making use of the last of the summer sun, finishing all the photos I need to before the equinox. I was particularly happy with this one; I don’t think she wants any toner. I did some creative sanding to create a little painterly lift.
Summer is the season of cyanotypes because I personally feel I must use the summer sun instead of a studio enlarger. If I want a good exposure, I have to make hay while the sun shines- this means getting outside whenever it is sunny and making as many as possible while I can. It is awesome to me how I can feel the passage of time and season through this process, how much closer I feel to the land, the way that the sun peaks at midsummer and makes the crispest exposures at only 3 or 4 minutes- and then a month later, and a month later still, I am exposing closer to 8 or 10 minutes at the very same time of day. I feel the summer fleeting and I have been traveling a lot, not able to bring these delicate setups with me.
I am happy with some of these exposures and experimenting more with bleaching and toning. Instant coffee makes a wonderful sepia, while green tea makes a more victorian dark blue/black. I want to try working with chestnut, oak leaf, black walnut next but I need to catch up on making an ample stack first to play with. Some of them I have been working back into with chalk.
exposing
bleaching
This week in Duluth I finished my travel sketchbook, which I had been working on since first vaccinated in march of 2021. I also completed this silverpoint of a braid of sweetgrass that I had been working on for two months. I frequently feel I am an impatient person but it is nice to remember I can work low and slow when I want to.
Sold to a private collector.
in the studio today, working on this painting that is impossible to photograph of me and my friends hands gathering together to process flowers for a friends wedding last year.
We finally acquired a letterpress, after years of dreaming and assuming we would never have the space or money to acquire one. We got incredibly lucky when a local dude close to retirement decided he didn’t need one for his printing business anymore, and we just so happened to spot it on the local online marketplace. It was for an extremely reasonable price, in perfect condition, and he was even willing to deliver for $50. We oculdn’t be luckier— though I was definitely anxious about it surviving the ride on the truck, which seemed to be actively disintegrating under his feet as he lowered it into our alley.
Just as lucky, we had just happened to finally clean up the garage the month before and install a heat source for winter. It felt like the stars aligned in a big way. We decided to test it for the first time on reprinting booklet covers for my broom zine with a type I found on ebay- two brooms tied with ribbons, seemingly from an old newspaper. It was a beautiful Sunday, printing covers and making hot ham and rolls on the new wood stove.
I am very lucky that my partner Tom studied letterpress in college and is able to show me how it works!
I spent maple sugar season at my sugar shack writing and revising my zine, Plain Living II & Plain Living I, which are works I began around 2012 when I started urban homesteading for the first time as a diy punk in chicago, Il. It was a fun project to work on while tending to my maple taps, and even more fun to be able to print more covers by hand. The hunt for good letterpress pieces is like foraging on eBay. I was very happy with the results and I look forward to experimenting more with the letterpress over the next few years (until we die, because I am never moving this piece of equipment again!)
