two kitties

Combat Paper: Drew Matott and Drew Cameron

Combat Paper is a collaborative project between artists and soldiers returning from the war in Iraq. Uniforms worn in combat are shredded and beaten to create pulp for handmade paper used for prints and artist books.

The overarching goal of the project is to help veterans reconcile their experiences in the war zone and alter traditional narratives of military service, culture and the re-construction of individual identity on returning home. 

The images you see above are broadside prints from a portfolio created in the Combat Paper studios. Initiated by the artists Drew Matott and Drew Cameron, the Combat Paper project is based out of Green Door Studios in Burlington, Vermont.

Project Facade is another project that explores the tensions war introduces to individual identity. Check out this post from the blog's archives to learn more about Project Facade.

Book Binding How To: John Carrera and His Pictorial Webster's Dictionary

Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

Better Living Through Ventriloquism

I found this little gem while browsing the bookstore. Basically a 'how to' book for using ventriloquism in difficult situations - like during a drug intervention for your best friend. The possibilities are mind boggling.

How to Make a Wreath From Recycled Paper

There is a link on the main page of my blog to a site called Craft Tutorials. You can find everything there - the good, the bad, the simply ugly. Wind chimes made of old measuring cups?

Or this. A wreath made from recycled paper. Vague instructions are here, and photos at the Rag & Bone Book Art blog. I am forever grateful to Craft Tutorials for introducing me to Rag & Bone. 

Edward Hopper: Room In New York (1932)

'Edith, you are a romantic,' he said with a smile....

'But why must I be called a romantic just because I don't see things the same way as you do?'

'Because you are misled by what you would like to believe. Haven't you learned that there is no such thing as complete harmony between two people, however much they profess to love one another? Haven't you realized how much time and speculation are waste, how much mythological agonizing goes on, simply because they are out of phase? Haven't you seen how the light touch sometimes, nearly always, in fact, is more effective than the deepest passion?'

'Yes, I have seen that,' said Edith, sombre.

'Then, my dear, learn to use it. You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish...you must learn to discount the others. Within your own scope you can accomplish much more. You can be self-centered, and that is a marvellous lesson to learn.'

'But if you would prefer to share your life?' asked Edith.

From the novel, Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner.

Tunnel Book Tutorial

I made this rough and tumble tunnel book after seeing a tutorial put together by Extreme Cards and Papercrafting. It's a few photocopies of images from a vintage book and some paper from an old school ledger.

And the tutorial would have been so much more helpful - if I hadn't left it on the kitchen counter. I didn't want to go all the way back to my house so I just guessed at it. As it turns out, the clips would have been extremely helpful. I'm going to try again, and this time, I will definitely bring the directions!

Debra Tomson Williams: A Story About You

Last fall, artist Debra Tomson Williams spent two weeks working in my art studio. She made a series of artist books during her time here.

One of my favorites, A Story About You, is featured in the artist books exhibition Recto Verso at Sweetwater Arts Center.

This accordion file book tells the story of how a genetic condition passes through a family. The show opens on Friday, June 5th.

Nava Atlas Book Art

Sluts and Studs (detail), originally uploaded by Nava Atlas.

I love artist books - its more difficult than you might think to create one. I've never managed to achieve that incredible combination of playful structure, engaging text, and divine visual. It takes planning, anyway.

See more of Nava Atlas' artist books and "readable objects" on her website.

April 30: Poem In Your Pocket Day

On Thursday, we end National Poetry Month with Poem in Your Pocket Day. It's simple: select a poem you love, then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends on April 30, 2009.

Poems from pockets will be unfolded throughout the day with events in parks, libraries, schools, workplaces, and bookstores. The Poets.org website has ideas and classroom activities.

I'm giving you a few days notice so you'll have time to select something. I'm also going to suggest that you photocopy the poem. If someone came up to me with a poem, I'd definitely want to take it home and sip on it with a cup of coffee.

Here is one of my favorites, but I'm not sure it is the right poem for my pocket. It might be this one. Or this one. Please tell us, in the comment section, which poems you might put in your pocket.

First Love

by Yehuda Amichai

I was blind to you when you loved me long ago.

I switched you for another, like Isaac,

for a smell, and a taste, and an appetite for meat,

for a fragrance of the field, and a house, and a little heat.

I have forgotten the words

of the only letter I wrote to you.

All that I remember is the taste of the glue of the stamp

on my tongue.

The fate that determined us was not really

destiny,

but it was as strong and sure as the finger of the violinist

that determines the fate of a note,

though it, too, is as final and as decisive

as death.

 

(Translated, from the Hebrew, by Leon Wieseltier.)

_{Photo credit: Heidi K. Rettig (2008) From the heart shaped rock collection down on our dock.}

Beckoning of Lovely: Amy Krouse Rosenthal

I get to be part of this wonderful project. Stick with it until the end and you will see my name. I'm Heidi, the "host" of the Missing Piece Treaties and the owner of the log cabin.

Brian Dettmer: Altered Books

 Brian Dettmer autopsies books from the top, down.

Australian Literature

I love to send mail by post. Letters are a relic, care packages an archaeological doorstep find. So you can imagine how happy I was to receive this box, all the way from Australia, from my friend J. I had sent him a couple of books a few months ago - two I had finished that I thought he might enjoy. In return, he sent a precious selection:

"I'm sending you this books as a kind of intro to Australian writing. It's hard to know where to start. Should one begin with a 19th century classic? Or with one of the feisty left wing women writers of the 1940s? Or the most recently acclaimed?

In the end, I settled for a Nobel Laureate and the novel of his which I like best: The Aunt's Story. Next comes David Malouf who may well be our next Nobel winner. I chose his very first novel, Johnno, because it is about my home town in the era in which we both grew up. In fact, when it first came out, a friend gave it to me saying simply "It's us." He was right. Finally, Peter Goldworthy's Maestro, which I just enjoy.

After I chose them I realised that they all in their different ways deal with the complex relationship that Australians have with Europe. More then, perhaps, than know. You may recognise some of that in certain generations of Americans.

Both the Brisbane and Darwin described are long gone. Darwin after a Hurricane in 1974. Now rebuilt. Brisbane in the hurricane of development so that is now like Dallas on a river. I hope you enjoy."

And this precious letter begins a new category, and a new week of posts on Good Mail. Stay tuned.

Bathtub IV: Time Lapse Photography of Keith Loutit

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Poet Smackdown: Steven Covey vs. Carol Ann Duffy

In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey explains the benefits of the Habits:

"In harmony with the natural laws of growth, they provide an incremental, sequential, highly integrated approach to the development of personal and interpersonal effectiveness. They move us progressively on a Maturity Continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence....they become the basis of a person's character, creating an empowering center of correct maps from which an individual can effectively solve problems, maximize opportunities, and continually learn and integrate other principles in an upward spiral of growth."

This is the kind of management program that would drive me to use crystal meth.

What would the world be like - at work, at home, in conflict and in love - if everyone chose to be polite, but direct? Compare the work of British poet Carol Ann Duffy. There is no doubt about what she is thinking and feeling:

Words, Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words .

Think about last week. Would it/Could it have gone any more smoothly if someone (or you) had just been straightforward (but polite) about something that was on your mind?

Easy Digital Photo Craft Project.

For Valentine's Day, I made a photo wall in Mike's office that capture some of his favorite memories of Montana. I came across the idea in the book, PhotoCraft.

It was simple and easy to do. I went to a discount store and bought a packet of slim, empty CD jewel case and a yard of sticky back velcro tape. I printed 5 x7's on the photo printing machine then trimmed them up and assembled the look in one evening. Total cost? About $15.

The jewel cases and velcro make it quick and easy to change the photos or re-arrange them. A perfect gift for anyone in your life - just choose some meaningful photos and go for it!

How to Knit a House for Your Hamster

Crack two kitties reader Jamie spotted this beauty yesterday in the New York Times. You must be as stunned as I was when I first saw the photo.

You can find this hamster house pattern, along with dozens of other fabulous, simple projects in the new book, Pet Projects, The Animal Knits Bible. 

According to the article, the hamster lived in the house for a day. And then he ate it.

Ray Materson Prison Sock Embroidery

This weekend I've been reading God of the Rodeo: The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison. It is a kind of ethnography. Journalist Daniel Bergner was granted unusual access to inmates by Warden Cain and delivers a candid anthropology of this prison community rich with thick description:

"..his short, wiry body was covered with tattoos. The spiderweb was among the smallest. An animal half lion and half monster, with a mane of fire, occupied most of his back. A viking dominated his chest, a helmeted woman his shoulder. From hip to hip across the bottom of his back, in fancy calligraphy, a tattoo read: LOUISIANA CRACKER.

For each of these he had paid a convict artist to burn a plastic canister, usually of Speed Stick, with a paper bag held over the plastic to catch the rising soot. Scraped from the paper, the soot was mixed with toothpaste and water to make the ink. A steel guitar string was threaded through an empty pen shaft. The artist rigged a tiny motor, taken from a cassette player, to jab the steel string thousands and thousands of times into Cook's skin.."

How to make something from nothing. The tenacity of the Angola tattoo artist reminded me of this piece, installed in a show I saw at the American Visionary Art Museum a few years ago.

The artist, Ray Materson, learned to embroider while he was serving time for a felony drug conviction. He rigged an embroidery hoop from the top of an old plastic tub and stitched with hypodermic needles scored from the prison drug trade. Materson unraveled socks to make thread and swapped with other prisoners for needed colors.

Using this steam punk assembly of tools, Materson spent his 15 years in jail embroidering tiny illustrations of his life story. The photograph doesn't capture the mastery of the work. Each piece is tiny - 2" x 2", 1200 stitches per square inch. Flawless; precise.

The Beckoning of Lovely - Amy Krouse Rosenthal

This is exciting news. Amy Krouse Rosenthal has invited me to host the "(Missing) Piece Talks" at my log cabin, a part of her wonderful, wonderful project, The Beckoning of Lovely.

I've known for a few days but couldn't go public until the announcement was made. Here is a little background video that explains the project, if you're not familiar with Rosenthal's work:

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

-- Robert Frost (1916) from Mountain Interval

Flip Books with Kraak & Smaak

D. and I always talk about (but never make) old school flip books. A flip book of our lake view as it changes throughout the day has been on the project list for, like, ever.

I imagined myself down on the beach in a lawn chair, reading and snapping shots of the horizon every fifteen minutes. Never happened. Or, once the weather turned, I could have used my wildlife camera instead.

And there are plenty of resources out there. The Flip and Photoshop Elements websites both have easy "how to's" to help you make a flip book. So basically, the lake flip book project isn't looking good for 2008.

This video from Kraak & Smaak is pretty inspiring though. I found it via Magpie and Cake. Maybe in 2009?

Making T-Shirts with Ed Roth's Stencil 101

Saturday night, t-shirts, fabric paint, Tessa, Talia, and Ed Roth's Stencil 101.

So What Do You Know About Boys?

To mark Banned Books Week, I read Carolyn Mackler's The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. Slightly overweight teenager Virginia Shreves is the heroine. She's the daughter of ambitious, intelligent, emotionally checked-out parents and the sister of a guy expelled from NYU for date-rape. 

The book has Virginia is getting felt up by a boy named Froggy on the very first page. Froggy is a guy she makes out with for the convenience factor - he takes the bus to her side of town every Monday after school for a trombone lesson. They kiss for 45 minutes, he leaves for his lesson, and then they ignore each other the rest of the week in school.

Reading the book as an adult, it's almost painful how little Virginia asks of Froggy (or from her parents). These are the breadcrumbs of love - but they are an important part of the story. The most important thread in this book - to me - is the struggle for Virginia to protect her emotional honesty, and this is how she gets there.

I appreciated watching Virginia take risks to find love and care from the people around her. I could identify with and remember what it was like to have parents who either wanted to be someone else or wanted you to be someone else.Not washing over the painful things as if they never happened.Only two people in this book - Virginia and her sister (who gives up and joins the Peace Corps to get away from the family) - are really talking. The sister has a conversation with Virginia one day about sex. She asks,

"I know Mom and Dad have told you about sex. But what do you know about boys?"

I've been thinking about how I might answer that question ever since. Leave me a comment and let me know what you know about boys. And I mean the things you know NOW that you're grown up and you've got all figured out. What you'd tell a teenager girl, even though you know it probably won't make a bit of difference.

Use a fake name if you need to - your email address will never be displayed.

Paper Dolls of US Candidates: Fold Your Own Sarah Palin

The geniuses over at www.folduscandidate.com have given us all something to do while we wait for the economy to slide into that deep, black hole.

Fold your own Obama - or McCain, depending on which team you're on. Maybe a paper Cindy and a paper Hillary could "get it on" in the copy room when no one is looking. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

Special thanks to Twitter's urlgrl for the link, and to Flickr's lulife for the image. Be sure to upload your own folded candidates to the folding candidate Flickr site!

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round, Things

Fernando Botero

As part of Banned Books Week, the American Library Association has published a list of the Top 100 Banned/Contested Books of 2000-2007. "Harry Potter" has been Number One for seven years running.

Most are contested as inappropriate subject matter for young people. Many old favorites are [still] on that list.  The bigger, the better? The tighter the sweater?   Yes. It's on there.  The boys are depending on us!  Almost everything by Judy Blume.

Newer books, like Carolyn Mackler's "The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things" start a conversation about uncomfortable topics - like the Our Parents Don't Always Know What's Best For Us  topic.

I haven't read Mackler's book, but I will. It's my first amendment right, and an activity suggested by the American Library Association as a way to support Banned Books Week. The Kids Right to Read Project also has information and ideas about ways to support books and libraries in the community. 

Read or re-read a book on the list - I'd love to see your book report!  

Debra Tomson Williams: Handmade Books from Unusual Materials

Debra Tomson Williams spent time in my studio experimenting with book making techniques and materials. You saw The Spine (2008) and Careers (2008) earlier this week. Today I want to show you some of the books she made using things she found around my house and on our property. These books are made from materials we don't usually associate with reading, but they still tell a story.

This book is made from shards of glass found in an ancient, seemingly bottomless trash pile next to our orchard. The glass and tin found here dates back to the 1930s. Tomson Williams has drawn branches on the glass in ink, and bound the book with clear duct tape. It measures about 4" at the widest part.

This tiny, 1.5" book is made from pieces of bark that wash up on our beach. The water curls the fiber in all kinds of interesting ways. I sometimes save it as "sculpture"; it never would have occurred to me to use the bark as a page in a bound book. I love it!


 
 This book is another miniature. It's feathery pages are embellished with vintage rub-on transfers. The pages are cut from [clean] dog poop bags. Tomson Williams watched Buddy The Dog while we were gone.

And speaking of Buddy, here is another book inspired by their daily dog walks in the woods. Each day, Tomson Williams collected things along the trail - natural and unnatural - and then put them in a 2" x 3" glassine envelope, stamped with the date.

The envelopes were pierced using the Crop-a-dile, a scrapbooking tool my husband bought me that Debra and I are warming to for bookbinding purposes. It can put a hole in anything.

In the detail shot, you see a "Raptor [fire] Crackers" package found on the road.

It's pretty amazing to be able to see how someone else interacts with your environment and what they pick out as worthy art material. I'd love to hear your comments on these books!

The Beckoning of Lovely: Help Amy Krouse Rosenthal Make a Movie

Amy Krouse Rosenthal emailed me yesterday. Yes she did. She did SO! I had sent her a message after reading her book, Encyclopedia of An Ordinary Life. The book that inspired me to do THIS. And think about this.

She sent a short video introducing her latest collaborative project, "The Beckoning of Lovely." Watch, wait, and listen to how you can help her make a movie.

Debra Tomson Williams: Careers (2008)

Debra Tomson Williams created this artist book using pieces from the vintage game, "Careers." The cards were drawn from a pile she had on hand, collaged with found images, then stab-stitched together with cover of lenticular plastic.

 

If you played Careers when you were a kid, you'll remember that you could set your own victory conditions. In other words, you could choose, Fame, Money, or Happiness, or a combination of all three. "Going to Sea" is a good card if you are accumulating points for Happiness.

The path you take toward your career goal is a combination of luck and strategic positioning. College might help.

More of Debra Tomson Williams work can be seen here and here.

Artist Books of Debra Tomson Williams: The Spine

While Mike and I were in Alaska, the artist (and my BFF) Debra Tomson Williams spent two weeks working in my studio. She arrived with a parcel of bookbinding supplies, hoping to complete ten artist books during her retreat.

She did. And then some. Each piece deserves its own blog post, so I'll string them out over time. But let's start with one of my favorites, "The Spine."

This is a small book, it fits in the palm of your hand. You can see it's black and white cover on the lower left in that first picture.

What I love about The Spine (2008) is that the simplicity of the construction matches the concept. If I remember right, this is a page from an old science book, folded, with  pull-down text about the human spine from the same source. But the images on each page play against one another in a really amazing way, don't you think?

Heidi Rettig: Number 9 Shrine

I created this diorama after reading Daniel Tammet's autobiography, Born on a Blue Day. Tammet is an autistic savant with synesthesia. His neurological pathways allow him to experience numbers as personalities. Tammet sees the number nine as larger-than-life, and bright, bright blue.

The piece is a kind of book report. What I might have made when I was in elementary school if I could have figured out how to assemble the materials and then physically construct the wild ideas floating around in my head. That was a consistent problem in my school years. I was always disappointed in my creative work because it didn't look anything like that mental picture.

Maybe it's therapy, maybe it's just weird, but when this idea came to mind, I decided to make it reality. A diorama to show how Tammet experiences the number nine. I worked on this piece, off and on, from May to September, and I'm pleased with it.

The plastic case is from my birthday cake. The base was covered with "grass" and "rocks" mail-ordered from a model train company. I poured a resin river and placed a tiny, plastic man in the middle of the park. He looks up to the number nine, cut from a cyanotype, or sun print, of dandelion seeds from my yard.

This one-of-a-kind diorama is for sale in my shop, for the low, low, price of $30 plus shipping. Yours for a song.

Pictures: Tim Walker and The Dress Lamp Tree

Can you fall in love with a coffee table book?  This is "The Dress Lamp Tree" by photographer Tim Walker, best known for his shoots for British Vogue. His new coffee table book, Pictures, is for sale on Amazon for $164.00. Hard to find. The calendar is cheaper.

Other coffee table books I'd love to have? Deborah Butterfield, Mark Rothko, and anything Andy Goldsworthy.