Experiments In Papermaking 2: Plant Materials

So it looks like I'll be doing a papermaking demo and providing letterpress-printed-on-handmade-paper menus for an event in late October. While the client would be perfectly happy with made-from-recycled-paper paper, I'd like to make something rather more special. Plus, if it turns out, I can add a new product to my shop(s).

So a few minutes ago I came back in from cutting this from my back field:

That's a whole lot of super-tall grass (and there's an even bigger whole lot still uncut if I need more), and (I think) two different plants which are both locally called goldenrod. Although, they're similar enough that it's possible one could be a later-flowering variety of the other. My knowledge of local plants really isn't what it should be, so while these are drying, I'll be researching to find out exactly what they are, so I can include that information with whatever I end up making.

So now I have to let the plants dry (for now they're out in the sun, but if it threatens to rain, I'll move the bins into the shed). Later, they'll be cut up and boiled for a very long time to break the fibres apart. Then comes the blender. Oh, for a proper paper mill! Maybe someday, after I build my printshop (I am very good at dreaming).

And for anyone wondering what the place looks like these days, here's the hill leading up to the back field:

And here's the house with some lovely blue sky and the tree that rattles on the roof in the wind and drops fat water drops on the roof after it rains:

Foggy Porcupine

For those of you curious about what's going on at the homestead, here are a couple of fairly recent photographs.

First, around mid-April, our resident porcupine decided to take a wander through our yard to nibble on some of the new plants.

You can see that even just a couple of weeks ago, the grass was quite brown (though the coltsfoot was busy popping up its yellow dandelion-like flowers). A more recent photograph, from last week, shows how things are greening up around here.

They're even more green now. Pretty soon, the maples will have dropped their flowers and come out in full leaf. The buds are just about ready to burst now.

Back at the Ranch

A couple of days ago it finally snowed and as soon as my load of laundry was done, I went for a walk. It looked like this out the front window when I left:

When I got back, the light was waning and my house was all glowy:

Like a Moth to a . . . Porch Light

We get a lot of moths out here in the country, but there's so much other wildlife that I haven't paid them much attention until now.

Last I night I happened to notice that there were a lot of fat, pale moths on the screen door, so I decided to have a closer look.

Of course, you can't see much from inside the screen. Our screen door has those latches that snap shut with a bang, so I had to be reeeeeally careful when I opened it and crept outside.

Some work on the ol' web, and luckily this is a pretty distinctive moth, and I was able to figure out what kind it is. At first I thought it was the evening primrose moth (Schinia florida), which is very similar in colour and shape, but I know that insect species can be very difficult to tell apart, and my moth has a distinctly different pattern on its wings, even if the colours are the same.

So I kept looking. This gaily decorated fellow turns out to be Dryocampa rubicunda, the rosy maple moth. Pretty much their entire lifecycle centres around the maple tree, so it make sense that we have lots of these moths since we have a lot of maples. If you're interested, you can read more on the Bug Guide, or Wikipedia.

While I was out in the dark trying to get some good photos of D. rubicunda, I spotted another handsome fellow.

He's an attractive wood-grain brown and both smaller and less furry than the maple moths. There were a couple of them on the deck, and they both sat with their abdomens curving straight up.

The, as I was getting ready to go back inside to warm up my chilly toes, a big, furry brown moth landed on the screen next to the maple moths. Since I had the camera out already, I took his picture, too, though being dark brown, it was hard to get a decent shot.

Both of these brown moths are as yet unidentified. I'll give it a shot later today, though I don't have high hopes as there are an awful lot of brown night-flying moths in the world, even in this small area of it.

We also have a number of mammalian visitors. We have a resident vole who has an extensive burrow conveniently located near one of the bird seed spots. There is a pair of chipmunks (perhaps not a mated pair, but two of them, anyway) and at least one red squirrel. A few snowshoe hares are regular visitors, and then one day, this cutie wandered into the yard:

He's a woodchuck or marmot (Marmota monax) and would no doubt be a pest if we had a garden. He seemed quite happy to toodle around the yard munching on weeds and didn't seem too concerned when I went out on the deck to get a clearer shot.

And just yesterday, I was about to go outside during a break in the drizzle, to have a quick turn around the property, and found this almost right outside the front door:

He sat there quite content until he saw me out of the corner of his eye, and then he took off for the woods. I didn't get a good enough look from the right angle to tell if he was a small snowshoe hare or not. I don't have a good book on Nova Scotia mammals (just one on animal tracks), so I don't know what other lagomorphs there might be around these parts.

So, I need a book on Nova Scotia mammals, and one on Nova Scotia insects (or at least moths, butterflies, dragonflies and beetles), and probably soon one on Nova Scotia wildflowers and plants. Like these, maybe:

THE LAND MAMMALS OF NOVA SCOTIA

Spring Cards: Design 1 Complete

I don't know if I'll get any more of these done by the time the Halifax Crafters Spring Market happens (which is April 17-18), but at least I'll have this one done: The Bluejay (Cyanocitta cristata).

I'm planning to do a whole "Birds of Nova Scotia" series eventually (collect them all!). Next I'll probably do a downy (or maybe hairy) woodpecker, and then chickadee. Mostly because they're some of the most common visitors around here, and I know I can do them in two colours. I'd like to do pheasant, too, but he'd take at least three (black, red-brown and green).


If you're curious about the process of designing letterpress cards (or at least the process I used in this particular instance), you can see my posts on the preliminary design and the digital proof for this same card.

Actually, just for fun, here are the three images in sequence:

We Had The Neighbours Over for Lunch

I've been meaning to post more about the house, but somehow other things kept taking precedence. Today was such a good day for avian neighbours, though, that I was finally prompted to blog.


With the exception of bald eagles and ravens, who tend to fly overhead but not stop in, I saw every kind of bird today that I had seen at the the house so far, plus a couple of new visitors.


We have two suet feeders, which are frequented by black-capped chickadees, bluejays and downy woodpeckers. We've had large flocks of chickadees, who are entirely fearless and cheerful little birds. I can't say how many have visited at once, because they don't stay still long enough to count. As for bluejays--who like both the suet and the loose seeds--we usually get five or six at a time, but I've seen as many as twelve flitting about the yard at once.


The downys tend to stop by singly, but there are at least two of them; we've spotted a male and a female (the males have a red spot on the back of their head). There is a flock of mourning doves who visit the loose seed (and who will even chase off the bluejays, if they get too obnoxious). The number varies, but I think there may be six or seven altogether.


There are also at least two crows who visit regularly, but unlike city birds, they're quite shy and keep their distance from the house. They fly into the trees if anyone goes outside, but I think they're beginning to figure out that a person outside often means tasty things to eat. One of them is a relatively small bird, and the other is so large I keep checking the shape of his (or her) tail to make sure it is actually a big crow, and not a small raven.


Today, I glanced out the window and saw--to my surprise and delight--that the black and white, red head-spotted woodpecker clinging to the nearest suet feeder was much larger than our usual downy visitors. It was a shyer bird, a hairy woodpecker. He sat and ate off one feeder while the little female downy had her lunch on the other. I ran upstairs to get my camera, but he flew off just as I was adjusting the focus (which is what also happened with the crow photo, except I managed to snap a poorly exposed pic of him flying away).

The other new visitors were three (or maybe more) tree sparrows. They look much like house sparrows, except they have very reddish brown heads and eye-stripes. According to my bird book, they're winter visitors. They didn't pay any attention to the suet, but instead hopped around pecking at the remnants of the seeds left by the jays.

I also experimented with some leftover bacon grease from this morning's breakfast. I always hate to just throw it away, as it seems like something the local wildlife would enjoy. So this afternoon I mixed a bunch of bird seed into it and made it into a sort of mushy cake on a scrap of wood, then put it out on the picnic table to see what would happen. The bluejays loved it. They don't always like to get so close to the window when we're right inside watching, but there were as many as five at a time pecking at the bacon seedcake. So now I have a use for bacon grease.


Photos, from top to bottom (all by Niko):

• Bluejay on a suet feeder.
  
• Black-capped chickadee on one of the suet feeders, on the table because too many bluejays at once broke the hanging chain.
  
• Female downy woodpecker on suet feeder
  
• Male downy woodpecker on suet feeder, restored to its hanging position with the help of some twine
  
• A bluejay and a mourning dove (look close, she's brown and hard to spot)
  
• Crow, who decided he didn't like the look of my camera and flew away as I was pressing the shutter release
  
• A bluejay laying claim to the bacon seedcake.

Or Falling Off a Bicycle

Well, I managed to do pretty well with keeping up on my NaNoWriMo word counts. Until Friday. I missed a couple of days, but managed to get caught back up again. Then came Friday, and snow, and a full day in the printshop, and driving home in the dark and wind. I was both tense and limp by the time I got in the door. I managed to feed myself some leftovers and then collapsed on the couch next to Bill, who'd had an even worse day of driving than me--his driver's side windshield wiper went on the way in the school and he had to drive leaning over to look out the passenger side. To his credit, he made it to school, did the whole day and made it home again.

And the weekend was full of house things and driving back and forth to Truro trying to get the right bits to install the new faucet, and again no writing happened. So anyway, I'm three days behind on writing, which is really just a point of pride. There's nothing saying I have to complete NaNoWriMo, but I'd really like to. And of course, today is such a perfect day that I've had a really hard time keeping myself inside working. There's a gate that needed disassembling, so I could have the boards to put up a shelf, you see. And now I really want to go out a snap a photo of a mushroom I spied in the undergrowth near the driveway, and I have to move those last couple of gate boards up next to the house, and, and, and.

In other news, I'm working on a fairly large job printing business cards and hang tags for a textiles artist. I had hoped to get started on that today, but getting Bill to school takes precedence over getting me to the printshop. He should have his truck sorted out by tomorrow, though, so I'll head down then. The polymer plates are ready, and they look pretty good. Some of the type is quite small, but I've printed type that small before and haven't had too many problems. So main issue is going to be the pressure on the press. The Vandercook Universal 2 that's in the shop has developed a problem where the press bed won't drop as far as it should, no matter how you crank it. By using very little packing, it's still possible to print polymer plates--as long as the paper isn't too thick. I'll be printing on textured card stock, so I hope that I'll be able to get the pressure to cooperate. Otherwise I'll have to print on the Universal 1 in the Design shop. Which I actually like better, but I'll be more likely to be in the way of some class or another, and the Universal 1 has issues of its own.

(Photo: the Dawson Printshop's Vandercook Universal 2 proof press, before it developed press bed pressure adjustment problems. Photo by Niko.)

Anyway, if I can get that job started tomorrow, I might be able to finish it by the end of the week. Then it'll be back to holiday cards, a 2010 calendar, and book jewelry. And maybe a couple of really fantastic blank journals. Oh yeah, and a binding job. I'll need to start that this week, too.

Catalogues for Sandra Brownlee

I'm supposed to be printing cards today. A Halifax stationery store, Duly Noted, is patiently waiting for an order they put in several weeks ago. Alas, today the car decided not to start. In fact, it didn't even seem to try to start. I'm hoping it's something simple that BillyZ will fix in five minutes after he gets home this evening, but in the meantime, I'm not printing.

I'd have had the order finished a couple of weeks ago, if not for a couple of rush jobs that I didn't feel I could turn down (not to mention that the extra income is very welcome since we just bought a house). The first job was the certificates for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia’s Masterwork Award. (How could I say, "No," to the Lieutenant Governor?) The design had mostly already been completed when the Dawson Printshop printed last year's certificates (I was in Pennsylvania for a few weeks when that happened). Former Dawsonite Carley Colclough did the rest of the design long distance from BC, and then I made the polymer plates and did the printing.

I miscalculated a little when getting the paper together; the paper was from the Colours line by Papeterie St Armand, which is rather smaller than most of the stock we use. And the certificates are quite large. I had thought I would get four certificates from each sheet, but was only able to get two. This meant I didn't have enough paper to make many mistakes. I cut a lot of scrap for testing and re-used some of last year's discards. I managed to print all six certificates (the five finalists and one winner) without a single mishap, which has to be a record, considering it was a four-colour job. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least. I'm very proud to have printed something that will have the Lieutenant Governor's signature on it.

The second rush job was binding the exhibition catalogues for Sandra Brownlee's show at the Mary E. Black Gallery. The show is called Departures and Returns and is on right now, so if you're in Halifax be sure to check it out. It's textiles, but her notebooks are also on display, so there's something there for book people, too.

A few of the 72 softcover catalogues had already been sewn, but I did most of them. Then I had to glue on an inner cover--it's like a wraparound cover you'd see on a paperback, but instead of being the actual cover, it's what the dustjacket wraps around. Then I had to tip in a plate to each copy and fold and install the dustjackets. It took me two full days of work to do all 72--good thing I sew fast. And I was very happy that the books all had their sewing holes punched already, which saved me some time.

On Monday afternoon as I was sewing the catalogues, I got a slightly panicked call from Sandra. She'd decided she was really unhappy with the cover size of the deluxe edition of the catalogue (which I wasn't working on), and wanted to know if I'd be able to help put them together if she changed the size. So Wednesday I drove to Joe's studio where Joe and I and a couple textiles friends of Sandra's worked on covering and attaching the new boards. The originals had been made larger to accommodate some weavings Sandra wanting to include. She decided to re-do the weavings at a smaller size, so the covers could be made to a size that fit the pages of the catalogue. We completed 12 of the 30 in the deluxe edition, which was plenty for the show's opening--Sandra can finish the rest at her leisure now that the show is installed and opened.

So today I was meant to be in the printshop, printing, but am not. Instead, I'll get the files ready to send to film to make the polymer plates for this year's calendar (flying machines! wood type! days of the week!), and I'll start on the next batch of tiny book jewelry (the Japanese-style binding, as I have to get more materials for the European-style ones) for the Halifax Crafters fair in early December. And perhaps I'll make some paste and get to work backing some suede with kozuke for another batch of mini SteamBooks. Maybe I'll even make a couple of larger ones this time.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll get a bit of work done on the website and do some writing. but that is probably wishful thinking. Oh hey, it's almost November. I have to decide if I'm going to attempt NaNoWriMo this year. Now that I'm not in school, it might be an achievable goal. And I really need to get writing fiction again.

Moving to the Country

I meant to have a nice detailed blog about the house--I even took a bunch of pictures--but since we have less than two weeks now to finish packing everything and get it to the house, and I'm working on a print job (meaning I have to be back and forth to the printshop), and the usual writing work, I haven't had time. Plus when I have had a moment free, we've been at the house, where there is no internet yet. So you'll just have to wait for the big house post. In the meantime, here's the outside.



It doesn't look like much, but oh do we have plans. It's solid, and that's the main thing (well, except for that deck, which needs jacking up and new boards). What we really fell in love with was the property--four acres of trees and meadow. And a cave.



It's a small cave in the gypsum bedrock, but a cave nontheless. Water trickles out of it, and cool air even in the heat of summer. And I met this lovely fellow there:



Naturally, I didn't get too close. I was close enough, though, that I learned porcupines talk to themselves as they trundle along.