Tuesday 25 April 2017

Infusions Mini-Album–Prepping the Pages

A couple of days ago I put a whole lot of toilet paper rolls into my flower press to flatten them, and a few under a pile of heavy books. The ones under the books didn’t flatten too well, but those from the flower press did pretty well. I bought this flower press at a village fete last year for a song, thinking it might be useful for just this sort of job.

01 Flower Press and Toilet Rolls

The ones that had been under the heavy books, I put into the flower press for a bit more squashing. Not sure how many I shall need, but I can always do more if necessary. I’ve got thousands of the things knocking around in my studio (they keep falling on the floor!) so it will be good to use them up.

Making albums out of them, you do have to make sure they are all the same size. I use 2 different kinds of loo paper – one is soft and posh and expensive (the middles of which I am using for this project) and the other is real el cheapo stuff (£1 for 6 rolls) for cleaning the drainable bags for Kermit (my stoma) – after all, you don’t need anything posh for this so why waste money? Ha! The cardboard rolls for the cheap stuff are bigger (bit of a cheat, really, because the full rolls look nice and big, but the hole in the middle is bigger, so you’re actually getting less). Since getting Kermit just over 2 years ago I’ve become quite an expert on loo paper… but I digress…

Since the edges of the rolls and the inside of one end (where the tags will go) will be visible, I painted these with black gesso. Here are the insides done.

02 Gesso on the Insides

I used a narrow palette knife for this, and realised after doing both ends of the first one that I only needed to do one end, since the other end will be closed by the album binding, and invisible.

I used a small foam brush to apply gesso to the edges of the outsides of the rolls, making sure I coated the edge of each roll because this will show, both ends.

03 Gesso on the Outsides

They were still not 100 percent flat, but I hoped that once I got the samples stuck onto them and they were bound into the album, they would eventually flatten completely.

This proved to be a messy job!

04 A Messy Job!

Thank goodness for washing up liquid and kitchen scrubbies! I got nicely cleaned up in time for a cup of tea!

Coming back later, I touched them up with more black gesso where they needed it, using a grotty old brush I’d already ruined using it for gel medium… You live and learn. I also started pairing the samples and working out which ones needed to be stuck to the toilet rolls that will contain explanatory tags, and which could be stuck back to back. I began the messy and somewhat tedious task of sticking the samples and assembling the pages. More photos tomorrow.

1 comment:

  1. Intriguing! I wonder where you take it from here! The flower press would be ideal for making your own paper as well! Have you tried that? I've tried it once with egg cartons, with more or less success. I've got a piece of nice textured paper out of it. You just soak the egg carton in water, mix it into a pulp with a blender and then squeeze the water out of it - this is where the flower press would come in handy! It give the blender a hard time though, so I haven't tried it since. I'm thinking I will need one of those presses too! A lucky find indeed!

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