Quite a productive day, considering!

Fundraiser was ace! Raised £215.44 apparently. And after a bit of a later start, I dragged myself back to the print room. Spent today cutting out my picture frames for my new image out of the wall paper pattern.

Turns out that despite going round shops looking for a wallpaper pattern or lace pattern suitable for my frames, my original paper pattern was the the best one. The new patterns were to big or fussy.

Because I've used only a part of this wall paper, I've avoided making the print look too repetitive. I then soft grounded the cut out frames and puppet strings onto my plate. I also did a test strip of my branches, they look really nice.

I wanted branches to grow from behind the fireplace and up the wall. This is to refer to the symbolism of the tree throughout Carter's story (Ashputtle plants a branch on her mothers grave and waters it with her tears. The branch grows into a tree. The mother comes back, transformed as a bird and lives in the tree that Ashputtle wishes upon.) I also wanted to use the branches to link to a family tree and the dis-functional family within the story. Tree branches often look quite scary and atmospheric, so this could be a good way to make my image overbearing. I wasn't sure whether to go for using the branches or to use screwed up tissue paper for this plate. But after doing the test strip, I'm going for branches. First had to stop out the rest of my plate, leaving the new frames and thread areas clear. This took quite some time due to the size of the plate and the varnish is quite thick and hard to get around all the detail of the frames without covering them up. I'll have to finish this tomorrow.


looked on the Habitat website again today, they do have a white 60x80 frames tried to order it on-line but only have one, don't want to just get one now in case they don't have them in stock in time for the degree show. I will have to phone tomorrow.