Silly wrens build these fragile nests inside the garage and then have no way of tending their young if they get locked out in the evening. So I got this one in time and moved it outside to a safe place but still close to the house as that seems to be what the little lady wanted.
It is amazing how light and loosely put together these nests are. Wrens must be in such a hurry to start laying eggs. I hope she or another bird finds it and puts it to good use.
I did have some spare time to go back to those wildflowers in the six way book. Still no improvements on this front. Dragging a brush across the gesso makes it muddy and less intense in color. But I do like doing them.
Some day this book will seem like quite a find in the documentation of the natural world. I hope to get it finished before I can’t even remember what I was doing with the book. What in the world possessed me to make the pages out of such thin paper and then having to gesso each page to make it usable. Why couldn’t I just use decent watercolor paper pages in the first place and a lot less of them to make the same size book. Always making things more difficult than they need to be. Well no one else would have a book like this. No one else would think nothing of filling their studio with thin papers gessoed on both sides and waiting days for them to dry to be folded into folios so they could stitch endlessly putting it all together only to be faced with having to use it! Maybe dementia is catching.
And here are the latest drawings a day.
Yellow succulent
with pale green leaves meanders
along the sidewalks.
Some interesting
grasses along the driveway
are now being drawn.
Very graceful grass
with spaced out bamboo-like leaves.
Good for tickling!
Late forsythia
blooming among dark green leaves
left from early blooms.
I worked out how the Stoat Book will be put together. Getting the fore edges to all match up with no white spaced in between images required rethinking how the text was to be laid out. Now I have all eleven pages saved in the computer just waiting for me to figure out which Epson printer to use. I also need to design a cover for it….graphite on an old contact print that has the same dull colors, a stoat tucked in somewhere. And “The Stoat Story” sounds a bit daft but after all that is the best I can come up with…because without him the old woman would still be in bed!
But I am not going to even start to print those pages for a very limited book edition without first finishing the Bush Book. I got tired of cutting all those 160 pages precisely so just quit for awhile. Well that does not get them finished so started back on them the other day when the caretaker was here. Now only forty more to go and I can start gluing them all together in order. Only ten of those books thank heavens! The problem is finding a long enough clean space in the studio to lay them out as I glue down the line.
Then it is perfect scoring and folding, adding the identification papers to the back of each page before making the covers and sleeves.
I really do need to get things finished and stop being distracted.
After both of these books are finished I would like to do a bit of writing….not much….to go with a layered concertina. Another book in black and white with a bit of red maybe. It would go with the other ones I am trying to do to keep up with my friends in Australia who are all making different bindings to go with different stories.
God forbid I get caught lagging behind!
That said I am off to cut up those forty pages.
BUT just before I go, here was my day today….clean up for the cleaning lady, do the drawing a day, make sure Lee and I had breakfast, hide down in the office with Lee doing a workout and watching the last of a cop series on Roku, then lunch, then facing the recall letter on my garage refrigerator, pulling it away from the wall to find the model and serial numbers, and then relocating everything in its freezer and frig sections to other places, making a call that puts one on hold til someone gets to you, scheduling an appointment to have it repaired rather than accept a measly rebate toward a new one, agreeing to wait til the part is mailed, getting the repair people’s call and make a tentative appointment to fix it, but being told that I have to give them all road names to get here because they do not trust GPS in the country.
Cutting forty papers on four sides each seems like a nice soothing thing to do. But sometimes I sure as hell wish there was someone else here who could lend a hand when needed.
Enough! The board shear waits.