August and September Letters

A busy August preparing to send my Young One off to college, and a stressful September dealing with elderly parents, put me very far behind. I was afraid I would have to drop out of the project. Decided the house didn't need to be cleaned and took a day to catch up.  For me, the purpose of joining this project was to forget the stress, recharge batteries and creativity. I'm so glad I decided to let the house go and catch up.

One more letter and I will have enough to make two more blocks.

Though I haven't commented in a while, I have peeked from time to time to see what everyone has been up to. Such an inspiration to come and browse. Thank you.

..and week 13

I must have been late with last week and early with this week.
The next background layer is text from a musty old academic literature text book.



Noela's week 12

I glued the letters onto black backgrounds - thus setting off the letters a bit better and creating a cohesive set of images.

I am also scanning my letters now instead of photographing - I get a sharper image - don't know why I didn't think of this earlier!!

Interesting pics from Marg

This came through in my email as part of a message. Thought you might be interested in seeing how some people spend their spare time.

First of Second from Marg

I was thinking of something quite different for my second alphabet but then I was at the beach at the end of the day and saw the potential for 'letters in the sand'. Then I had a bit of a fiddle in Photoshop, still a learner though. These are the results.

Jim's next letters

Sue's 2nd alphabet continues...

Now I am on track. I have done next week's letter as I have a busy week coming up. Sue

Elaine's 2nd alphabet

We got back from overseas at the end of July and yet it is only now that I have been able to work on my second alphabet. It has been very frustrating as I wanted to get started. 

My plan this time is to make a wall hanging using my collection of off-cuts from Kimono silks. The alphabet is one that I designed many years ago at a wonderful workshop that I attended in Germany with American calligrapher, Alan Blackman. The exercise was to design an alphabet based on a geometric shape, I chose the triangle. The letters aren’t always easily recognisable, but I don’t mind that. 

For the letters I am using the silks which I have appliquéd onto the calico. I placed them into 7 cm squares which I stitched on the sewing machine with black thread onto the calico background. In each alternate row I have placed an un-cut square so as to break up the overall design. 

These, as well as some of the letters are embellished in various ways with things like beads, embroidery, buttons, sequins. I might need to add extra bits and pieces of decoration, but I won’t know that until I have finished them all.

It hasn’t been ‘a letter a week’, but 2 letters a day!

Kim Schoenberger - J

J - Sgrafitto

A coloured slip is applied to the clay and carved, scratched or incised with a tool to reveal a different colour underneath.

Really Rich Red slip is being applied to the tile.

Before transfering my letter J and carving into the slip I decided to burnished the tile. Burnishing gives a mirror finish to the surface, it can be traced back to ancient civilisations and was used in unglazed low temperature firings as means of partially sealing the pot, but I'm using it for pure aesthetics and experimentation to see how it responds in a high temp firing compared to that of lower temp firing.

Burnishing stones on the left and carving into the tile.

The slip always looks mottley at this stage but it will burn clean in the firing.

Burnished tile and carved...

Photographed on an angle to show the mirror finish resulting from burnishing and polishing off with a soft plastic freezer bag for extra gloss!

Noela - Week 11

I have finished 'fiddling' with my teabag/tissue letters. I am happy with them now - still messy and  'wabi sabi', but with an overall sense of order.

I added lower case letters with white ink and roughly oulined the capitals.

SEPTEMBER 4 FROM MIEKE.

I- Iceberg lettuce.

J-jujube.

K-kiwifruit.

L-lemon.

Lettre de septembre - letters of September

Bonjour,
hello,

Please kindly accept my apologies for my delay: it was back in class and ... great work again ..

Voici la suite de l'alphabet... Toujours l'écriture "Gestuelle Cursive", toujours le carré tracé...
Here's the rest of the alphabet ... Always write "Gestural Cursive" always the square route ...

... Et toujours l'alphabet en complément du carré sur la page...
... And always the alphabet in addition to the square on the page ...

Bonne journée
Have a good day

Heather's 2nd set of 2nd alphabet letters

Thought I'd get this one in early. My second alphabet, Spencerian...I just love this flowing script....could write it all day.

Linda's completed first alphabet

Here is an image of my first alphabet framed and hanging in my studio.

letter L from Linda

One more letter - it didnt fit onto the last post. Next group will be posted mid october. Cheers.

August and september letters from Linda

Here are my next 6 letters - G to L. Some of them are pretty unrecognisable to the uninitiated , but great fun to do! I am copying an alphabet designed by Paulus Franke in 1601, but adding my own colour. Parallel pens work a treat with these.

Jeanette's first alphabet arranged

Jeanette’s Alphabet 1 is arranged in a PERFECT PANGRAM, that is, each letter is used only once to make a sentence. As you would expect most perfect pangrams are somewhat nonsensical. The one I chose is: Cwm fjord veg balks nth pyx quiz. This can be interpreted as: Relaxing in basins at the end of inlets terminates the endless tests from the box. (Thank you to contributors to Wikipedia for this bit of fun.)

Sue's 1st September letter

My second letter "i" for Sept. Yeeeaah! I am on time at last! Warm regards, Sue

Jeanette's Lindesfarne letters

These four letters are derived from the letters

in the Lindesfarne Gospels from about the year 698, in England.

Noela's weeks 9 and 10

I have broken with my methodical step by step approach this week - I am posting about the progression in my First Alphabet's final presentation. I made a half measurement, to scale, version of the green wooden box out of foam core and matt board. Then I photographed each outside and inside surface of the green wooden box. I adjusted the pics so that they were neat, scaled rectangles then printed them to size on a special plasticised copy 'paper' which is water proof and stands up to wear and tear. I fixed the images to the box with double sided tape and acetone based craft glue.

I plan to make some sort of concertina book which fits inside the box.

Next few letters

I am trying to be a little more experimental with this alphabet. With the "G" I tried a monochromatic background in the brown. There is something I like about it. For the "H" I thought I'd try diaganol background shapes. I'm not that it really works, but I may try another letter with diaganols that follow through "under" the letter. "I" is monochromatic green kind of graduated along. I like the brown one better, with more random placement of the different blocks of colour. The "J" doesn't ahve the red dots or diamonds in the letter, bascially because I forgot :-) but decided to keep it as another trial letter. I definitely like the letters better with the red in the letter. I also noticed that I although I put the blue on the left side of the letter, like the other ones, with the curve of the "J", it looks like the yellow is on the "outside" where the blue should be. I may redo this letter....we'll see.

Presentation (at last) of first alphabet :-)

I was stumped for a bit as to how I wanted to present/display the first alphabet. Although the squares are small, the vision in my head had always been like a border on a wall....so how to keep it in a straight line and yet be a feasible display. When I first started making the letters I had thought they would look on well on black but I didn't care for that at all. I played around a bit and came up with an accordian book in red!! I am very pleased with how it all looks!!