Bean Bag Book

Recently I spent a day traveling. By mid-day I had eaten nothing but the  17 peanuts that the airline offered me, so during a 3 hour layover I set out to find something resembling actual food and ended up with a pretty darn good food court Mexican lunch of a tasty bean and chicken burrito and some reasonably  good chips and salsa.

Detail of bean bag book

As I was about to crumple up and toss the paper bag in which my lunch had been served, I saw the polite admonition on the bag to recycle, and instead tucked it between the pages of The Interestings, my travel book of choice that day.

Back at home yesterday I pulled the brown bag from my carry-on and started piddling with it, and by afternoon I had turned the take-out bag into a spur -of- the-moment  journal. I added only odds and ends already in my stash: some blank brown kraft paper pages, a bamboo chopstick, some black rubber bands, a date stamp just for fun, and some color accents from an old gouache paint set of my dad’s.

I’m giving a book-making class a month or so from now. While this one wasn’t completely perfect, I may use it as an example of how to create a nifty little book out of just a few odds and ends.

 

A belated bit of show and tell–New years greeting

After wrestling with a complicated New Year’s greeting project, a scrap of paper on my work table turned it all into something much simpler, and somehow more satisfying. And who doesn’t need another nice bookmark?

I would stick my neck out for you . . .

A little homemade Valentine card for Second Child, far away in the frozen north.

Nemo Did What?!

Nothing like a winter snowstorm (apparently courtesy of my cat, Nemo, who is taking the blame for much of this event) to give one time to get back to one’s blogging. I haven’t been idle, though, and I think it’s time to show you some of what I’ve been up to.

Winter haiku lanterns with celestial bodies–stars and moons, galaxies and planets.  Oh, and a few choice lines, first from Basho:

Come, let’s go

snow viewing

until we’re buried

And the second, from Issa:

No talents

also no sins

winter seclusion

What more do you need when you’re snowbound?

String of hearts

And a last minute Valentine quickie from a paint chip, pink embroidery thread, a needle and some scissors:

Gallery

Gallery, a photo by floating ink on Flickr.

Don’t store cut garlic in oil for more than 4 hours.

Play

Play, a photo by floating ink on Flickr.

Make Jimmy play with me.

Why are you so obsessed with that bowl?

That’s what my better half keeps asking. I don’t know the answer. There are a lot of bowls in my work.

Some are tea bowls. Some are oryoki bowls.  Some are broken, some are not. Sometimes a bowl is just a bowl.

Which is nice . . .

So this came in yesterday’s mail. I’m always happy to see it. But this time I was even happier than usual. One of the items chosen for display in the Reader Challenge Results, which featured hand carved stamps this time, was something that looked awfully familiar. This:

My sneakers! They were in amazing company on these pages–such beautiful things the other contributors had made.  I blush. Okay–done now. I’ll try to restrict myself to quiet giggling.

“Look at me making art!”

Monoprint van gogh’s baby, a photo by floating ink on Flickr.

Quoth a friend of Second Child’s, who had come over to spend the weekend with us.  On Saturday I made large sheet of gelatin and brought out the watercolors, but the girls came nosing around and I turned the place over to them. SC’s friend, who was not having a good day, really got into making monoprints, and at one point threw her arms up in the air and shouted “Look at me making art!”

Made my whole weekend.

Just over a week later, I suddenly realized I’d stored the gelatin sheet out on the porch inside the gas grill, intending to go back to it on Sunday. Then I forgot it. By the time I retrieved it, the gelatin had frozen and thawed maybe 4 times. and it was really in bad shape. Sort of crumbly. Not good. But before throwing it out,  I got out some sheets of paper and the paints–nothing to lose, right? I ended up with some nice pieces–they’ll be perfect for backgrounds for . . . something. That’s one of them at the top of this post, and another that’s become my current header.