Pears and monoprints

Playing with monoprinted papers made a few years ago. Pears was once a theme - these were created by crumpling and uncrumpling brown paper many, many times until it felt like fabric. Liquid acrylics were then scraped and pushed around the surface. The acrylics dried to a soft gloss. Gold oil stick was then gently brushed across the surface, catching the tops of the folds and creases. Next step was to print pears. I use a large sheet of glass, bevelled and taped around the edges onto which I rolled a thin layer of oil based printing ink. The paper was placed face down over the glass and a knitting needle used to gently draw out random and overlapping pear shapes. The ink takes a few days to dry - depending on weather conditions - and the resulting paper can be used whole, or collaged into a journal.

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The peaceful rhythm of quilting

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Midnight came and went. Seven more hours of suffering before we go to hospital and that was probably the best birthday decision of all. Turning 60 in the ER. Another 4 days before I am home and the positive takeaway is there WAS a stone blocking the duct to the liver, and it WAS the cause of me turning yellow. It WAS NOT copious, continuous comsumption of champagne. They had landed that one on me 8 weeks previously, and I obediently and conscientiously avoided said champagne for almost 7 weeks until the weekend immediately prior to TYOM. So there WAS a bottle of Dom Perignon 2010 consumed between four of us - deliciously sipped down to the last drop. It WAS true the pain started sometime in the next 24 hours and truer that I thought this was the end my relationship with champagne. How blessed to be wrong. They had managed to rule out all forms of known hepatitis, some novel considerations including HIV, drug use in my younger years, clots in one or more vital organs, a...

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