printed material

 I feel I could write a post starting with the words 'What a strange time of year it has been...' and just keep changing the date on it annually as every season and every year is different these days. At last we are seeing fledgelings, mainly blackbirds and song thrushes, and,  for the first time yesterday, this young robin. Other young things are conspicuous by their absence but I am hopeful for baby swallows soon! Last year the swallows here did not breed. This year, despite returning at least a month later than usual, they are thriving and there is a huge amount of activity in the air. They look strong and are dive bombing any other bird that goes near their nesting site in our small pig cott. Whilst I was admiring a butterfly the other day one of the swallows swooped and caught it before my very eyes. I've never seen that before and it was amazing - obviously not for the butterfly, but that is the cycle of life and they're all in the food chain somewhere.

Things are also improving for moths nationwide, albeit marginally. Numbers are well down but traps this week have brought some beautiful moths to the garden. I thought you may like to see a selection. Last night's trap yielded about 100 moths, all resting quietly now until we release them this evening.

 I found a small pair of 1950's type curtains in the Oxfam shop for £1. A bit faded  in places but who cares when I can make something from them. I also found some vintage ric rac in my stash and enough bits and pieces for some lining so......
 I made a bag to raise funds for the charity Combat Stress and I liked it so much...

I made another! There's something about that black, yellow and pink that reminds me of my gran's bathroom tiles when I was a child. Now all I have to do is hope someone will want them and that they raise some money.

 When I was in town this morning I bumped into a local farmer I know. He was getting something repaired on his tractor at the tyre depot and was telling me he needed it done urgently so that he could get on with sileage today before the rain came. As I'd just listened to the announcer on the car radio telling me today was going to be the hottest day of the year I sort of scoffed and asked if he was joking. Watching the TV weather tonight has proved him right. We are apparently in for heavy rain and possible thunder tomorrow. I can't get my head around how the weather can be so changeable after the soaring heat today.

Plans to run a moth trap tonight have been shelved but a quick walk around the garden this evening on rabbit patrol has been glorious. There are bees in abundance out there and deep inside some flowers there is evidence of pollen dust collected and scattered everywhere. My poppies look beautiful even though they are besieged by cuckoo spit.  I even caught sight of a Broad Bodied Chaser and he stayed still long enough for me to capture him over and over again. I thought he might be newly emerged and still waiting to develop that characteristic cobalt blue body but a closer look at his wings show him to be a bit ragged around the edges. A beautiful creature nonetheless.

I've been doing some cyanotypes this afternoon with some wild flower images, part of a new project I'm looking at. It has been such a fabulous day full of intense colour but it sounds like batten down the hatches again for tomorrow. Roll on Friday.

 A quick re-watch of the film in the last post sent me off to find this. I suddenly remembered this book of cigarette cards that I picked up in a mixed box at an auction last year. Seeing the hand of the police constable on the film brought back the memories of when they used to do traffic point duty. I am not as old as these cards (truly) but the police used to control traffic regularly when I was a child in the 50's and 60's and I can remember those hand signals and what they meant. When I took driving lessons in the mid to late 70's they were still teaching us how to use hand signals despite most cars  having indicators by then. I think it was meant to prepare you for every eventuality! I can still remember having to wind down the window whilst driving (no electric windows then of course), extend my hand clearly if I wanted to turn right, rotate my hand at the wrist to signal I wanted to turn left and gently wave my arm up and down to indicate I was slowing down.Surely I can't be alone with these memories?

These cards must come from the 30's I think and this is just a small selection but they made me smile, especially as it seems to assume that most people had a chauffeur. I find it interesting that the card about the rules for children crossing the road does not have them standing at a zebra crossing. These, along with flashing Belisha beacons are also a memory of my childhood and I thought they existed in the 30's?  They were also days of innocence, when there were not huge numbers of traffic on the roads, hence children running with hoops and lastly, my favourite - 'Do not play with a dog in the street'. Own up if you did that......

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.

I came across this the other day and bookmarked it. All I remember is that it is the work of Claude Friese-Greene and that it has been picked up by Stephen Fry and Kevin Spacey, whose tweets have helped it go viral. I'm not in the same league and don't tweet but it is a glorious film and I'm happy to introduce a few more viewers to it.

 I was going at some point to do a post about all the prints received for the print exchange but a quick look at Gina's blog today shows that she's beaten me to it, so, unless you live in Australia and are still waiting for the postman (yes, Fiona, I mean you!), please have a look at the completed set. They are all so different but a great collection to have.

Initially I thought I'd keep all the prints in a dedicated box but let me share what John sent with his print and how it changed my thinking. Firstly, I had a big smile when I opened his package as I'd laughingly dubbed us 'the magnificent seven' in one of my e mails and he had found this very kitsch album cover to protect his print in the post. I did wonder which one I was.........
 He kindly also included a piece of bookcloth in my package on which he'd printed a mini print exchange label so I had to make a book with it to store them in for posterity didn't I?
 And it seemed only fair that his print should be the first one in the book too....
Now they are all bound up and can be viewed in their entirety anytime I want to. So many processes and ideas contained in one volume, which have generated lots of ideas for prints in my head. At the risk of repeating myself....thanks again everyone. It's been fun and I am delighted with my book of prints.

 Every one of the above people joined me when I threw out the comment recently about doing a mini print exchange.  I heard today that my final posting has reached Fiona in Australia so I'm joining some of the others and showing my offering for it.... and, be prepared, it's a bit of a saga.....
 We agreed at the outset that our prints would be a maximum size of 12/12.5 cm square. Whilst I was waiting for an idea to come to me I did a bit of displacement activity and cut up some old collagraph plates into the agreed size. I intended to ink up and print some of them as a warm up  as I had never printed an edition before and wanted to be consistent. One of the plates was the collagraph above. Although months old I'd never even proofed it before. It was made from a mailing from someone about the plight of honey bees and I remember spending ages cutting out all the small hexagons and then re-glueing them in different places to get some height to the plate. I had an idea that it would work with some text or some bees attached to it so I took some beautiful words from the anthology 'The Bees' by Carol Ann Duffy and set them out in Photoshop. My original thought was to add text and a 3D bee to the print with  wings that could be adjusted but I discounted it as too complicated and added an old illustration from a sketchbook to the poetry and had it made into a thermofax screen.
All went well initially. I printed enough copies of the collagraph using different viscosities of ink to ensure they looked similar if not the same. I was well within the posting deadline we'd all agreed and all I had to do was allow for drying time and then screen print over the top.
I only wish it was as easy as I made that last paragraph sound. In truth, what could go wrong, did go wrong! I practiced with the thermofax screen to get the placement and the colouring right but I just did not like the results. I also only had so many proofs to play with and could not risk ruining the seven copies I needed for the finished article. By the time I was happy with the colour choice etc, my screen had started to break down. Maybe it was because the thermofax screen is better suited to fabric rather than paper, but I knew I only had a finite number of chances before it gave up the ghost completely so I just had to get on with it. I had to give up on the bee but I needed the text to stay put.
So, I had to find a plan B and I sort of went back to the original idea. I cut seven bees out of watercolour paper and attached each one after printing the text. It is easy to see where the screen was failing on a couple of the letters but I have convinced myself that this was a design choice and not an error........
Here above is my final print edition. Once I had all my copies done I packaged them up with the embossed name label, wrapped them in tissue paper and dispatched them just in time to meet the deadline . It seemed ironic to me that I had set the ball rolling but was actually bringing up the rear in terms of delivery but they have all reached their destinations and everyone has been kind about them for which I say 'Thank You'. In return I now have a fabulous collection of prints created by diverse means. When I know the exchange has completed I will share them here and link to their creators. It has been a real learning curve and despite the problems I've really enjoyed it. Thanks to one and all.

 In my kitchen I have a dried seed head from an allium christophii, picked from the garden a couple of years ago and placed in a jug on the windowsill. I can often be caught watching the shadows it creates on the wall when we have some sun. For some reason the other day I picked it up and started looking at the marvellous construction of the individual flowers all radiating from the central stem. When in flower each of these is a tiny purple star, each of which dries to reveal the black seeds. I have only ever bought them as bulbs and would imagine they take an age to bring on from seed but once in my hand, I had to photograph it from all angles. It reminded me of an image I'd seen of a linocut inspired by alliums and I decided to capitalise on these rare, consecutive days of sunshine and get out the cyanotype chemicals.


 I wanted to do some cyanotypes last year but the weather was atrocious in 2012 as there was never enough light and heat to have a go outside , but I used my photos this week to produce some transparencies and then used these to get my images yesterday. You can see from the image above that I ended up with a haze of tones and a cleaner black and white image would have worked better, but the cyanotypes I produced are really rather delicate because of that haze and I think I prefer them to the usual clear blue and white effect.

 I have a box arrangement that I put my head in to coat the paper with the solution, trying to keep the light at bay.I'm sure I must look pretty odd but it is fatal if light gets in as the solution starts to turn colour immediately.  Once dry I quickly put the paper on a photo clip frame, put the transparency on top and then the glass, held on with bulldog clips to make good contact. Then I rush from the shed to the garden and prop the whole thing at an angle to the sun and watch it turn charcoal grey in colour. I'm sure it is an exact science in someone else's hands, but I just decide when it looks dark enough and then take it back to the shed and rinse it under water until it runs clear. I used some soft printmaking paper for the first time with them and that might also have contributed to the hazy look. I usually use heavyweight watercolour paper which stands up to the rinsing and the images are often sharper, although I then did these bits of bracken on the same paper and they are a substantially clearer image so it must be that the transparency was too airy fairy and not sharp enough. I also did a cyanotype image of my print exchange idea but as we're still winding that up I cannot show it here. Thank heavens I never decided to do seven cyanotypes for the exchange. Waiting for the sun to shine consistently here would have meant waiting a long time to get them done! These large fern prints are already the front and back pages of a japanese stab bound book, stabbed and waiting for stitching. Blue and white is so Japanese isn't it? The perfect way to use them I think.