Friday, February 25, 2011

Nature Dyes

I'm loving this! It reminds me of leaf spots in Autumn.
It's the result of indian ink being dripped onto wet paper to cause a reaction, the paper was dried and then over-dyed with a wash of walnut dye. The pic below shows my son making one of his indian ink/water papers which we did  a few weeks ago. I saw the potential for good collage fodder so made myself a few too!  He graciously donated me his papers as well:)


My walnut dye. It's pretty dark so I was surprised it gave such an rust/orange shade to my paper. I made it by mixing and matching recipes I found on the net but the basic brew went like this...

Soak green walnuts in water in a stainless steel bowl 
(Until they ferment/smell bad and your family threaten to throw it out if you don't do something with it!! lol)
Boil the brew 20mins and then add 1 part white vinegar to help prevent mold.

So far this method worked but I think I should have boiled them longer to get the darker shade of brown I thought I was making! The dye is now in a jar out of direct sunlight, I will be interested to see if ageing it makes any difference to the dye colour. No doubt I could water it down to get a lighter shade of rust if I wanted too.

These too pics are the resulting papers from my Eucalyptus dye experiments. I like the shade of brown I got with  these.I added my own designs to the paper as you can see! Most of the "line" paper has already been used in my collage work so I will have to get another brew boiling! Good thing I collected a lot of bark!


ICE #12 is nearly finished. It was inspired by a game of snakes and ladders and uses a large piece of my lined eucalyptus paper so watch this space!

Friday, February 18, 2011

OWOH Winners!



Thanks to all the bloggers who took time to drop by and visit me on there OWOH tour! 111 bloggers made there way to my corner of the globe so I used random.org to draw the winners.
DRUM ROLLLLLL PLEASE!!
The ***Lucky Dip*** winners are...

The Altered Paper who has won lucky dip bundle #3
Alicia of Altered Bits who won lucky dip bundle #1
and Debra of It's all good (or at least most of it) who won bundle #4

When I logged in to do this post I saw that there were 24 comments in my spam folder...realising this meant I hadn't included all of the comments in my draw so I did a special 4th draw to be fair (bundle still to be made though!) and the winner of this bonus draw is Que Bella

Congrats everyone and thanks again to all who visited. To be honest I wasn't a good visitor this year as I under estimated the time it takes to do the OWOH tour and life's been busy here with the new commitment of kids being home to do school instead of at school! I think we're getting the hang of it though and should have some art to post here soon....and time to visit my blogging friends!

Saturday, February 12, 2011

ICE storm!


ICE 2011 #8
Society is a Nest II
Fragile Series
Title: Respite 

Eucalyptus and fennel dyed paper, recycled paper and paper scrap, thread

We all need a little respite now and then to make us stronger, more capable, less fragile...

ICE 2011 #9
Society is a Nest II
Fragile Series
Title: Responsible.

Eucalyptus dyed paper, recycled paper scrap, thread.

The text says 'I don't want to be responsible for a broken heart and fractured beat" which is similar to a line in a song by Alanis Morrisette.

ICE 2011 # 10
Society is a Nest II
Fragile Series.
Title: Freedom

Eucalyptus and fennel dyed paper, recycled paper scrap, thread, pencil

Even freedom is fragile.

The text says "Song of Freedom" inspired by Bob Marely (of course!)

ICE 2011 #11
Society is a Nest II
Fragile Series
Title: Wedding Vows

Marriage, it can be so fragile yet it should be so strong, if only we could always remember that we promised.. good times and bad. True acceptance of each others imperfections. It doesn't need to be perfect to be beautiful.

And Strong.

WAHOO! That's 11 done and 2 more fabulous collages to go! I actually haven't touched my art supplies in 2 weeks thanks to the kids going back to school and while that means more free time for some, it means busier days for me. I've got 2 of my children doing correspondence at home this year and it's taken a bit of getting used too, this new time commitment! It's o.k though and I'm sure it will be worth it, I just need to find some sort of new balance again! These collages were made between my last ICE post and the start of Feb, I was hoping to have the last 2 done by now but life's like that! You may have noticed I did do some dyeing with some delicious eucalyptus dye (incorporated into most of these collages) and I am pretty pleased with the results. Today I boiled up some walnuts and made ink and a post about this and the eucalyptus dye is on it's way...I hope!