And a bag for my digital drawing tablet, from the same material.

They’re both made of the same material (a durable shopping bag), except the digital tablet bag is padded with a thick black felt lining.

See the entire post below for more pictures.

Check out more images of this Father Time doll and how I made it, by viewing the full entry below. I’m particularly proud of the solution I found for his skull.

What’s this snail shell got to do with anything?

Here is pictured me gluing the shell to a golf tee and a plastic golf ball.

This whole thing sprang out of my first attempt to knit something. I knitted a length of grey cloth that was full of dropped stitches and irregularities. I justified dressing Time in such shabby attire on the basis that he probably doesn’t have many friends, let alone a tailor.

The scythe is made from a twig, some black ribbon, and a blade-shaped piece of aluminium that I cut out of a needle threader.

The inner edge of the apple card is dark because I had to moisten it
in order to fold it without breaking the paper.

Paper doesn’t have to be made out of wood fibres, and it doesn’t have to be bleached and smooth. I had fun making this fruit and vegetable fibre based paper (admittedly it’s quite coarse — like card) and printing on it with fruit and vegetables afterwards. I should have gone the full mile and made the paint out of fruits and vegetables, too!

For more photographs and an explanation of the process, read the full post.

My desk looked like a schoolchild’s. Does all this count as regressive behaviour?

The process is thus:

1. Boil vegetable/fruit matter (peels, odd ends) for five minutes to soften them. At this stage you can also add an egg carton, or whatever scrap card you have lying around, if you want to add bulk. Use an immersion blender (or a regular one) to make a pulp the consistency of a thick porridge. The finer the pulp, the thinner you can make the paper. If you blend it too finely, however, the fibres will be too small to lock into one another, and you also won’t see the textures and colours of the individual ingredients.

For my mixture I used what fruit and veg peels were left over in the house. You can use almost anything, but I used the skins and odd-ends of things like lemons, clementines, spring onions, carrots… Then I tossed in what was left of a box of porridge oats.. and then I threw in the cardboard box they came in, too. And an egg carton. This stage is fun — it’s like making a witch’s potion. You can decide the colour of the paper at this stage by selecting ingredients of a particular colour, or by colouring the mixture with food colouring or paint.

The frame framing its maker.

2. You will need to make a sieve (whatever size and shape you like) in which to mould the paper/card. My dad was kind enough to knock this one together for me (above).

Once you have your frame, you can pour the pulp as evenly as possible into it and then carefully flop out the rectangle of pulp onto a fine dishcloth (i.e. not a towel whose thick material will leave a coarse imprint in the paper) that’s folded in two for thickness/absorbency.

Then lay another folded dishcloth on top and press the paper flat, sandwiched between two planks of wood using — if you’re lucky enough to have one — a press, or, like me, your body weight. This is both to squeeze out excess water so the paper can dry quickly, and very importantly, to push the fibres of the paper into interlocking positions so it’s strong when it dries.

3. The next part is perhaps the most delicate stage of the operation: Carefully peel away the dishcloths and place the still fragile sheet on old newspapers to dry completely.

I ironed on a plank of wood instead of a soft ironing board.

4. The final stage is to iron your dry card flat — or put it between some heavy books for a while — and then guillotine the edges neatly (unless you prefer a rugged finish).

All done!

I wouldn’t advise eating your stamps after use.

I cut in half some fruit and veg and used them as stamps to decorate my paper.

I tested the stamps in my notebook before trying it on the extremely valuable paper.
No way I was making a mistake after all that work.

It is indeed a lot of work, but it’s all great fun and not without its spoils; the finished product can be a notebook cover, the basis of a painting, the basis for a greeting card, material for making a collage, a work of art in itself…!

I learnt how to make paper from an artist in Germany (one Gerhard Feuchter) who, amongst other paper artworks, made sculptures with his paper fibres by colouring the pulp and slathering it onto 3d wire frames to dry.

See also:

*The encrypted poetry book I made and bound in Germany, under the wing of Herr Feuchter.

*All about Plant Fibres and their application in nature and in man-made materials.

I decided to make my own life mask (above) after recently becoming intrigued by the concept of death masks. Wikipedia:

In Western cultures a death mask is a wax or plaster cast made of a person’s face following death. Death masks may be mementos of the dead, or be used for creation of portraits. It is sometimes possible to identify portraits that have been painted from death masks, because of the characteristic slight distortions of the features caused by the weight of the plaster during the making of the mold. In other cultures a death mask may be a clay or other artifact placed on the face of the deceased before burial rites. The best known of these are the masks used by ancient Egyptians as part of the mummification process, such as Tutankhamon’s burial mask.

In the seventeenth century in some European countries, it was common for death masks to be used as part of the effigy of the deceased, displayed at state funerals. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were also used to permanently record the features of unknown corpses for purposes of identification. This function was later replaced by photography.

Shorpy has this grisly image of a death mask being made in New York circa 1908.

Wikipedia has photos of some interesting masks including a life mask of Abraham Lincoln and a death mask of Blaise Pascal.

When looking for instructions on how to proceed with making my mask, I found these two articles handy (I followed the second one in the event):

Check out the extended post below for more photographs of my attempt to make a life mask.

My dad kindly obliged to bandage my face up! It was hard not to smile — and thereby ruin the whole effort — given the silliness of the scene.

By the time the mask came off, it was dark outside. Very weird — like going into the cinema while it’s light outside and exiting after dark has fallen.

Here’s the mask fresh out of the mould.

I had to slather my beard, hairline, eyelashes and eyebrows with vaseline in order to prevent my hair being ripped out by the plaster after it had dried.

My paperback copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was in need of some love; its spine was broken, the pages were falling out, and the cover was pretty ugly to begin with (I can’t even track down the cover online, which suggests it’s a design that didn’t last long).

So I knocked out a new jacket, complete with buttons. I rebound the book with woodglue along the spine.

The colourful felt used is actually cut from a metre-length of kitchen cloth that I got at the supermarket.

The text is printed directly on to the felt. I fed an A4 piece of the felt through my (standard) printer. The text resolution was surprisingly crisp and attractive.

I cut a pad of a4 drawing paper in two, put all the paper together and glued the spine with wood glue, to keep all the pages together.

Then made a cover, drilled holes all the way down the side, and bound everything together with the japanese binding technique I learnt in my papermaking class.

The cover is made from a map of Tuebingen, the place in Germany where I was living for the past five months or so.

The binding string is a sort of plastic rafia that I found in my parents’ garage. It’s durable and looks pretty neat. Nice colour.

I started doing some quick sketches of things.

They are admittedly quite poor but I honestly have practically no experience drawing on paper. I’ve always worked with a tablet on the computer, since joining the Clock Crew. Happily though, i’ve found a lot of skills are transferable.

Will probably post more sketches as I progress.

The buckle was also part of the boots, but now serves as a clasp to close the book.

The stitching (all the stitching that is not left over from the original pattern of the boots) is all hand-stitched and rough.

Given the nature of the material used, and its source, the faux leather had to be cut into shapes and then stuck together to make a large enough surface area. This lends the book a frankenstein’s monster sort of look…

Continue reading below for lots more pictures and background info.

I made all the paper in the book myself, and pressed symbols into each of the pages. I had to first cut the shapes out of linoleum before pressing them into the still-wet handmade paper.

Afterwards I stained the imprints with ashes, and then used a fixer to make it stay put.

The code on all the pages is not so much a code as an alphabet. The letters merely stand in for roman letters that make up english words.

The texts in the book are poems and prose by me, chronicling my experiences this past year.

The texts are printed on tissue paper (I had to stick the tissue paper to normal weight paper in order to get it through the printer — then peel off the tissue paper) which is in turn stuck into the allocated spaces on each page.

I created a font so as to make typing out all 26 pages of symbols easier. I had originally planned to just write the pages by hand with a pen, but it was tedious to make the spacing nice and not to smudge everything.

Below: Two typical pages from the book. A symbol above and text continued in the space below.

The symbols on each page stand for letters of the roman alphabet, and they appear in alphabetic order, providing the key to the code on the pages.

opening words of the book (the weird formatting of the text is a clue as to how the code in the book is read):

Closing words… A poem about contentment.

These two pages are the only pages that have unencrypted text.

The pages are bound through the spine of the book. The binding is visible from the outside.

What is it and why did I do this?

It started out as a project for my paper making class – we were told that we were expected to make "artist’s books" by the end of the semester. An artist’s book, I learned, is a "book object" – that is, it looks like a book, but it is a work of art in itself, and isn’t necessarily read in order to be appreciated.

More often than not they are essentially sculptures, or very elaborate books with no authored content, or with abstract content.

My book is full of bad poetry/words, but the poems are not the focus of the book, as the poems are encoded in a pictographic alphabet I constructed with a friend when I was younger (I clearly had just as little to do back then as I do now). So when you open the book, none of the words can be understood.

Embossed on each hand-made page is a symbol from the alphabet mentioned above, and the pages are in alphabetic order. So the key to understanding the book is in the book itself.

In doing that I hoped to make the book a metaphorical object, an artists’s book, representing understanding. Or one aspect of understanding in particular, which is that the answers we seek (in understanding life, love, books, films, people, ourselves, etc etc) are, more often than not, directly in front of us — right under our noses — and if we would just look harder, or in a different way, we would unlock all the answers.