Printing wrapping paper!

I’m starting a new project… hand-printed wrapping paper! The first screen is coated and drying in the darkroom, I’m waiting for it to dry so I can shoot my first design. My whole darkroom/studio setup is still so new, I’m nervous about whether it’ll work on the first try, here’s hoping it does! Soon I’ll have images of my new project to share… Hoping to finish a bunch of wrapping paper (hopefully at least three designs!) in time to sell at the Chicago Renegade Craft Fair in September!!

canoe atop subaru / paddling out to our campsite

We had a beautiful 25-minute paddle across peaceful waters, through lily pads and rushes, out to our campsite at the end of a long narrow, piney peninsula sticking out into the lake. It was the site of an old loggers’ camp, now converted to two public campsites, accessible only by boat. The soft pine needles were perfect for pitching a tent on, the breeze kept the mosquitoes and deerflies at bay, and we had views out to Mt. Katahdin, and across two pretty little bays, one on each side of our peninsula.

our sweet campsite

We had our first of several spectacularly delicious dinners. My mother does gourmet campfire cooking with gusto, carrying the standard supply of tinfoil and propane camp stove, plus a cast-iron dutch oven for roasting food in the hot coals, and a homemade convection oven for baking cakes and pies on the campfire, as well as a bottle of wine for every night, stores of flour and sugar, butter, eggs, baskets of fresh fruits and veggies, and a snack for every occasion.

blueberry muffins, campfire, reflector oven

first evening on the lake

Our original plan was to camp one night on the peninsula, then paddle out across the widest part of the lake to Hammer Island, a small island with a few campsites and nice views of the mountains, and stay there for the next two nights. But by the morning a real wind had come up, and there were whitecaps on the lake, which we are told makes for unsafe canoeing conditions. So we relaxed under the pines with our novels and our knitting projects, watching the whitecaps churn out on the lake and waves crash on the rocky shore. By and by afternoon we were feeling restless and adventurous so we packed all four humans AND two dogs into the larger canoe and set off across the bay to a tantalizing strip of white sandy beach on the far shore. As soon as we left shore, the winds came up stronger and we realized our weight was poorly balanced in the boat, the dogs were nervous and wouldn’t lie down, they kept jumping and lurching around, everything was tippy and unsteady, the whitecaps were lapping over the gunnels and with too much weight in the front of the canoe, Richard had a challenge trying to steer and keep us on course. It was only a ten-minute paddle but I pretty much spent the whole ten minutes telling myself “we’re going to tip over but it’s OK, I know how to swim, the water’s warm, it’ll be fine.” And it was. We made it across the cove without tipping over, put in at the sandy beach and had a marvelous swim in the lake. The water was unbelievably warm and the sand was improbably white and it made me feel like we’d somehow paddled over to Brazil for a few minutes.

on the beach at sandy cove

For the trip back we were a bit more careful with seating ourselves into the boat and we zipped right back across the cove very neatly and quickly. It was a nice lesson in how important it is to pack the canoe carefully and distribute weight evenly, especially in a stiff wind. After this exciting expedition we were content to just sit back at our campsite and enjoy the view, waiting until the wind died down enough to paddle out onto the lake. As it turned out, it never really did. There were stiff winds and whitecaps all day every day, from dawn til dusk, so we stayed put in our lovely campsite with our vacation books and our knitting and our tasty cooking.

choppy waters / canoe and roots

blueberry picking, sunset swimming

sunset over Seboeis Lake and Mt. Katahdin

Paprika / fern

chilaquiles for breakfast / canoe lessons

We did lots of blueberry picking, and tons of swimming, as the lake was very warm, and took a few short outings into the quieter, shallower, smaller cove on the lee side of our peninsula. Judy gave me some canoeing lessons in the shallow water, trying to teach me how to man the stern and steer. It’s hard! On the last morning the lake was finally calm enough for us to go out and paddle about. We had a lovely turn around the lake and enjoyed the quiet early morning, still water, dragonflies and nice views of katahdin before heading back to break camp.

early morning paddle

what a photogenic little peanut

Here’s Laika! she’s so cute!!! We couldn’t survive for long without a dog. I didn’t want to rush to replace our lost pups too quickly, but we realized that summer is really the best time to start out with a new dog, and we just fell madly in love with Laika’s cute face on petfinder. Right now we are just fostering Laika, we haven’t formally adopted her yet. She has a really tenacious urinary tract infection that hopefully will be all cured after a few more weeks of antibiotics, and then if all goes well, we will finalize the adoption. She seems just as healthy and happy as any puppy, she’s been a crazy little monster all morning and now she is napping sweetly at my feet. Laika is around six months old, she’s a rescue puppy and she was brought up to Maine from a high-kill shelter in Arkansas. Nobody knows what she is, she was billed as husky and german shepherd but we’re thinking she could also have some australian shepherd, maybe even a little bit of beagle? for sure she is 100% puppy. She’s only been with us for a day and a half, but so far I can tell that she is CRAZY about food, any and all of it, she is smart as a whip and busy busy busy all the time. She seemed to fall in love with us just as quickly as we fell for her! She’s an expert counter browser, she knows her name and usually comes when you call, she’s very very curious, she likes chasing butterflies and chickens and trying to climb into the dishwasher, she doesn’t know how to fetch yet but I’m trying to teach her.

Morris & Essex booth -photo by Lisa! thank you!

this post is a work in progress, more details to come, about our trip and the fair…

tiny fuzzy chicks

Back in April my mom got her annual spring order of baby chickies! She picked them up at Blue Seal when they were only a day or two old. Their box had a US Mail label on it – so crazy that you can send baby chickens in the mail! They were postmarked from Idaho. In the box were fourteen little Silver-Laced Wyandotte chicks, peeping and scratching and peering up at us. For the first few weeks they lived inside the house, in a big cardboard box filled with sawdust, then they moved up to a bigger cardboard box with a roost and a tree branch in it.

three days old

two weeks old – little feathers growing in!

After a few weeks they got to move outside into the big girls’ chicken coop! We’ve had an annual problem with foxes raiding the coop and carrying away our chickens, so each year my parents have to upgrade security on the hen-house. Last year they re-built the whole chicken coop entirely, and it is pretty much a high-security luxury chicken palace. Before they could move in, we had to finish shingling the roof and staple hardware cloth all over the ventilation holes to keep out sneaky rodents. The first day they were happy scratching and running all around the fenced-in yard, they’d never had so much space before and they had to try out their wings, making crazy flapping leaps and jumps all over the place. It’s a little bit sad because at that age they are little tiny birds with big wings and they can almost fly, and you can see them thinking “whoa, this is awesome.” But then as they keep growing, their wing-to-body ratio just gets worse and they will be stuck on the ground like the rest of us. Poor little gals.

about a month old.

Anyway, the first night, it started to get dark and they were all out in their yard and didn’t know how to get themselves back inside the chicken house, and they were all settling down to sleep underneath their house, or in the tall weeds around it. We had to go out and chase them and grab them and put them up inside their house, one by one. Chasing fourteen tiny squealing chickens around through waist-high weeds in the dim twilight is really really hard, it took us nearly an hour to grab each one and put them all to bed. Happily they’ve learned to put themselves to bed now. They all sleep in a big snuggly heap most nights, or sometimes a few sleep on the roost like grown-up birds. They’re still little but they look like small adults now, some have tiny red combs and wattles and they’ve all got grown-up feathers instead of fuzz. Judy says we could expect them to start laying their first eggs in the fall.

the new high-security chicken fortress

a pair of inquisitive young ladies (around two months old)

studio room: before

We picked a big room upstairs from the kitchen to be my studio. It’s got six beautiful windows and lots of open space. On the negative side, the floor is in bad shape, it’s got damaged old wood planks with a few big gaps where you can see through to the kitchen below, all covered over by vinyl flooring which is peeling and curling and torn away in a few spots, then covered in some places with a second layer of peeling and curling vinyl, it’s hideous. And the walls are covered with seventies-style fake wood paneling which someone partially painted forest green and then gave up and just punched a few holes through the wall instead of finishing the paint job. They even painted over a few random sections of the cruddy brown trim with what looks like black nail polish.

ugh.

I don’t need my studio to be very fancy at all, it’s just a place for making messes anyway, and we’re supposed to be focusing our renovation efforts on the kitchen and bathroom downstairs, so the studio is like the last priority for real renovations. But the ugly splotches of green paint were going to drive me crazy, so I decided to do a quick and dirty paint job just to give the place a little bit fresher look.

first order of business: cover up those crazy patches of green paint. I can’t possibly concentrate on work if I have to look at that crazy paint job all day.

I even primed everything and then painted it all some historic shade of greenish-blue. (I will admit that I have a strong urge to paint EVERYTHING in the whole house greenish-blue or bluish-green or robins-egg blue or dusty aqua or anything along those lines. I am going to have to use a lot of self control to avoid making the whole house look like a swimming pool.) Anyway, I haven’t totally finished painting but it’s looking a lot better already. I was in a rush to get working so I could print up a bunch of t-shirts and new cards for the Renegade Craft Fair, so I had to start filling up the studio and working in it even before the painting was done. I swear I am going to finish the paint job soon!

it’s not all painted yet, but at least one entire wall is done…

silkscreen printing table

silkscreen set up! My first screen made using my new light table!

I found some small shelves for free on craigslist, and got some more cheap sturdy shelves at a big box store (ugh). Shelving is the one thing I can never find used at the salvation army or on craigslist. My parents gave me a beautiful, incredibly heavy, big long work table (I think maybe an old army mess table?) which they’d in their basement for eons. The table-top is too rough to print on directly, so I made a portable printing station with a smooth, flat slab of wood and silkscreening hinges. I covered the wood with a layer of clear acetate so it’ll be easier to keep the surface clean. For drawing at my worktable, I found a super comfy giant office chair by the side of the road in Limington. For drying printed t-shirts, I strung a clothesline across the back of the studio and tied little loops for hanging clothes hangers at regular intervals. For drying printed cards, I found a beautiful folding drying rack by the side of the street in White Rock, what luck! (I have a sharp eye for free stuff, right?) The biggest studio project was the light box which I need for exposing photo-sensitive emulsion to create my silkscreen stencils. It’s just two long fluorescent shop-light fixtures inside of a big box, on legs, with a thick sturdy glass tabletop. I built one a few years ago when I was setting up my first studio in New York, and it took me a few days in the workshop with my dad’s help. But this time I whipped it up in just one day, in my dad’s workshop, with just a little help from Mike to screw in the light fixtures that evening. And it works!

building my new light table (in Richard’s workshop) … and the finished product!

At the moment I’m using the icky, windowless downstairs bathroom as my darkroom though I would like to eventually build a little darkroom in the closet attached to my studio, I just need to do some major clean-up in there, and hang a door. And I’m using the garden hose for all my washing-up needs, but one day soon we will get running water and plumbing in the studio! I found a utility sink in the back yard at limington (perfect!), and my parents have been trying to get us to take this old claw-foot tub that’s been sitting in their back yard in Gorham for thirty or forty years at least. I think the tub and sink will go side-by-side on the back wall of the studio, by the chimney. I can use the sink for cleaning up small stuff like paintbrushes, and the tub will be excellent for washing out big screens. And gorgeous too. I am going to have such a great wash-up station! The studio’s definitely not finished but it is really exciting to have ONE room in the house that is actually functional. I spent a lot of hours in there during the past few weeks, working late into the night. It’s a great space already.

I’m developing new t-shirt and greeting card designs, so I’ve been working on new design ideas, selecting a few classic favorites to bring back, researching and ordering t-shirts, and building my new screenprinting studio so I can start working! I built a nice big wooden light table for exposing my screens, I built a new printing station with screen hinges, I found a great big old mess table in my parents’ basement to use for a printing table, bought screens and screen-making materials and emulsion, inks, squeegees, etc. I used to have all of these things in my studio in Brooklyn but when I moved to Argentina I had to sell them all so I’m starting over again from scratch, sigh. Cleaned out the studio space at the new house and started priming and painting the walls, set up shelving to store all my supplies, unpacked boxes of art supplies, set up a drying area to hang wet shirts, got the whole studio set up and I’m printing now! I’m having a bit of trouble with the photographic process, namely my “darkroom” (a windowless bathroom) doesn’t seem to be dark enough and sometimes causes me problems, hopefully I’ll figure out how to make that work a little better this weekend. I’ve printed a few of my designs already and I’ve got a bunch more to go!

And I’ve got new card designs too… two brand-new designs, letterpress printed. So I’ve ordered the paper and custom-mixed ink colors, had type-high metal plates engraved from my designs, and I’ve been driving out to Scarborough to work with my letterpress printer, Mark at Dunstan Press, each day, basically standing by the press with him and making sure each stage of the printing process is going well, colors are correct and registration is perfect, etc. It’s really fun to see it all happen! I’ve ordered envelopes and little clear boxes and sleeves for packaging the finished product. I’m hoping I’ll have time to do some screenprinted card designs too, we’ll see how next week goes. It’s going to be a crazy week.

Back to work! Photos and more details to come, probably not until after the fair is over!