doing transfers again

I had stopped doing transfers for a while, i was so into printing on silk and so on. I did a few small one in my cloth book, including my first successful tape transfer - wow so easy! for a tape transfer you start with an image you can destroy, this is usually something out of a magazine, newspaper, or something you've made a copy of. I took an image of a toxic waste sign from a catalogue. So i cut it out of the catalogue and laid down a big piece of packing tape over the image. smooth it and burnish. then drop it in water so you can rub the paper off the back, leaving the ink from the image imbedded in the tape's adhesive. when i was done there was very little stickiness left so i used some acrylic gel to glue the sign to the cloth.
it's alot nicer than cutting out the paper and gluing the paper picture to the background, especially if you want to take advantage of both the shininess of the tape and the translucency. when i was done you could still feel the flexibility of the cloth. but is was very small so it had no big affect on the cloth.
Another transfer i did was with an image from my R2400 that had a tiny flaw in it. (the tiny ray of light is not a flaw but a feature of the way it was shot, in person it's cool) it's the image posted with this update. I took a 16 x 20 canvas board and used soft gel gloss to adhere a hand made paper to the surface. then, with plenty of gel on that surface, i laid my print face down onto the gel and burnished. then i ironed it! my poor little travel iron got such a beating these last few weeks. I was worried about the amount of work they was ahead of me because i know the next step was to get rid of the paper. because it was supposed to be a fine art print, i had printed on think paper. So when i peaked under to see if my burnishing and ironing were working i saw that the ink stayed down and the paper was lifting up smoothly! wow. i go very excited but unfortunately this did not last through out the image. I'm not sure what the variables were but there were big patched where i had to wet the paper and rub it off. my fingers got tired so at one point i employed a rough rag, which worked well. but it was easier to press to hard with the rag. I'm not sure about the result, where i like it. I'll try to take a picture of the canvas and post it soon.

silk panels

these were printed onto blumethal silk and suspended with wire inside two discarded kitchen cabinets that had their middles punched out when i found them. I love using found objects in my art and the contrast of the new silk with the old discarded wood cabinets is fabulous. you can't tell from the picture but the wood is smooth with a lovely grain.

working with silk some wall hangings

earlier this month (follow the link) i posted an image that i was working on to create silk wall hangings. i finished 4 variations. two were made from silk scarves that i printed on my R2400 and then hand painted. they became wall hangings because i painted heavily with the acrylics. even tho i had thinned the consitancy with acrylic medium i couldn't stop paintting it was so much fun. they are now too stiff for wearing -- but sturdy enough for the walls.

you can see my husband's vinyl collection behind the scarves!

my cloth book

this is the cover to my autobiographical cloth book. you can see the whole thing by following the link to my site.

a new window falls in my lap

i was coming home form shopping and there were more broken windows in the back of the truck where they're renovating the house a few houses down. I often look and see what they are dragging out of there. Usually things a re too busted up. but i could see at least one of them was in great shape. So i went and asked the construction worker if he was throwing out the windows. so he let me have the one that wasn't broken. It's huge! with two beautiful old handles.

at first the guy gestured like i should climb up there on his oversized pick up truck - you know the kind you can never see around when changing lanes on the bay bridge in a wind storm - and get it myself. so while i was looking for a way up there, he climbed up and started pulling it out from among the broken ones. I saw that the window frame was about to catch on the handle of the one next to it so i reached under the window as he lifted it and tried to push the broken one with the intrusive handle up and away. but there were so many other broken windows and doors that it was too heavy for me. so i called out to the worker "the handle!"

he kept yanking,

one of the broken windows broke some more! he started twisting the window to get it unstuck from the handle and the other window broke and glass fell all over the truck bed. I was pretty scared that he'd break the main window by now. he has it swaying over my head at a 45 degree angle - i moved fast! then with a great crash the offending handle let go and fell with it's window frame and glass into the truck bed shattering yet more glass. Now all i can say is "Oh my goodness!" (sounding too much like little orphan annie).

he swings the window over the side of the monster truck and hands it to me - and i'm grabbing it while the bottom edge is above my head! I was so scared he was just going to let go - assuming that i was as strong as he. but he moved it gently down to where i had it under control. I thanked him profusely and carried the treasure home having to stop 3 times to rest on the way.

how exciting.

this thing is 5 feet tall, comes up to my eyes!

finishing!

I finished all three windows, the cloth book, one more small handmade art book, and four silk wall hangings as well as some 15 new note cards, 5 new 11x14s, and 10 new 16 x20s, that's alot of work.

I solved the problems with banner printing on Epson's R2400 on my mac and ironing onto freezer paper and it seems easy now.
the trick with ironing onto freezer paper is to encourage the silk to be still and straight with pins or fabric tape or something. then lay the freezer paper over it and encourage that to stay in place too. i leave a two inch lead of freezer paper on the front edge to compensate for the apple/epson driver problem mentioned earlier of starting to print two inches after the beginning of the paper.

To get the banner printing to work on the R2400 with my mac OS 10.3.9, i define a custom paper sizes (in page set up) using 13.14 as the width and putting an extra couple of inches on the tale end to properly position the paper. (Note, be sure to actually select your newly defined paper after creating it cuz, at least on my set up, it doesn't automatically do that.

Then when i go to print, cuz my silk is not 13 inches wide, i'm sure to un-check "center image" in the first print dialogue box and give it a small margin because of the edge of the silk is not exactly on the edge of the paper when i'm done.

when i send it to print i make sure that the banner options are available and check "save banner" (or what ever it is) so that it won't draw a cutting line at the end of the image. I set it for thick paper which reduces smudging and black streaks form the stiff silk touching ink pads and what not. I set the ink density to =10% because my tests were light.

Then i feed it through the manuel roll slot. I brought over a chair that was slightly higher that the slot so that the silk when up and the headed down into the slot at a good angle. on the exit side i did not want the silk to drop down too quickly as this causes the stiff paper holding the silk to bow back up into the printer and increase the chances for dirty smudges. So i brought out the little arms in the exit slot and i built a soft slow bridge of scrap paper and books up and over my scanner. nice set up.
pictures soon

art by the beach

taken with my lens baby
i really enjoy the abstrations - makes it about color and form and they way i feel when i'm there absorbing the wind and waves and sand and the fog - let's not forget the fog!

my windows are almost done!

I 've been working like mad to finish my windows in time for the Open Studio. here's a picture of the first one completed. Sorry it's hard to see but what's there is a big beautiful old window that someone through out (they through out 4!) to which i have adhered silk on which i've printed and image leaves in a stream.

each of the for windows was to have a slightly different version of this image taken in wonderfully peaceful Laurel canyon in Tilden Park in Berkeley. But i no longer have four!

the other day i was working on what was to be the second window. I was doing layout , leaving tape as marks of where the panels should go. forgetting that i was working on glass i leaned to hard and POP CRACK BANG the window cracked right down the middle in a beautiful diagonal. bummer.

the good part is that i probably would not have gotten all four done on time anyway and instead i will have three - the complete series - done to present at Open Studios.

an another installment for the long list of sh*t that can and does go wrong.

mostly i have fun telling the tales of all the stuff that goes wrong. but sometimes it bugs me. like the other day. a clear example of the scramble my brain took from the chemo and never fully recovered! I had these wonderful brochures to go out about the open studios coming up. they were specifically for artists in the Sunset district of California - calling attention to how easy we are to see. I personalized them by circling my house on the neighborhood map, circling my contact info and securing a little insert about my new work. I spent hours putting this together and then dug up some stamps i had. They were lovely, each with a different building famous for it's unique architecture. I stopped and wondered, was the postage correct? I couldn't remember when i'd bought them, or when the last time postage was raised or what the postage is nowadays. So i had a brainstorm, i rifled through the mail that had come the day before. most of the mail had stamps that said "First Class" and not the amount. then i found one stamped with a meter that said 37 cents. Great! my stamps are 37 cents! So i stuck them on until i ran out and skipped down to the corner (OK I don't skip anymore what with one thing and another!) and happily deposited my first bundle of advertisement for the Open Studios. Whew glad to have that done it think - clueless as usual. well it came out the next day when i was sending my daughter to the post office to get more and i said to her - get a hundred 37 cent stamps - No my husband says 39 cents. 39? your kidding right??
well of course he wasn't and there was nothing i could do about tossing all that time and effort and money in the trash - cuz you know i won't get them back til after the open house and they will have ugly stamps all over them about how i have melting butter for brains.

But i noticed that i have a really different attitude about these things than i did when i was young. I used to have such a hard time with my art because i would visualize it and then things went wrong and it never came out like it was in my head, which meant i had failed to express myself and i likely tossed it out. Now i see that it's part of being in the material world that manifesting your vision is full of twists and turns and unexpected bends in the road. it's from these challenges that the art really gets made: in solving the problems, trying a different way or actually liking the way the materials took on a life of their own and created something maybe even better than your original vision.

I figure most of those people in that first mailing didn't really want to get the mailing so it all turned out for the best! Today i sent out over 100 more - with 39 cent on each one!

working wtih silk the saga continues

It's not the silk that's difficult it's the darn mac printer driver for my lovely r2400 printer.

it's not apples fault. the driver is made by epson and they were just plane lazy not including basic functionality that's in the widow's version of their driver etc. so the issue in this case is printing banner prints - and getting the printer to act nicely.
the driver does not include predefined banner sized paper. so you have to "define" your own paper. I made one up and ran a test print using my new silk scarf ironed onto the freezer paper (see below). it started the print in the middle and stopped after about 11 inches of ink. bummer!
so i did a little research and found this really helpful personal website called convolutedbrian (http://www.convolutedbrian.com/epson-r2400-custom-roll-paper-sizes-macintosh.html). The fellow is

I used his advise to use the specific width of 13.14 for my custom printer and then asked for 44 inches.

I cut up a roll of plain paper for the second test, rather than make a mess of my silk. based on his experiments i made the paper longer than 44 inches because the printing always starts 2 inches into the paper with this method.

And my test went very well - except that it never fully ejected the paper and attempts to force the printer to spit it out caused it to pull the paper back up into it's innards and spew it out the slot for the exiting of very think materials which one feeds through the front. this is not ok cuz it rumpled it and put smudges on the paper. so i guess that's another step to research cuz mr convoluted doesn't mention this problem, he's working with rolls that he cuts off as the prints come out.

I will not be beaten - i will get this printed as i want it!

(BTW it looks like I'll need to pump up the saturation to get the colors i want on the silk.

SF Open Studios in the Sunset featuring kayla's daydreaming arts

Hi Everyone:

I'm very excited to announce the upcoming SF Open Studios run by Artspan http://www.artspan.org/open_studios.php

Each weekend different neighborhoods participate in this city-wide event so that you can plan a tour of studios near each other.

October 21 and 22 is the weekend for The Sunset where my new daydreaming arts studio is located, so I want to invite everyone to come for a visit.

It's worth the trip to see my new work (http://daydreamingarts.home.comcast.net/) as well as some of my classics. My latest work has taken an excited bend in the road toward more abstraction in my photography while utilizing more mixed media
work. In addition to framed art in 16 x 20 or 11 x 14 sizes I will be showing handmade books, cloth books with handmade dolls, image transfers with mixed media, note cards, tiny framed art, works on silk and on found objects -- including my pride: silk and acrylic on several beautiful windows.

My new studio on 19th Ave in San Francisco has fantastic light and room for multiple simultaneous projects in a comfortable and safe environment. Download this brochure http://www.sunsetartists.com/os2006.htm which shows my studio as #10 on the map: 2169 20th Avenue - just off of Route 1. It is a real working studio so you can see my process, not just my product.

The Artspan website has information concerning the Open Studios event: http://www.artspan.org/open_studios.php ; a search engine to find artists' studios by numerous criteria: http://www.artspan.org/search.php ; and information about the exhibit of some artists' work (including mine) in a SomArts Main Gallery in SOMA: http://www.artspan.org/open_studios_exhibit.php

Come see my latest work and my new studio October 21-22 from 11 am to 6 pm.

kayla garelick
daydreaming arts

kaylagarelick@mac.com
http://daydreamingarts.home.comcast.net/
http://daydreamingarts.blogspot.com/

working with silk

I'm starting to work with that wonderful silk from Jacquard my friend gave me.

She gave me 2 packages, each with one long thin silk scarf. SO SOFT!

I'm trying to press it before putting it on the paper to print and i can't get the creases out. should i: 1) be more patient and keep ironing; 2) turn up the heat past the silk setting; 3) hand wash the silk to get the creases out; 4) other?

well after extensive use of 1 and 2, i finally I got to 3 and got the creases out by wetting the scarves and pressing them again.

then i ironed the long silk scarves onto a very long sheet of freezer paper. This will allow me to feed the silk through my printer and print directly onto the silk with the paper holding it steady.

boy was that hard. in the end i convinced myself that all the imperfections are what will make the scarf special, not your K-mart reproducible fake painted scarf. but i'm rationalizing in part cuz i really found it so hard! nothing wanted to stay put.

i had imagined being able to iron the silk on nice and straight. instead it wiggles like trying to put jello thru a pasta machine!

I may start all over tomorrow ironing on a table top, not using the ironing board like my friend suggested.

I will do my first print tomorrow.

the image is the one i made for the scarf. it's a composite of several of my images. see how talented i am!

what NOW?!?!?

for my cloth book I've printed a bunch of images on lazertran so i don''t have to sew quite so much.

the sewing's getting hard. the more dolls and other stuff get sewn on the harder it is to put the next thing on, I've taken to rolling up the dolls etc in the sides of the book like a scroll and pinning them with clothes pins so i can move the sides through the sewing machine without destroying the things already sewed.

i was sewing a doll's clothes on, watching the little thumb twist screw that holds the needle on bumping into the doll's head. I watch carefully, worried that it was going to ruin the doll's head. well it all went fine, i finished that and moved on to sew on the next then when BANG! CRACK! POW!

the sewing needle starts to fall out.

I stopped the machine pronto and nothing got broken but it sure came close!

the little thumb screw had slowly been unscrewed by bumping into the doll's head.

every step is an adventure!

it's so absured it's funny all the things i can stumble accross to break!

i really do love my Mac but this is absurd

I'm in the middle of so many things at once. like a mailing list! OMG! I have an old list made with Apple Works, a Mac program and a new list made Address Book, another Mac Program.

Can get either to import the data from the other! Of course Not! Can I get either program to export something the other can read? of course not! Just because they are both basically data bases made on a a Mac. don't be ridiculous!

So far i'm just printing out labels from the 2 programs. i also added all the names from the hall of flowers show.

i went to add the names of families who's kids go to SOTA where my daughter goes. but i got overwhelmed - the mailing list is over 43 pages long and in PDF so it won't simply import.

and i really don't want to send out that many!

So i said - ok , just the Theatre students. (my daughter's in Theatre.)

it was still too much, so i'm only 1/3 through the copy and paste. Maybe i'll limit it to kids in her class ...

the Sunset group has a really nice brochure. I'm sending these out to announce the Open Studio. I have such a gold mine in the list of people from SOTA that i think i'll either buy more of the brochures or make a post card of my own. I like the brochure cuz it looks professional and makes it seem like a nice sized event. but the image for my piece is small. they all are cuz that's the way it is with several artists and ads and all that.

I printed labels but could not figure how to do the return labels with the program i had so I downloaded this thing from Avery. what a disaster. i got it done, but it really should automatically repeat the one address. I was probably not paying attention. I also printed out a little blurb about my new work to stick inside. i wish i'd has some nice paper to print it on. But all my good stuff is too heavy.

i love my mac! but...

Unfortunately Address Book ( a native program on my Mac) just can't get it right. It guesses what i mean to be typing, before i've even hesitated ... as tho i actually want it's help, and it goes right ahead an puts its guess there unless i actively delete it.

for example, I spell my name in lower case letters, but no one else in my family does. but if i attempt to type our last name in a field Address Book insists on making it lower case, even tho i started out with an upper case G. so i try to handle it by back spacing and adding a capitol G . but it lowers the case automatically. So i try to really fool it by adding an uppercase G between the lower case G and the rest of the name (this works with other programs) so i can go back and delete the lower case g after. But no, now it types the whole name in front of the new G so instead of "Garelick" I end out with gGarelickarelick. If i go ahead and leave it, it turns the new upper case G to a lower case.

what a waste of time.

then there's guessing at first names. I have a friend named Jonah. guess what happens when i start an entry for my friend Jon. But do i notice? No cuz i hunt and peck so i'm not looking at the screen to see that Address Book has added info to the field when i didn't ask it to.
and forget it for people named Michael. I have a relative Michael who's married to Gretta (nice gal) so to save time i made their entry say Michael-Gretta. now Address Book adds -Gretta to every Michael i know, just by my action of tabbing to the next field. OMG it did this for a client and sent out an e-mail like that before i noticed that Address Book had added my friend's wife to my clients name!

I hope you all find my examples amusing. I hope even more that someone will say - oh yeah they fixed that in May just go to the preferences and toss such and such file.

getting it done

In the last week i have been very busy getting realy for open studio. I continue to work on my cloth book, the windows photo prints and i've started work on a silk scarf. I'm fixing the templats for the backs of cards which have the old address and getting a mailing out. here are some stories to share:

I'm bummed cuz i broke one of my windows today. I was measuring and putting down pieces of tape for the layout when i leaned too hard on the glass. the crack was so load!

i'm ok about it i guess. but i couldn't help but think about using it broken as symbolic of my fucked up life - i really do break things alot! But even after i taped it up so i could safely more it, it feels very unstable and dangerous.

the cloth book is coming along, considering how little time i have to work on anything, I'm very frustrated with the Jewsih holidays taking time. but i go through this every year.

I'm wondering about whether i should do the street fair at christmas time again.. i think i'd have to renew my license in addition to the fee for the space..

I destroyed my shoulders the other day. "working out" with three pound weights. caused my arthritis to flare up and it hurt hard for a a couple of days. shish!