Welcome to the Threefold Letter. This month, a bundle-dyed fabric book, printing with botanical ink on handmade paper, and a furry new friend.
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This month I completed a new fabric book titled ‘passing through’. It is 295 x 300mm, with cotton pages and a linen hardcover. It has 23 pages. The cotton pages are bundle-dyed with iron and ferns from outside my house which I believe is a Nephrolepis species, also known as ladder fern. The texture of the ferns form an incoherent, stammering motif with blotches of iron. The text is letterpress printed by hand (without a press), and is excerpted from a longer poem titled ‘Crossing Places: in and out of the world’. The words thread through the visual textures at perpendicular orientations. Reading the book is slowed by the fabric pages, making it an experiential and time bound voyage in and out of layers.
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In preparation for the Printopia Print Fair, I am working on a series of botanical prints on handmade botanical papers using botanical-based inks. The prints below are printed on garlic skin paper. The black ink is commercial oil-based, but the dusty night blue is made from pomegranate. I have a number of powdered pigments ready to go, however the ink needs to be mixed anew at each printing session, and for every successful print there are at least two that don’t work out. I’m hoping to have a large collection of prints available for purchase by May, but given that each different element can take days, if not weeks, it’s slow going!
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The newsletter is a little late this month because I’ve been preoccupied with the newest member of our household: a tiny tabby named Bobby. On a recent trip to Whangārei to visit my sister, we met sibling kittens named Bob and Carol who were up for adoption. Carol has been renamed Poppy and has gone to live with my sister and her family. My niece and Poppy will grow up as the best of friends. Bob is now Bobby, and he is currently curled up on my lap as I write. He’s already gotten into a stack of handmade paper, so the house needs kitten-proofing asap!
