Thursday, October 2, 2008

Surface design

I have been making some surfaces to print on this coming term (eek, my last in this course! Quick, change the subject). I chopped up some prints I'd made, mostly on found paper, and sewed them back together using a faggotting stitch on the machine. I like! I suspect this is my long history in quiltmaking putting in an appearance - I didn't think it was going to crossover into my other art, but here it is at last. The one above was made with scraps from the making the ninepatch (not sure why blogger is putting that photo first, but I'm too braindead to wrestle with it). There are several of each version.

This one was also made with scraps from a previous print, that I chopped up to apply to papier mache bowls.
A ninepatch composed of pieces from three or four previous prints.

And a surface of long skinny pieces, also leftovers from the ninepatch. I hate to waste even the scraps, so nothing new there because I'm the same with fabric - if I hadn't done something with the paper scraps, they were threatening to need their own receptacle as I clean out the studio (a work in progress that seems like it may never end). Now they are neatly stowed in my printmaking folio, ready to go off to school and be printed over with another image or two (one more thing out of the house, one more plus on the decluttering side. It's a losing battle - last week I found a perfectly good child's wooden wagon on the side of the road for collection with the rubbish and brought it home. I think it's destined to become part of a sculpture).