One Week Down...8 1/2 to Go

Honestly, I'm not counting down the weeks until Fall break. My curiosity got the better of me and I just checked.

We just completed our first week of school. I have no idea why it is so taxing, but every day when I got home from a day of teaching, I just wanted to take a nap. It feels exhausting getting back in the groove.

I did have some time to get some snips done.

Not necessarily mounted though.

My intention when I started this snip was to make something small and simple for an Etsy shop. However, I cannot do much simply. This was more detailed than I had intended. Oh well.

When I told M that I wanted to sell my bike snips on Etsy, he was not happy. He declared that he wanted all of those for his bike room. So, in order to ever sell some, I'll have to make prints. Tonight I pulled out all the silkscreening stuff I experimented with last summer.



I'm still practicing snipping silhouettes as well.

Did I mention that my brain is getting jazzed up trying to think up new things for teaching too? I really enjoy being busy. I just hope it doesn't make me a jack of all trades and a master of none.

Tired

The kids come back to school on Monday. We have "Open House" for them this afternoon. After 23 years of teaching, you'd think I'd have this getting ready stuff down pat. I guess I just always figure out one more thing that I need to do each year. If I had one more week before the kids came, I think I would be ready. For now, I am scrambling around trying to get everything done.

And I'm exhausted.

I'm still having big, big computer problems, so if you have emailed me or commented here and I have not responded, I apologize.

Then there is also that tired thing......

Still Trudging Up the Learning Curve

I'm one of those folks who actually reads the directions for new machines, software, media, what-have-you. However, I do not guarantee that I will follow those directions. Today I went back to climbing the learning curve of silk screening. I abandoned the "improvements" I made to the process yesterday, however I created more "improvements" today. Oddly enough, I started having greater success with the process once I abandoned those improvements as well. While not getting a perfect run on any print, I managed to achieve a perfect print about one out of every two times. Not bad, I think. It's an improvement.

Today was the last weekday of my summer break. = ( My birthday is tomorrow. = )

Learning Curve

I recently got major Gocco envy. Gocco is a silkscreen set up that lots of folks, arty and otherwise, use for small projects. Evidently, they're easy to use and take up a small amount of space when set up. They were produced in Japan starting in the 70's and the market there was saturated with these things. After folks starting producing home graphics on their computers, the market fell off. Well, Gocco has caught on in the U.S., and these little machines are highly sought after here. Unfortunately, the company who manufactures them has long since gone in another direction and is no long interested in continuing to produce them. You can still find a Gocco to purchase, but supplies are going to be more difficult to find as time goes on.

So, I put in a search for the next best thing, and I think I have found it. PhotoEZ is cheaper than Gocco as well as being much lower tech. I bought everything I needed to start up for well under $100.

Producing the silkscreen itself was much less difficult than what I remembered from my college printmaking class. Basically, you put the original art work on the stencil film and set it out in the sun. Then you soak the film, wash it off, and print with it.

Trying to reinvent the wheel, I made a frame to hold the stencil and even made a vacuum table (out of a flower pot...window screen...and a vacuum cleaner....snicker). Quite the contraptions, but they served only to complicate a process that was intended to be simple. I abandoned them when they created new problems and did not alleviate the old ones.

Here's an overview of my travels up the learning curve:

I'm not "there" yet, but I'm getting there. I'm beginning to get excited about the possibilities.