Week Review: Pictures, Frames, Rust Dyeing and Sketchbooks

I’ve decided this year to start doing these week review posts. I find that whilst I might be doing things over the course of the week, they either aren’t significant enough to warrant a whole post about them, or they are things I written about before. I thought, though, it might be interesting to see what I get up to, and it is a good record for me to see what I’ve done in the week.

I’m currently in the process of preparing for Shopfest and an exhibition at the beginning of March, so much of this week has been getting my new work mounted and framed. I’ve also had time to do some rust dyeing (this time with tea) and make a few new sketchbooks.

The first thing I’ve been working on this week is getting my favourite pieces from the Poetry of Decay course I did back in November, mounted and packaged to sell. I’ve also framed a couple of pieces that I think look best in a frame.

I’ve had a number of pictures like the one below, reading to be mounted for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it until now. I don’t have pictures of the recent ones I’ve done, but they are the same idea (three squares in a column) and are part of my Snapshot series.

I’ve finished another piece of work. This has gone through a lot of different stages and it has a lot of layers. I wish I’d taken a picture of it before I finished it, because it looks so drastically different, but I’m really pleased with how it came out. I’ve started working more on canvas recently, which I was resistant to do for a long time, but I’m slowly finding a way to make it work for me. I have a number of other finished canvases, which I’ll be sharing on Instagram in the coming weeks.

Having done more work on canvas, I’ve been figuring out how to frame them myself. I found a straightforward solution, which involves using premade mouldings and just gluing/stapling them together. They have turned out quite sturdy and I think, now they are painted, look pretty good. They are still drying, so I can’t show you the finished results with the canvases in the frames.

I’ve done some more rust dyeing, this time using tea rather than vinegar. (It is how I dyed these papers.) I’ve managed to dye a lot of paper in just a couple of days, because it is so easy to set up and leave during the day or overnight, without having to put any effort in, and it creates such beautiful paper. I don’t know whether I am going to package these up and sell them as paper sets or make books out of them yet, but for the moment, I’m just going to look at them!

I made a few more sketchbooks, using the methods I talked about in this post. I finished off an A5 watercolour sketchbook that I’ve been avoiding completing. I had the covers made and the paper cut, I just couldn’t be bothered to bind it. Now that’s done, I feel a lot better. I also made a couple of A7 concertina sketchbooks because I had some paper that I thought would make pretty covers.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I’ve got a few things coming up, so a lot of what I’ve been doing recently is bits and pieces and a lot of finishing off. Hopefully in a couple of months, when I have a quieter period again, I’ll be able to get back into trying new ideas and experimenting with things again.

Also, a quick note to add, if you haven't spotted, I made a new banner for the blog, with a new colour scheme. I felt like, after three (or is it four?) years, it needed a bit of a change!