I continued with the theme of patterns for my 1 Second a Day videos in March. I came across so many interesting bits of pattern design last month, and also kept noticing new things in familiar places.
I decided to take a break from the project this month but I’ve been missing it, and still noticing so many terrific examples of pattern design.
I am pleased to share the heart enamel pin I designed, based upon one of my cut paper pieces. Producing these has been on my goal list for over a year, and it feels like there were many obstacles in the way to making it happen, but I finally did it.
The pins are hard enamel with silver metal and red, measuring 1.5″ wide by 1.25″ high with double pin posts at the back, and rubber clutches.
I only had a small production run of fifty made. As of this posting, I have 39 remaining (because a few lovely friends already bought a bunch).
Follow this link to buy one online »
I thrifted this side table all the way back in June 2012 from an interesting furniture store no longer in business on The Drive. I was walking past the shop and the table was sitting outside with a note on it asking who would be the one to make it beautiful again. At a $15 price tag, I decided it was going to be me.
Flash forward six and a half(ish) years to October 2018 when I finally took an orbital sander to this piece. It was my last project during the Tools for Women Residency at MakerLabs in the fall. I did the bulk of the sanding over a few hours one afternoon, removing a yellowed varnish, and smoothing out all the nicks and scratches. I have no Before photo to prove it, but this little table was in rough shape when I bought it.
My work with the orbital sander (and three progressively finer grain sand paper) brought out the beauty of the natural wood. I did the fine details of the concentric circles on the door and the lines on the legs by hand. Hand-sanding is my least favourite thing to do, so I procrastinated this part of the project for another month and a half.
I was determined to finish this off before the end of the year, so over Christmas I finished sanding and moved on to staining it with a natural varnish to emphasize the beauty of the wood.
It looks incredible now, and I’m proud of the work I put into it.
I regret that it took me so long to tackle this project, but it was my introduction to an orbital sander through MakerLabs that was the key to finally getting it done.
As I wrap up a month of sharing handmade items from my personal collection on Instagram, I thought I’d share a few more of these on my blog. It’s been challenging to keep up with this every day, and also take good photos of the pieces I’ve shared without going into an elaborate photo shoot.
Jasna Sokolovic O’Connell
Some of the things I realized as I did this is: I have a lot of ceramics and not just functional pieces like mugs, I have many unusual pieces of art in my collection, and there are many pieces I have had for ten years or more and I still love them (as it should be).
Melanie Elery
Aaron Moran
Cynthia Lyman (or Wyman?)
Julie Moon
The Eastside Culture Crawl happened a week or so ago and I acquired the beautiful painting below from Pilar Mehlis, and two tiny ceramics from Kayo Benson. So the collection continues to grow. It was love at first sight with the painting.
Pilar Mehlis
Sarah Pike
Sandeep Johal
Bullfinch Barbary
The enamel necklace above is one of the pieces I’ve had for more than ten years. I continue to wear this regularly and treasure it because the necklace is a very special piece. The series has been a great way to reflect upon the things I have, and a strong reminder to buy things I love with the intention of possessing them in the long term.
I’ve been steadily working away on pieces for the pattern design project, and finished these two a few weeks ago. Each design seems to present new learning experiences with interesting surprises along the way.
Before I started, I assumed each of these would be relatively simple to cut, and maybe a little boring. But studying something up close for a few hours through the lens of paper cutting line by line brings with it an intimate knowledge of each new pattern I explore.
Cutting the delicate flowers and leaves in the pattern above proved to be challenging but gratifying. The waves of lines in the pattern below seemed completely uninteresting to me until I started cutting and got cut up in the flow of them. Both have given me so much to think about in terms of new directions in my personal work.
After finishing these two pieces I switched back to working on three more Islamic geometric patterns, and completed the third of three earlier today. That wraps up the cutting work I’d set for myself to reach before the end of November. Now I plan to assess next steps, and decide whether or not to add more to the project.
It’s a good thing I keep an on-going record of what I am working on with Instagram and my blog because it helps me realize how productive I have been lately. I’d been feeling unproductive, but looking back at my previous entry earlier in October about the pattern project I’d revived, I realized I’d done lots of work on it since then. I’m currently in the process of working on the sixth new one.
I switched things up last week and started cutting Islamic patterns. The two pictured here are the ones I have completed. These designs are even more time consuming and elaborate to cut than the series of Japanese textile patterns. So many lines!
I enjoy working on these because the process of cutting is like examining the structure of the pattern under a microscope. My eye is a close as it can possibly get and I literally view the structure line by line.
I finished the third new Islamic pattern paper cut earlier today, so now it’s time to assess what the next steps will be for the project. Cut more pieces?! Select a third series of patterns to add? Making decisions is part of the fun.
I recently decided to restart an old project I’d left unfinished from an artist residency at The Leeway Studio a few years back. I created a series of paper cut pieces exploring pattern design which focused on Japanese textiles and Islamic geometric designs. I’ve been thinking about this project for ages and wanted to do more work on it. I sometimes use the pieces as samples in my paper cutting classes, but they were always intended to become an installation.
Last week I cut the piece above to add to the Japanese collection of patterns, and today I cut one more. Below is an image of most of the completed ones from years ago. Each one has a cut area of 7.5″ x 5″ within a 8.5″ x 11″ piece of cardstock.
The final image below is the mock-up of three patterns with their borders folded into a box to make them three dimensional. This is how the overall installation will be and make the mixed patterns into a sort of 3D quilt.
I think part of the reason I am working on this old project again is because it’s always bothered me that I never saw it through to the end. I really want to show these, and the only way to make sure that happens, is to finally finish it.
I did my final laser cutting session of the Tool for Women residency at MakerLabs last Friday, and reproduced this lovely heart design as a laser cut from bamboo ply. The original paper cut is below so you can see how well they match. It was probably one of the easier ones for me to trace and create a vector file from in Illustrator, so it’s no surprise at how well it turned out as a laser cut piece.
It’s hard to get a sense of scale from the photos but the original is around 4.5 inches by 3 inches, and the wood version is 13.5 inches by 9 inches. The heart is from the series 28 Days of Hearts I worked on earlier this year.
Now that the residency is over, I’m trying to figure out how to move forward and continue creating laser cut pieces of work, which is something I’ve been intending to do for ages.
In my latest session with the laser cutter at Maker Labs last week I used the time to cut a more complicated design. The piece is based on a drawing I did over the summer (as part of the daily drawings on circles) and spent a considerable amount of time carefully tracing it in illustrator. When I started I did not realize how much work it would take to clean it up and turn it in a vector file worthy of laser cutting. The original is below.
I cut the piece from bamboo ply leftover from previous laser cutting projects from a few years ago. It looks striking in the wood, but the longer I examine it, the more I want to go back and tweak a few things with the composition. The piece is 16 inches in diameter, while the original drawing is 3.5 inches in diameter. My aim is to have one fabricated in a much larger size eventually.
I have one final laser cutting session booked this Friday before the residency comes to an end, and I’m hoping to use it to try a cutting material I haven’t used before.
My series of daily drawings on 3.5 inch paper circles wrapped up as of yesterday when I finished the sixtieth one. The stack of them measures about 3/4 of an inch high, which is not a lot, but equals two months of sketchbook work capturing ideas.
See the previous sets here and here.
Set 9 – exploring variations of looping lines
Set 10 – exploring tessellated patterns inspired by my visit with Nadine Werner
Set 11 – revisiting an older idea of spirals with new variations
Set 12 – exploring an idea based on a textile pattern I came across here.
Set 13 – exploring line work inspired by tape art murals
Set 14 – exploring intense and intricate line work
Set 15 – exploring some of my favourite Japanese textile patterns
I’m a little bit sad to have run out of circles before the end of the trip but I knew that was going to happen. I punched an even number of circles to cover sixty days. I’m pretty tired of working so small and badly need to go home to the studio and make some larger work. Soooooon…..