Stalled

June is always a crazy month for me - my birthday, my garden, my job, my life... it all collides. I think it has something to do with sunny days and warm weather. I have several pieces of frames that I have every intention of completing today. Tomorrow, my "Obbligato" piece will be showcased on Etsy's Art Showcase and I need to add to my stock before then.

On the list of "excuses for why art has stalled" I can add the fact that my miter saw is broken. Well, the all important safety mechanism is broken. The parts to repair it cost nearly as much as a replacement saw. That really bothers me. The old saw was bought for projects around the house and probably wasn't meant for the volume of work I've put it through. I'm thinking that I need to invest in a more industrial miter saw.

Watch for more posts later today.

Picture holders 2

Stumbling on the notion that the face of the stair tread could be covered in printed material instead of leaving the natural wood exposed was an interesting twist. I started sorting through the collection of vintage print material I've stockpiled. I came across an atlas of the United States compiled by National Geographic and copyrighted, 1960. Towards the back were a couple of pages of wonderful maps of our National Parks. The maps have a beautiful lemon yellow color to them. (I've been drawn to this shade of yellow a lot lately. I bought two shirts in this same hue last weekend. I think it's a classic June color and it probably reflects my ache for more sunlight. We've had 20 consecutive days of rain in Portland - very wet, even for the Pacific Northwest.)

Using maps from Grand Teton and Yellowstone as the base, I started building the collage in a little more intentional/less random way than usual. On the Teton frame, I found the words "adventurer" and "such" from my old dictionary and stuck a little string of music between them. Using "adventurer" is an obvious choice for this amazing landscape, but the phrase "Of a quality that has been or is to be specified" in the definition of "such" really struck me as a personal note, a piece of one's own interpretation, on their experience in Grand Teton. As a bow to randomness, I slipped in the music and a small vintage postage stamp on the larger bottom rail. On the Yellowstone frame, I went with an intentional international flair. Yellowstone National Park is arguably the most well-known national park in America, second only to Yosemite perhaps. I've layered a series of colorful international stamps on the righthand side of the map and dropped the word "find" on the lower rail. I'm hesitating on gluing this one together for some reason and I think it's the lack of randomness in the layout. When this gut instinct kicks in, I tend to trust it and leave the piece on my drawing board for a day or two... until the mood or muse finds me.

Picture holders 1

On Monday, we finally got a stretch of warm sunny weather and I ripped apart sseveral pieces of stair treads to create some new picture holders. Several buyers have requested larger picture holders than what I'd had recently sold on my site, so I put the Romeo & Juliet headboard on the back burner for a day and started these frames/holders. (And yes, I still got a lot done on the headboard!)

The picture holders begin with large stair treads (the big wooden piece that you actually step on in a staircase) that were rejected for any number of reasons, but most often because the unusual grain pattern in one doesn't match the other 14 in the package. I have A LOT of pieces of treads in all sorts of wood; everything from red and white oak to fir, brazilian cherry, and something from South America called ipe (pronounced e-pay). The process begins with a template for a photo. People asked for larger frames, so I found a wonderful vintage picture of my Grandfather and Grandmother from January 1965.  I like using this picture of my grandparents, I like to think my Grandfather's spirit (he was carpenter) is a part of the process. Oddly, my grandfather is my current age in this picture. The photo measures 3.5 inches square. I made a little paper template that size.

I took the paper template to my wood pile and pulled out about 20 pieces of tread. Since I'm working on the Shakespeare pieces, I sort of cheated and went the easiest route. I picked pieces of tread that would need minimal trimming and sanding. That narrowed my pile down to about 12 good pieces. I pulled out my table saw and miter box. The table saw is used to rip the larger pieces into managable smaller pieces. The miter box trims the managable pieces into nice square or rectangular shapes. This shaping process narrowed my pile down to a select 8 pieces.

Finally, I selected the rails for the frames. The rails are the little beveled wood pieces that actually hold the picture to the tread. Again, I had A LOT of strips of interesting wood to pick from - these strips of wood are usually scrap pieces of flooring used to separate and protect finer-grade molding in shipment. I eye-balled several little strips and chopped them down with the miter box. I chose some larger strips to decoupage with images and some finer wood to leave is more natural state.

Pictured are some initial layouts. This week I will determine what images to cover which pieces. I'm thinking about changing it up a little this time and decoupaging the tread, while leaving the rails natural. I have some wonderful vintage materials to use including a driving guide to France from 1955 (also used in the Indochine artwork), a great map of San Francisco from the 70s, a wonderful book in German with cool illustrations, a zillion odd old stamps, and a great old book of music. More coming soon...