When you sign up, you are sent a little Moleskine cahier notebook, the sort I print with my Print Gocco machine and sell on Etsy.   You have to fill it, choosing one of the themes available – I’m doing lines and grids.  Then you send it back to them and they take them on tour and then they will be entered into the permanent art collection of the Brooklyn Art Library.  You can take them apart and replace the pages with thicker paper or do all sorts of creative stuff with them as long as they retain their original dimensions folded up..  Sounds fun! 

I need a deadline to get me doing stuff these days so hopefully this will be the impetus for lots of other artwork … I’ve already got a few ideas bubbling around though no doubt I’ll still be panicking to fill it when the deadline approaches!

Meanwhile, I finally took a photograph of my third completed reeds piece:

We had a family visit to Minehead at Easter.  I had a walk along the sea shore where there is this impressive statue to mark the start of the South West Coastal Path.  It was casting some interesting shadows too!

I love these little cottages.  One of them was the old coastguard’s cottage.

And there was this old phone box.  You don’t see many of them around nowadays. 

Here is the view across the bay looking over the roofs of houses down below.

And the little harbour – the tide was out a long way and some of the patterns in the sand were fascinating too!

Here they are, bent over like old, tired, arthritic people. 

This is where they grow… alongside what I think is a recycling company of some sort.

I love this one, where all the reed heads are poking up into the sky…

Reaching up ….

Here is my latest reeds work in progress – I am experimenting with paper lamination.  I have used white polyester voile, printed with transfer paints and then layered it over pages and pages of inkjet printouts of some of my reeds photos.  Here I have screenprinted an abstract design using acrylic medium and one of my thermofax screens over it….  This is it drying:

You can’t see the design at this point but I had to dunk it in water and rub off the paper which was not adhered to the voile.  I had a nasty shock at this point because the inkjet ink was obviously not waterfast and a lot of it came out in the water.  I thought it was a failure at that point, but I hung it up to dry, and I’m not too disappointed with it. 

This is a close up:  I’m going to be adding paint on top of this.

I do love the shadows on the wall cast by the paper laminated parts:

UPDATE 14/4/10: I found one on the WordPress plugin site and am trying it out – can you tell me what you think of it on this page, please? It just shows my Journal Quilts from 2005. I had them all organised so those are the ones I uploaded to test it. It seems to work fine on my computer – does it work okay on yours?