I’ve been thinking about layers again. I want to make a layered piece but I need to experiment with combinations. I’ve been meaning to have a go at making paper by squirting paper pulp. I used an old Nurofen syringe, but had to make the hole a bit bigger because the pulp kept on clogging it. I used a hot skewer to make it bigger, but while I had the lighter I decided to burn some holes in some of the mulberry paper I’ve been using to make book cloth.
I like the effect of the burnt edges. In the last two images they resemble coastlines, the last one similar to the Thames Estuary.
I made a mould out of some stretcher bars and some mesh, wrapped some thread around it and then squirted on the paper pulp. Removing it from the mould when it was dry was satisfying.
I took whatever images were close to hand to see how layering might look using some bits of cork as temporary spacers.
It was a really interesting exercise. I find myself drawn more towards the burnt paper than the thread and paper pulp. Maybe I need to try the paper pulp on different images, but my initial thought is that I don’t like the combination with the thread, although the thread does allow it to be suspended, rather than lying flat. I think that I much prefer it when I made the paper with the thread embroidery in a whole sheet. The paper pulp might look better without the thread, with the thread incorporated into a different layer.
I think that I’ll just start making the piece and experiment and make decisions in the moment.
I’ve been making the book cloth for the second book. This time I lino printed onto a sheer fabric and a plain cotton.
I need to sharpen my cutting tools – there was slip on the left side. I’ll be able to cover it up with the mask for the title block.
Overprinting on paper
Print on sheer fabric
Print on cotton fabric
Fabrics bonded together and backed with mulberry paper and addition of title.
For the end papers I asked my husband and daughter to draw some more outlines for me to fill. I’d been experimenting with not using straight lines.
I then redid the cyantotype for the remake of volume I. Whilst I was waiting for it to develop, I scrunched a piece of fabric up and left it outside. I was pleasantly surprised by the result.
Whilst I’ve been contemplating the book cloth that I might make for the second volume of the book, I cyanotyped an image onto some sheer fabric. Cyanotyping onto fabric is something that I’ve been attracted to and tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, over the last couple of years. As early as the Interim Show I had visions of long billowing swathes of fabric.
But what caught my attention was the effect when I held it in front of a mirror, almost like the effect of the 3D printed images you get on postcards and bookmarks. I’ve still got a sheet of mirrored acrylic from my ‘A Die and A Log’ and I thought it would be interesting to experiment with layering images over each other on top of a mirrored surface. I toned the image with coffee to see what it would like other than in blue. I also wondered about using a different process – solar plate printing is something that’s been on my radar for a while, but I think that it can be quite tricky and it’s probably something best learnt in a workshop setting – again something to think about for the future. Another option would be a direct image transfer. I’m going to give it some further thought and have a play to see if it has legs as an idea.
It’s impossible for a photo to convey what the eye can see, and also I may need a better image.You can just about make out the reflection of the second head.
I haven’t made a book before. I’ve watched a couple of YouTube videos. I told myself not to have any expectations.
I copy and pasted my blog posts into Word booklets. Each booklet is 5 A4 sheets which is 10 sides and therefore 20 A5 pages amounting to 1 signature. The book will have 10 signatures (totalling 200 pages) and already I know that there will be more than one volume.
It was a laborious task of formatting, copying and resizing the images and creating QR codes for the videos.
Having printed each of the signatures and folded them, I set about sewing them together using linen thread, which I waxed using a beeswax candle, and an upholstery needle. The wax helps prevent the thread from fraying and tangling. First, I had to use an awl to puncture the holes.
Then I applied two layers of archival PVA glue to the spine and attached the ribbon.
Next I had to attach the end papers. I decided to use a couple of cyanotype prints that I had made using the lino cuttings and the shredded cardboard.
The next step was to trim the edge of the text block. When the paper is folded into signatures the outside sheets have further to wrap around and so protrude less than the inner pages. When they are sewn together it creates a zig zag effect down the edge of the pages and so this needs to be tidied up. A stack paper cutter would be ideal in this situation but the woman in the video successfully used a metal ruler and a craft knife.
This is where it all started to go wrong. I think that the craft knife I used was too lightweight and the blade flexed so that the cut edge was all over the place. I tried to remedy it by re-trimming and unfortunately it turned into something akin to the time I trimmed my daughter’s fringe and in repeated efforts to level it out had to resort to taking her to the local hairdresser to get it fixed – ok, made to look less awful.
In an effort to straighten things up I clamped the text block between two pieces of grey card and used 220 grit sand paper to smooth down the edges, which seemed to make it a bit better. I appeared to be back on track.
The next stage was to make and attach the head and tail bands, and the mull.
I then had to start thinking about the cover. I decided to make my own book cloth and made a cyanotype using some of the main words from my blog’s tag cloud. I wrote them onto an A3 plastic sheet and used some pretreated fabric, which unfortunately only came in A4. I masked out an area onto which I then ’embroidered’ the title.
To make it into book cloth I sewed it together in such a way that the seam would run down the middle of the spine – unfortunately because of the measurements I couldn’t do it so that the words matched up. I attached some Japanese mulberry paper to the reverse using Heat and Bond.
I then measured and cut the front and back boards and the spine, and then taped them together to see how they fitted the text block. The idea was to trim the long edge of the front and back boards so that they overhung the text block by 3mm. And this is where it went irretrievably wrong. I’m not quite sure what happened.
I don’t usually do fiddly and I thought that I was being extra careful in my measuring and cutting but something went wrong somewhere and 3mm doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room. When I had folded over and glued down the edges of the book cloth I tried putting the text block inside only to find that not only was there no overhang but that the paper protruded beyond the edge of the cover in some places.
I tried removing the spine board and replacing it with thinner card and sanding down the edge of the paper. Eventually it fitted so that there was a miniscule amount of overhang but the price was that the text was very close to the edge of the page. Nevertheless, I carried on because I wanted to complete the process.
So there we have it.
What do I think? I’m amazed that I’ve managed to produce something that looks like a book. For a first effort I’m pretty pleased with it. I feel like it’s a real achievement. Obviously there are some major issues with it but on the whole apart from the last stage I think it went quite well. I really like the cover and the end papers – I think that they work really well. I clearly didn’t set out thinking that it wouldn’t work, otherwise perhaps I would have used substitutes as I’m now going to have to make them all over again. But now that I know what I’m doing and where to be careful, it won’t take as long.
I will remake this book, but not yet. I need to feel like I’m making some progress so I will get going on volume 2, which will hopefully go a bit better, and then come back to it.
On the whole it was an enjoyable process – I enjoyed learning something new. What will I do differently next time? Oh, quite a bit! It was a great exercise from which I learnt:
accuracy in measuring and cutting is crucial
I need to get a more robust craft knife or alterrnatively contact my local printers to see if they can do the trimming for me.
The paper used for the end papers was cut from larger sheets and either wasn’t truly A4 in size or had shrunk after the cyanotyping process as they turned out to be slightly too small, but as usual I thought that I might be able to get away with it. I didn’t. Next time I should make them larger and cut down to size before attaching them to the text block.
Change the font and size of the page numbers
Think about where the thread is on the reverse of the title – connecting threads can cause lumps and bumps once the mulberry paper is bonded to the fabric
I need to adjust the margin settings – I allowed for an inside margin of 1.5cm plus a 0.5cm gutter and an outside margin of 1.5cm. Once the book was put together the inside margin turned out to be quite generous whereas the outside margin turned out to be problematical after my attempts at trimming. I think next time I will reduce the inside by 0.5cm and increase the outer by 0.5cm.
What I find intriguing is that the act of researching and making this book to document my becoming, is itself part of the process of becoming.
I wanted to make some marks – layers of marks – and so I took some A2 paper and used charcoal, pastel, an eraser and a pen.
It wasn’t meant to be anything. I thought that I might use it as a base for something else. I had been wanting to have another go at overprinting the linocut image from Never Say Never. In that post I comment that the shapes look like crouching figures – in retrospect they are foetal-like. The subject of microchimerism has come back to my mind recently and I thought that the idea of making the ink more transparent with each print could touch on that. Also, the marks underneath would also become increasingly visible. I gave it a go but I made a hash of the ratio of ink to extender, and I couldn’t find the new tube of extender so I just added some white which, of course, made the print totally opaque, which wasn’t the original intention.
I left it for a while and got on with other tasks relating to the book and when I revisited it I thought about umbilical chords (something I have referenced previously in Sisters). I thought I might use some of the red thread that I had for my paper experiments to sew some kind of twisting chords which then made me think of using black stitching to delineate between the three shapes. I used a blanket stitch on the second shape as I’d seen at her Tate Modern exhibition that Tracey Emin had used it on her blankets to give a less defined line.
I’m really chuffed. I was thinking as I was sewing that maybe I should have planned where I was going to go, but then decided that, no, I liked the spontaneity of it all. Would I have done anything differently? No. How did I feel as I was making it? I felt pleasure, at all stages. I enjoyed the making of it and I like how it turned out. In fact, over the last few months (Summer Exhibition aside) I have really enjoyed making. That’s not to say that I haven’t enjoyed the process of making before then – I have, particularly the experimenting and and the wandering, it’s just that recently I have felt contented, as if some things have fallen into place. I particularly enjoyed the experiments with lino cuttings and packaging, and I’m really happy with the video that I made.
I think that it comes down to the accidental and the incidental; the unexpected that happens in the process and the small things I notice within the process which then lead to something else.
I often become distracted; I’ll put a pan of water on to boil and then get distracted by something and go wandering off, only remembering that I was meant to be boiling some eggs when the pan has boiled dry.
I was cutting some lino yesterday and I collected the bits of lino on a piece of tissue paper. As I was lifting it up to dispose of them I thought, ‘oh that looks interesting’. And off I went. I wrapped some tissue paper around an old photo frame. I couldn’t be botherered to go off and find clamps etc so I balanced the frame on some books on two chairs. I then set up a couple of anglepoise lamps. Lying flat on my back on the kitchen floor allowed me to photograph the tissue paper from underneath. I experimented with the lino bits as well as some packaging which I had saved, just in case it might come in useful.
To save me from getting up and down, I enlisted some help with the sprinkling. These are the results:
I really like the effect of the lino bits – they are dynamic and have the sense of someone having just made some quick gestural marks. I like the added depth provided by the bits that are further away from the surface of the tissue paper.
I really like the effect in the photos. The first one in both sets is without any backlight and it almost looks like something trying to break through the tissue paper – like something crawling under the skin. It would have been good to try with just a few bits, but by the time I had the thought, I had put everything away, but something for the future.
I also made a video of the ‘sprinkling’. Otto, the dog, was in the kitchen at the time and decided to have a bark and come close to my head grunting like a pig. I was in the process of cleaning up the audio – I was even going to try out Garage Band – but then decided not to – I liked it how it is. I used some audio effects in Capcut – Deep 2, Echo and Super Reverb. I wanted to make the audio unexpected – the sprinkling of something light has been distorted so that it sounds unusually heavy and the background noises are unexpected when heard with the visual which I think makes it more interesting and unexpected.
I’ve spent the last few days chained to my laptop copying and pasting most of my 195 blog posts (now plus one!) into a word document. Am I regretting my decision to make a book out of my blog? No, because it feels like it’s ticking a big box somewhere inside of me – it’s keeping my chimp happy – I’m making something that evidences the last two years. It will leave me free to experiment with something else.
That said, I have already reminded myself that I have never made a book before and so the process is very much an experiment, and that I should have no expectations as to the result.
I have formulated a plan though. The book is going to be in A5 format as that avoids the need to deal with things like columns. I’m going to print it in a series of booklets – signatures – of 5 sheets of A4 which equates to 20 pages. These will then be stitched together – I’m currently thinking no more than 10 in a single volume and then covered with a hardback cover. I am thinking that I may use some canvas that I have knocking around which I could paint, draw, print and stitch onto. Alternatively, I could try sheer fabric, cotton or linen. I’ll need to experiment. Even the end papers could be pieces in themselves.
I have already formatted and printed off a couple of signatures. It’s definitely going to run to more than a single volume, so I think that I’ll format and print off the first 10 signatures and make a single book just to see how it goes, rather than spending time formatting and printing out all of the blog.
Thus far the process has revealed a couple of things. Firstly, I need to be mindful that future posts will have to be included, so it may be an idea to limit posts going forward – but who am I kidding? Secondly, in carrying out the exercise I have relived the past two years and it has been helpful to note ideas that I have had along the way and which I could develop in the future, as well as discovering some draft posts which I didn’t publish, perhaps because I wasn’t quite ready. This is an example of part of one which was on the subject of perfectionism:
‘But old habits die hard and when my mother became ill I couldn’t process it on an emotional level and so I became the best carer that I could be, which now I regret because at times it meant that I wasn’t the best daughter that I could be. To this day I can’t understand why, when she said she fancied a gin and tonic, I told her that she couldn’t have it because she was taking morphine. She was dying, what did it matter? It is one of my biggest regrets. And when she didn’t eat one of the many offerings I had made for her, it was because I was a failure, because I wasn’t able to find that one thing that she would want to eat.
I had the same thought this evening as Monty, the dog, only had a few little bits of meat which he had been quite happily eating yesterday. What am I doing wrong? What is it that he wants that I’m not offering him?
And, of course, the answer is nothing. I can only do what I can do in the circumstances. If he was hungry he would eat. If my mother had been hungry she would have eaten what I had made for her. Even if they did eat, it’s not really enough to make any significant difference. I’m not responsible for them not eating. There is nothing that I can do on a practical level anymore to avoid having to deal with the inevitable outcome. ‘
I had an urge to make some marks with charcoal before I went to bed last night. It started off as a wild grassy landscape then I wiped it and used some Conté pastel to draw various figures, crouched, swimming, running etc. They were quite comical. I sometimes wonder whether I have to look at something to be able to draw it. Anyway, I wiped that off and it left some lovely outlines. I kept using the pastel, closed my eyes and drew two heads using a continuous line, looking from time to time. I then traced the lines with some charcoal, cut a wedge of eraser using the fine edge backwards and forwards over the line. I wiped it all back and then did several layers of pastel then charcoal using the eraser in brisk strokes all over the paper. I think it turned out surprisingly well, and I’m pleased that the heads are only just visible when you stand back – close up it’s just a lot of mark-making. And the weirdest thing, I can see a third head in between the two which doesn’t stand out so well in the photo.
I quite like the idea of revelation, and layering seems to facilitate this.
Drawing lines on the first print I made of the linocut – there must have been some loose bits because it left small circular areas of white which reminded me of places or points of interest on a map. I then cut out some areas and laid it on top of a section of the figures line drawing using some cut up old corks as makeshift spacers. I then stuck the print with the large white space onto some watercolour paper and cut out the centre. I sewed some threads across the centre – thicker embroidery silk would have been better but I had to make do with what I had to hand. I laid it on top, slightly off from the print below.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 