Lotus...Lotuses..Lotus.

 Having visited the Blue Lotus Garden here in Victoria today, Here I was stunned by the various shapes and stages of the gorgeous flowers.

                          Only partially open, this is nevertheless  beautiful in it's shape and form.

                                                 Even the simple single white is beautiful

 This double pink is really quite blowsy, but the central seed capsule is quite fascinating. It's slightly warm to the touch and emits a smell rather like menthol!

 T  he gardens harvest the seed heads for the florist trade and sell them green and dried brown.

                                     These are the giant version, standing well above the water.

Mostly Disappointing.

 I untied the bundles of vegetation today, not really expecting very much, as I knew that to get good leaf prints the bundles have to be tied up tightly, and mine weren't. I didn't quite know how to tie them tightly with crackly dry leaves inside. This above already had the yellow splodges on it from wrapping some purple hibiscus flowers, but the orange marks are from the dried mistletoe leaves. Not a good red as I had hoped unfortunately.

 These next ones are more interesting, made from wrapped slightly green Eucalypt leaves. They weren't crispy dried leaves (see previous post) but still green and slightly pliable. They had been picked green and not stored already dry as most of the other leaves had been.

 I decided to do my usual play with a simple inversion in Photoshop, and now we have a stormy sky or even a storm at sea. I love it!

Galls.

 A few weeks back I went out with my secateurs and cut these large galls off a native Cherry tree. I assume that they are made by some insect or other, but these are very old and very dried out. I wanted to boil them up and use the 'juice' to add colour to my Coreopsis dyed fabric.

 While the galls were boiling away I spread out the still wet and mordanted fabric and sprinkled dried leaves over them and only bundled them loosely, as being so dry they would have cracked into tiny fragments had I tied it tightly.

 This is dried Mistletoe leaves and a few flowers. I believe that they might give a reddish colour.

 These fine Eucalypt leaves are a little fresher and as a consequence still retain their green colour.

                                             Wrapped bundles ready for the gall treatment.

Ex Libris

 It seemed an awful waste of rubber to carve out the middle of this small fame block, but if I hadn't, I think that the frame would have ended up buckling and not being square. I haven't carved any letters before, so it was a bit of a learning curve to carve this 'ex libris' stamp.

Using an old butterfly stamp of mine, I tested out the new stamps. They weren't too bad, but the whole thing is a little bit too big when compared with the traditional book ownership plates. Still, I can use the stamps, but perhaps I'll try another set a bit smaller.

Ice Flower Dyeing.

 I've had several bags of frozen flowers of various colours in the freezer for some months and they are taking up too much space! I decided to start with the bluebells and was quite surprised to see the lovely blue shade that they made in lukewarm water. I put them into a mesh bag to try and keep the actual flowers out of the water, but as you can see a lot of the bits were small enough to pass through the mesh.

 Oh no, I added some soda ash as a mordant and this is what happened, no more lovely blue, but a watery yellowish green instead.

 Some more of the blue came out of the flower pulp and now the water is a bluish green, but still very weak and probably not enough to dye the cotton in the bucket.

                           Oh well, let's add some frozen coreopsis flowers and see what happens.

           Now the water is an orangey colour with bits of bluebell floating in it, not very inspiring.

But wait..........the water is now a deep reddish colour with the same coreopsis flowers still immersed.
I'll leave the cotton soaking for a couple of days without stirring and see what I get.

New Stamp - New Project.

 Well, it's not a completely new project as it's another book, this one with eco-dyed fabric and stamps. This stamp shows the seed capsules from a Bottlebrush plant, with the new growth beyond where last years flowers were. I have simplified the design quite a bit with just a few leaves rather than the quantity on the specimen that I worked from.

       This stamps looks as if it would lend itself to Photoshop stamping.....................must try it out.

It's a Book!

                                  Well it's now a finished book, and this is the front cover.

                                                                 Here's the back cover.

 A selection of the pages follows. Above is the Banksia and a mud-map. The spirals represent camp sites.

 This is the inside of the book showing the last page with gumnuts and the inside of the back cover.

                                      Two more species of Eucalypt and their seed capsules.

Another couple of Eucalypt gumnuts with the meandering mud-map and spirals as a background. All the pages are hand sewn into place on a strip of Lutradur for stability and then the whole lot glued into the cover. It was a most interesting project for hot summer days.

Its Almost a Book!

Because of using mud as a paint for the background of the pages, I felt that I should seal the paper and prints against damp fingers that might handle it. I used a matte gel medium as I definitely didn't want a shine, but having said that, I found it difficult to photograph the drying pages because of glare.
Here are 4 double pages ready to dry over night, you can just see the white that I've used to bring up a few highlights. I started off using a lovely new white gel pen, but the fine grit of the mud-paint jammed up the rolling ball, so unfortunately I had to change to a white 'polychromes' pencil which didn't give anywhere near such a dense and fine line. Now to think about how I'm going to bind the pages into a book, and what sort of cover I'm going to make.