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Last Monday I received a telephone call asking if I would be able to teach a paste paper class the next Saturday. I accepted the job even though I knew it was a lot of work getting all the materials together to get them to the new (for me ) space in time fore the class. Adi and Sabine were here, Sally and Quentin had asked if we would be able to visit Philadelphia while they were there,  a book was scheduled to be delivered on Friday for a rapid construction. And now, there was an opportunity to teach a one day workshop. Mindy, who owns the studio, was very helpful getting some of the supplies that I needed for the class, I had to gather other tools and materials from the Center for Book Arts and from my studio and kitchen. Colman and I went to Philadelphia (next story, next entry) returned late Thursday and saw clients and set up for the Saturday class on Friday, the book project was moved into the next week so I was able to rest a little Friday night.

I caught the 8 A.M. ferry to Manhattan, it was a beautiful day, so very welcome after the near constant rain of the past few weeks. As we were putting into the slip at South Ferry I saw this tug pushing two barges with mountains of gravel in them. They were beautiful in the morning light and unusual, tugs are usually pushing refueling barges toward or from freighters moored in the harbor. The gravel mountains look small until you realize that the red walls around them are  over 4 feet tall or you compare them to the doorways on the tug.

On the way to Mindy’s studio I walked through the farmer’s market  in Union Square,  it was nearly endless temptation.  Fresh baked goods, farmer cheeses (one of them a blue. . .), baskets of fresh picked raspberries and cherries,  potted plants and  handmade pretzels were  distracting me from my journey. I picked up  a couple of butterscotch oatmeal cookies and an apple turnover  and headed to Mindys studio ( Intima Press , Studio on the Square) on the east side of the square.

Everything went well and I enjoyed working with all of the students.  For lunch I was told about a falafel place in the block north of 16th street, it was really good with a salad bar of toppings for the fresh falafel.

Here’s the class photo,  Mindy is holding her dog Suki.

I took the following photos  from the ferry on the way back to Staten Island.  I like the lighting  when clouds are heavy and the sun is low. This is the Goldman Sachs building in New Jersey.

There was a perfect photo op  with a sailboat near the Statue of Liberty.

We were married in Connecticut on May 30th. Last weekend we held a reception for our New York neighbors, family and friends. The week long rain stopped and we had a temperate if damp day to celebrate our marriage. Adi and Sabine were here for the weekend helping set up for the expected 60 guests.  Colman and I had already driven to Ikea to get  enough champagne flutes and I spent  late Friday and part of Saturday  baking savory  hors d’oeuvres for the time before we intended to cut the cake.  Here’s a shot of  Adi, Sabine and Colman with early guests from Brooklyn and Connecticut.

Adi’s son Taybin and Kat, they will be married in August.

Here we are relaxing just before curtain time.

The sun came out for the first time in days, here are our neighbors, Ellen, Kevin, and Toni.

More guests arrived, and we started to serve the pink proseco.

It was time to bring out the cake,

The cake was a gift from  Ben and Sylvia Weinstock.

Adi took this movie as we were starting to cut the cake, I had a little trouble getting it started since I was un familiar with three tier cake architecture. There were wooden supports in it, everything went smoothly with Ellen’s help, after we removed the top tier. It was really good, a yellow cake filled with raspberries in raspberry cream. A lot of our guests remarked at how beautiful AND delicious it was.

Ellen just sent these photos of Keith helping me take off the top tier of the cake.

There were unexpected gifts, Henry takes notice.

Here are Gwen And Daphne with flowers from the cake.

And Juliette waving to the camera just before we cut the cake.   Many thanks to Adi, he took most of the photos in this entry, and I’m veryhappy to have the movie of us cutting the cake.

Saturday started with the arrival of a crushed box from Florida,  a plant I had ordered  online  was here in just about no time. Here’s the photo from the web.  There had been an email notice that it was on sale,  it was sort of like paying full price and getting free shipping.  The plant is more than 2 feet tall with wavy edged, arrow shaped, lax, very fleshy, succulent,  green leaves.  It’s in bud. . .  Traveling so fast did it some harm, but I think it should recover.  It’s name is Synandrospadix vermitoxicus,  does that mean it’s poisonous to mice?

This weekend was the first of two weekends that Art By the Ferry took place. It will run next weekend too. Colman and I got out early (for us), picked up our art works from the Staten Island Museum and found a parking place in the no-space-for-cars-land of St George. Walking toward the spaces where the art was being shown, we ran into so many people we knew that it was some time before we got to see any of the art. For those of you who don’t know what this event is, it’s a mass showing of hundreds of artworks and performances ( musical and words) by the artists, craftsmen, musicians and writers who live on this (larger than Manhattan ) island. It’s a great opportunity to see and hear a really wide range of works in a lot of different mediums. The art work is displayed in a number of buildings behind the Borough Hall on Stuyvesant Street all the way to a warehouse that we calla Fish’s Eddy (for the last tenant) toward Stapleton on Bay Street. I didn’t take many photos. Most of the people we knew were moving too fast that early in the morning.  Here is a photo of our friend Irma, who is known for her photography, (displayed in another space), she’s showing some of her jewelry here.

This is Denise with some of her work in the left background. 

The weather couldn’t have been better. It was nice to see a lot of our friends in person, in the open air, a lot of us are on FaceBook  so we have an idea of what we are doing but FB isn’t like actually seeing the work or as pleasant as being able to talk face to face.

As we were heading back to the car,  I noticed this hole in the sidewalk. it , at one time must have held a post of some sort.  A lot of alianthus seeds had germinated filling it with a bright green salad of leaves.  the photo is about life size. 

I spent most of today sewing books for a client, the telephone rang quite a bit too.  I took breaks to go outside to tend my  abutilon seedlings and see the the new flowers. This is a mid season azalea, Full Moon.  We bought it because  of the large white flowers and because the bush produces flowers in three  different  colors;  pure white, white broken with salmon (or solid salmon) and a picotee pink with a flare.  The leaves are a beautiful glossy green. 

This is the first day the martagon lilies opened.  We bought one bulb a long time ago, it’s the only martagon we have been able to keep. We don’t dare move it , once martagons are happy  in a place you let them stay there.  Last year there were two stems.  It’s martagon dalhansonii. 

This azalea is a seedling from one of my crosses done about 10 years ago,  it has a compact form and varied flowers. Most of my other seedlings are salmon colored late season plants. 

Henry is a constant shadow where ever we go. 

It’s been a busy few weeks leading up to last weekend. Colman and I went to Adi and Sabine’s home in Connecticut for a special event. Here’s a photo that  our friend Helen took on Saturday the 30th, the story will be in a later entry, for now, I will try to catch up a little.  

Sunday before Memorial Day  we went to a party at Kevin and Diana’s.  I didn’t take many photos except in their garden, on the way around the block  we were surprised by the fullness of our neighbors rhododendrons. Our next door neighbor Gary’s bush was at its peak, the chionanthus in his driveway was also in full bloom.

The Brown’s house next  to Gary’s is surrounded by very old plants, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many flowers on any rhododendron.

Around the side of the Brown’s there grows a pink flowered bush.

At Kevin and Diana’s the stand out was this clematis. There were roses, iris and other flowers all around the yard but these were special.

I went into the city today to pick up some printing for another large book. As I arrived in Manhattan and got off of the ferry I glanced back toward the harbor, a fire boat was near the terminal in full spray.  I’ve wanted to shoot this for a long time, couldn’t have asked for better lighting or a better vantage point.  Two photos and it was over, the water stopped, when I got back to the terminal the boat had moved on to another place. If you look into the sprays on the right, you can see a shadow of the Statue of Liberty through the mist.

I’ll close this short entry with a photo of Henry, for the past two weeks we have been letting him outside. He gets to be a cat in the wild and he keeps us company on our trips around the garden. It’s also reassuring that when he’s out of sight, he appears when we call him. If we go inside he sometimes waits for us on the deck. 

Tonight the annual student show opened at the Fashion Institute of Technology on Seventh Avenue at 28th street. There’s great work from all departments on display in many of the open, street level spaces of the main buildings. In the museum building, in the lobby, women’s fashion are being shown along with packaging design.

Downstairs in the special exhibition halls,  Surface Design, Children’s Toys,  Illustration, Menswear, and  Jewelry with Jewelry Design are on display.

Here are a few shots of the Galleries. There were a lot of people in attendance.

The toys:

The center illustration is a wonderfully atmospheric and frightening picture of a  man who has hooked a monstrously large sea creature.  It’s my favorite of all the illustrations.  I’ll visit it again. 

A wall of really nice jewelry designs, many masterfully painted in gouache,  next to cases that contain work from the jewelry and silversmith studios. 

Some shots of the individual jewelry cases.

One of my cups and a bracelet are in this case.

Here are some close ups of my pieces in the show.   My rice and sesame cast silver bracelet is on the right.

two of my brooches

The Keum Bu Cat earrings.

My design for a fork.

The recently finished mirror.

The turquois necklace with filigree backed stones.

My Snake Pit tray  is next to Annie Wu’s brilliantly colored necklace.

My copper cat cup has been silver plated.  I think it looks pretty nice but it needs a better polishing. I think I can do that now without removing the plating.

I’ll visit again, there are a lot of interesting things in the show by other students,  I’d like to put them up in another entry when I can give them credit along with the photograph.  The show is up for another 2 weeks, you should visit if you can.  There’s a lot of good work from all the departments of F I T .

We have been unusually busy. On Wednesday morning, at 8 A.M., a 137 pound crate of paper arrived. I began to make a very large, guarded book out of it that had to be finished by the end of the day. At 6 or so I was cutting the last of around 60 leaves out of the book to finish it, wrap it and get it ready for pick up. There are no shots of the book, but I did make movies during various stages of it construction (for publication at a later date). Here I am folding the pages early in the morning and the finished book with its boards wrapped to protect them while my clients work on the interior. The book opens to display a spread of  54 inches.

These shots were taken toward the end of this week. The garden has been performing, our first tree peony opened Monday and the seedling, blooming its second time, had 4 very nice pink flowers.  This is Green Dragon in a Pink Pool.  

This is the seedling. It bloomed for the first time last year.  We’ve been told that it takes about 3-5 years for the seedlings to display their full potential. this one is coming along nicely. I like the dark pink flares in the petals.

Here  is the front yard as seen from the street.

The pink rhododendron, New Rocaille, growing with the chartreuse flowered Euphorbia myrsinites.

Ipheon is blooming, it has escaped the flower beds forming patches in what should be the lawn.

 In addition to class work, we are in the last two weeks of classes,  my dragonflies are in production for earrings that have been ordered by a gift shop. Days keep getting busier and busier.

This is the first part of chasing the sterling silver wine cup that I raised from a disk a little while ago. I delayed the work on this cup because I wanted to have a mold made so that I could have blanks raised by metal spinning that would meet the size that I needed. Here’s a photo of the one I raised by hand and the copy I had made from the new mold. Mine is on the right. 

I used the surface gauge to mark the final height at 75 mm and then used shears to trim the cups down to equal size.  The off cuts will become a cuff and parts for a bracelet.

Then I used the surface gauge to mark up the borders on one cup.  This is the first time I am working in 18 gauge silver so I am taking it slowly and trying to be as accurate as I can.  I decided to decorate this cup with my first design.  It’s a simpler than a later design that I really want to do but the later design requires me to make repoussè  circles with which I have not hadmuch success.  Once the horizontal lines were in place I divided the bottom into 12 parts and extended lines up the sides with a triangle and a sharpie.  Mylar stencilswere made from my original drawing and I laid them out with an erasable sharpie onto the cup. This is a large photo to show  most of my work surface.

Here is the cup with the bottom panel drawn in, I used the stencils again when I drew the design with the scratch awl, then I drew the border the same way.

Everything was scratched in and I began working with the chasing tool.

Once all the lines were chased in I began to press the background down on one side of the chased lines to give the leaves some relief.

Now the background is being pushed down evenly.  I decided not to texture it yet because there is some snarling in the cup’s future.  After it is snarled it will have to be annealed which will soften the whole cup, detailing after that will make it hard and usable again, if I do it now, it will mean that I will have to do it again which will leave undesirable double impressions.

The background is down and the leaves begin to get some sculptural detail.

 The background of the border has to be lowered as well as the bottom part of the cup.

Then I began to matte the border background.

The border has been matted and I have begun to close the lip just a little. I want to sketch in a design on the bottom before I remove the pitch.  When I showed this at school last Friday, Gennady , Rebekah and Michael all said, at different times, that I need to lift the leaves and border out more. They can’t all be wrong, I was satisfied with the relief so far  but after I saw the difference in the lotus bowl I understand what they were expecting of the piece. That’s the reason I started the lotus bowl over the weekend. I wasn’t sure how much the snarling iron would change the relief on this cup. I don’t want it getting too wide or fat. When I start to detail the leaves I know that it will go in a bit so I guess it makes sense to push out more first. 

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Spent part of the weekend working on one of the raised copper bowls.  The bowl was marked with the surface gauge,  I made stencils and drew the lines on it with a sharpie, corrected the drawing and then scratched the drawing in with a sharp center punch.  Here it is after all the lines have been chased into the surface.

Then I used a tool to depress one side of the chased lines. the lines between the petals were depressed on both sides.  It has the effect of making the petals stand out from the bowl.  The curve is still like the original bowl, they need to be pushed out from the inside. After working a design into the bottom, I removed the pitch and cleaned the residue with a turpentine soak.  In class we would just burn it out with the torch. There is no need to anneal and I don’t want to anneal before I use the snarling iron, the work hardened lines will keep the bowl’s shape while I push the petals outward, those areas are still soft enough to work. 

Here’s the bottom design chased with a little shaping and at the first stage of being depressed.

When I showed this and a silver cup (In another, future entry) I am working on to Gennady, he asked why I hadn’t put a stick into the  pitch. The stick can be put into a vise  and because it takes up space in the cup I would use less pitch making the whole thing lighter to carry back and for the to school. He also suggested that I use black pitch in which I will be able to get a higher relief, it’s less expensive as well as more malleable.

Once the bowl was cleaned , I used the snarling iron to balloon the petals.  Here are two shots comparing the before and after shapes inside and out. The difference, while subtle in execution, makes a great deal of difference in how the bowl looks and feels. I did a little more  snarling after these photos were taken. It took some time to figure out how the iron is striking the inside, control is not perfect but I was able to regulate the curves and remove most of the obvious indentations and missed spots. All of the work with metal seems to be about the reflection, one has to act and observe, the reflection is changed and one acts again to further the change.

You can see that the angle at which the bowl rests on its side has changed as the petals were pushed out. 

The bowl was annealed, pickled  and I put pitch back into it with a short length of closet pole.  I recovered more than enough pitch to fill a napkin ring.  With the pole firmly held by a vise I may overcome a problem I had with the bowl moving while I tried to work on  difficult angles with the sandbag. 

It’s a dark and drizzly day. We took Henry to the vet to be neutered,  he’s about 10 months old now and  has become constantly hormonal. We don’t want him to spray. . .

When we got back from the vet’s I took a walk around the yard, Spring has arrived  even if I have to walk through sleet making crackling noises on the dried leaves underfoot and bear the cold damp wind. Rhododendrons are blooming along with bulbs and other perennials. Here’s part of the front yard from the porch. 

The Rocaille rhododendron and  chartreuse flowered euphorbia myrsinites.

To the immediate right  of this photo there’s a row of fritillaria meleagris, the checkered lily with the blue flowered ipheion in the far  background.

On the way to the back yard our patch of arabis is putting on a show of white flowers.

It was so bright outside yesterday that I got the umbrella out of storage and uncovered the table and chairs.  Elizabeth Flemming is blooming  along with some yellow primroses. The chinese maple has leafed out.

More primulas near the deck.

And back to the rhododendrons, (pseudochrysantha) by the front walk.

Last Sunday we went , with our friend Tibor, to the annual  cactus and Succulent Show in Connecticut.  Our first stop is always in the sales area, the show could wait but rare plants and bargains might just vanish before we get there. We were attending on the second day, I’m sure the best specimens went within the first few hours of opening on Saturday. This is just a little glimpse of part of the sales area. 

One of the members of the sponsoring local cactus group was selling rare aroid tubers.  I got three  which are now potted up and I am awaiting their emerging leaves.  The scope of plants available goes beyond the expected cactus and succulents. Bob Smoley was even selling some sea shells  and bromeliads along with his fine collection of succulent plants. A local potter was selling some of her pots  and tufa tubs which are used to grow hardy succulents outside. 

Now, on to the show.  The first area is devoted to cactus.  This show always has a lot of exceptionally well grown plants. I don’t  generally like cactus as much as succulents but I have great admiration for a well grown plant and  a appreciate the skill and patience it takes to produce results like these. 

These fasciated cactus are in perfect, immaculate condition. It was breathtaking to see them up close as individuals.

This copiapoa always gets my attention, it’s compact, black and has furry tufts instead of spines. 

In the succulent side of the show this sculptural Kalanchoe bonneri made an elegant appearance. Haven’t seen this one before. The colors and form is really nice. It got a blue ribbon.

Here’s a nicely grown Sedum compactum. 

A collection of euphorbia francoisii with different leaf forms.

A closer look at my favorite type of  Euphorbia francoisii.

Here’s a look back to the beginning of the succulent part of the show.

A look across the divider back into the cactus display.

And the rest of the succulent show further along the tables.

It’s not easy to get these massonias to bloom.  These plants were shown with their remaining dried calyx clusters, one has seeds in it.

This Adenium bispinnatum is a magnificent specimen combining bonsai culture and flowers in a great presentation.

A good display of large flowered euphorbias.  You don’t often see plants this large.

I was told that this table with its mixed collection of plants was an educational display. 

a grand pachypodium in flower. 

The center table held a number of special collections, this is a nicely grown caudex plant (trichodema?), it blooms with large daisy like flowers either white or pink.  

These plants are gesneriads, but because of their large tubers which are usually exposed when the plants are grown in pots, they get into succulent shows  along with caudex plants.  The sinningia leucotricha in the far right of this picture and in a portrait shot below is the plant that got me to grow gesneriads a number of years ago. Its dramatic, fuzzy, silver coloring wins a lot of people over to this group of plants (which also include african violets and a number of succulent leafed vines).

These are caudex plants. 

Here’s a last shot of a desert pelargonium (geranium) with a delicate yellow flower. 

In Class last week, Rebekah wanted us to make a test piece in preparation for the final project.  Steve, another classmate gave me a small piece of copper  that was thinner than the 18 gage with which I am used to working. Rebekah had us chase  a design into the thinner copper and then we made flattening tools to hammer around one side of the chased lines to push the background down in order to raise the design above the metal’s surface. All of this work is done on the face of our copper while it is set into the pitch bed. I took it home and removed the metal from its pitch support, here’s aphoto of the metal in the first stage, front and back. 

The piece was then put back onto the pitch with the face down so that I could work on the back.  Since I had a number of tools from working on the Snake Pit Plate I was able to continue without Rebekah’s oversight. I wanted to see how far I could push the bird, rocks and trees down into the pitch. The other challenge was to keep the shapes in a proper relationship as they overlap in the picture. Here it is on the pitch with an insert showing the design pushed down after working.

This is the effect on the front side. 

It was put onto the pitch again with the right side up.  I filled the deep parts with pitch to make sure there was no air trapped under the raised parts before I turned it over. Then I began to matte the background leaving some of it relatively untouched  to put some obelisk-like objects in the  picture. I had to make a couple of new tools to detail the feathers, I’m finding that the tools I made as punches are much more effective and useful if they are very small and have thinner faces. Here it is nearly done. After I took it off of the pitch I used a mallet to flatten the edges and finish the piece.  Finishing this has shown me the advantages of using thinner metal.  I have been running into difficulties with some small pieces done on 18 gage, the larger vessels don’t seem to be affected as much by the thickness of the metal.