minus + minus

(more…)

From workshop with Gaylord Schanilec in Bloomington, Indiana at Jim Canary’s house.

More about Gaylord Schanilec at http://www.midnightpapersales.com.

(more…)

Here are some photos of projects in progress.

Experimenting with casting and dying pulp for the “book object”. Trying to make a book page/paper tablet.

Coffee paper finally dried.

Accordion painted book — gesso on paper and handwritten text from One Hundred Years of Solitude.

From One Hundred Years of Solitude by G. G. Marquez.

(more…)

As part of my project for Spring 2009 Design Seminar at the Indiana University Bloomington, I am experimenting with natural dyes for paper. I will be documenting the process here to share it with my classmates and anyone interested.

I am using 60% Cotton Rag + 40% Cotton Linter as a base for dyeing. The half stuff is soaked overnight, beaten in a blender, soaked for a few more days and then batches are beaten again before being put in the vat. For the explanation of basic papermaking process see this post and this one.

Natural dyes to be explored:

1. Turmeric. 1/4 cup for 3 cups of pulp.
2. Beets.
3. Homemade walnut ink.
4. Blueberries.
5. Tea.
6. Coffee.
7. Green clay.
8. Grass and green leaves.

Paper samples will be bound in a book that will feature a quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez.

This is my mold made from two picture frames, sheet size is 6.5×4.5 in.

This cotton pulp has been dyed with beet juice.

Coffee.

Tea.

As the papermaking process is visceral, tactile and messy, I chose this quote to go into the finished book.

Her hermetism was not odd. Although she seemed expansive and cordial, she had a solitary character and an impenetrable heart. She was a splendid adolescent with long and firm bones, but she still insisted on using the small wooden rocking chair with which she had arrived at the house, reinforced many times and with the arms gone. No one had discovered that even at that age she still had the habit of sucking her finger. That was why she would not lose an opportunity to lock herself in the bathroom and had acquired the habit of sleeping with her face to the wall. On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and  tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without beeing seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult neeedlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.”