This is your last reminder on the blog to participate in my giveaway for lots of pretty papers! The raffle ends November 12th.
#41

I made a marbling sampler, because Steve Pittelkow sent me such an amazing array of his marbled papers. Look at the variety of marbling styles he has experimented with and developed, and these are just the tip of the iceberg (meaning, if you saw the entire sheets, you would be in awe). I hope to share more with you as the days progress. I wove the marbled strips into a sheet of Christine Higgin’s handmade clay paper. Did you know that you can add clay to paper? It adds weight to the paper and it fills in the gaps between the fibers, yielding a very smooth surface. Christine generously shared her recipe with us:
Clay Paper Recipe: Beat 1-3/4 lb of second cut cotton linters in 15 gallons of water for 1-1/2 hours at zero in a Reina beater. Add 2 cups of kaolin (available from papermaking suppliers) or local clay that has been mixed into a slurry and strained to remove an rocks, sticks, etc. Add 10 drops of retention aid.
#42

This is another marbled paper by Tom Leech. Do you see that each marbler has his/her own style of marbling? I saw hearts in Tom’s marbling, so I tried to echo that in the way I cut the paper for the weaving. I wove it with Hiromi Paper‘s brazilian banana paper in red.
#43


#44
I’m so fortunate that there is another artist who makes paper right in my town! Susan Mackin Dolan is also a printmaker, and she let me pick through some old shaped papers that she made years ago in bright colored cotton, which she enhanced with lithography. I wove these stockings (I can’t stop thinking of The Night Before Christmas story) into a sheet of Thai Unryu with sprinkled newspaper bits from Black Ink/Graphic Products Corp.


I decided for the first time in this 100 days to make a weaving using the strip method that I learned in elementary school. I cut one sheet into strips vertically and the other horizontally. Up until now either my warp or my weft has been left solid, at least to some degree. And let me tell you that having one sheet of paper in tact makes it much easier to do a weaving. And I like the results much better too. I find today’s weaving, which includes two views of the moon’s surface (one in color and one in black and white) rather blasé. Maybe it would look better if viewed from outer space!

This is a prototype for a kit that I’m developing and will launch soon. It is a shadow lantern, one of the projects featured in my book Paper Illuminated. The image looks fuzzy because those are shadows that are cast from a cut-out sheet of paper onto a solid sheet, with a 1/4″ balsa wood frame in between. I’d be curious to hear what you think!