of days to complete the entire process - preparing and soaking the fibre, cooking, rinsing, sorting, bagging up and finally storing in the freezer ready for my next papermaking session. 
Below are some photos of the 'cookup' in progress.  Thanks to all those friends and family that donated their onion skins over the past few months - a worthy cause!

1. The cooker with the fibre in bags.
2. Rinsing the fibre in my outdoor sink.
3. Close up of the cooked banana fibre - YUM!