Celebrate life & love and other fragments

 

I did quite a bit of letterpress work on Saturday: printing some celebrate life & love cards and post cards; first print run on a card commission; and printing some celebratory coasters.

But first CELEBRATE life & love. I just felt the need to put a positive message out the about the importance of celebrate each day of life that we can and also celebrate the love we share. I had been printing some coasters in a bright red so decided that a strong luscious vibrant pink would be uplifting. The opening photo is me playing with left over ink on darker coloured paper. The actual cards are given a bit of sparkle with copper dust. The postcards are on white and grey as you can see.  The type for the cards is Mistral 72pt.

I printed 40 of the first run of memorial cards. Fiona is to hand illustrate them and print the inside message.

I printed a number of sets of Christmassy coasters including the Cheers coasters.

My workspace was tidy but full as I packed up on Saturday afternoon.

Finishing bending leaves on stems

 

A good outcome today in that I got 15 larger patinated copper leaves riveted to their aluminium stems. I'm making one set of 9 on 60cm stems; and two sets of 3 on 40cm stems. The set of larger leaves on the 60cm stems are pictured above.

A couple of process photos follow including photos of the more pointy tops of the stems where they are riveted to the leaves; and gently rounded base to make it reasonably easy to push into the soil, gravel or grass when installing the sets.

Some photos of the finished sets on three.

To keep the workshop a bit tidier I have hung the four leaf related sculptures on the wire mesh.

A good sense of achievement for Friday. 

In the mist

 

We have had some welcome rain over the last couple of days - not heavy but rather light and soaking. The trees and blossoms, such as the one above and those following, are loving it.

We woke to a white out this morning as you see from the photo of the white beech tree below.

I was surprised to see one of the local female wallabies out in the mist and misty rain. What was extra exciting was to see her joey poke its head our whilst mum was feeding; but then decided that staying warm in the pouch was a better option as you can see from the third photo. You can just see its little face looking out to the wet grass and weeds in photos one and two. Mum seemed to be enjoying enjoying eating the dead heads of dandelion flowers.

G's orchids got a good water through the shade cloth.

Back to the white beech tree - the mist had lifted so you can now appreciate that a couple of days ago all the feral bushes etc were removed from its base. Lovely to see the tree in its grandure. It will look terrific when the rubbish is removed. The tree has a fig growing with it and a strong birding butterfly vine at its base.

A varied weekend

 

Whilst Saturday was about letterpress and shopkeeping; today was about creating large patinated leaves (some above), testing a design for a small scroll winder and completing two olive ladles.

The shop keeping was about dusting gold dust off the peace and joy Christmas postcards and cards and packaging them and adding them to the Deckled Edge Press shop inventory

I have been working on big (about 5cm wide and 27cm long) patinated copper leaves that will become part of outdoors sculptural installations. Some process photos follow.

And another photos of half of the stash.

Fiona is creating mini boxes with scrolls and asked if I could help with creating a rod winding thingy. So the image below shows a prototype.

We had sold out of small olive ladles - ladles with holes to let olive oil or vinegar through when serving. I completed a couple more this morning; and one sold this afternoon. Probably need to make a few more.

All in all a fairly productive couple of days.

Time to assemble some bits

 

I melted a mix of scraps of gold, 925 silver and silver-plated brass to create some special pieces of melted metal jewellery.

During the week I managed to drill, grind and polish the pieces. Though I did not have a great amount of time for my art today I did manage the assemble the stash above.

Fiona suggested that because the metal was more valuable and had a slight rose gold hue that I might make some of the pieces a little more elegant by adding crystal beads. I did that with four of the smaller pairs of melted metal - drops are about 1cm square.

There were others that made a strong enough statement on their own.

The freeform piece of metal has now become an interesting pendant.