Tales from Studio Mailbox

Maibaumaufstellung

Today many small communities in Germany are hoisting their custom decorated Maibaums in observance of the 1st of May.  Tomorrow is actually Germany's equivalent to Labor Day, so everyone is looking forward to enjoying a long holiday weekend.

Here, the fire department marched a magnificently tall tree through the streets to the music of a small band.  Then the children were allowed to decorate the top portion with handmade butterflies from the local kindergarten as well as long crepe paper streamers.  

Then the crowd was kept behind a safety line while the firefighters shimmied the tree into an upright position with the use of some primitive looking gigantic chopsticks!  The crowd cheered, the band played and the children danced.  The tree was up without a hitch so it must officially be May!

 

Pretzel 15 Reinactment

With the support of a friend who delivered fresh pretzels to my door, this is photographic proof of my strange obsession.  Silke, this one's for you!  What do you think?  Am I even close to the Bavarian Pretzel Maiden in Sighting 15? 
I did these in 15 minutes and a self timer on my camera, running in and out of my house, convincing my neighborhood that I am a true lunatic.  I rarely appear on my own blog, but will allow you the humor of the progression of the shots (including an empty window in frame #2).  Click over for more images of pretzel insanity.  Who knows?  Maybe these are the world's first set of self portraits with pretzel props.

Altered Book of Doors

 I was lucky enough to work in a book owned by an artist in Belgium who's new to our European Altered Books group.  Her theme was "Doors" and the size and shape of the book was really fun to play with. 

Normally I would dig through my very unorganized photographic files until I found a door picture that I wanted to develop the spread around.  But because I was so miserably sick during the timeframe I had to work on it, I was extremely grateful to whomever enclosed a laminated magazine clipping of concentric arched doorways.

 Using the shape of the laminated photo, I did the old "symmetric" trick where you make a horizontal cut to the center of the book's binding, and then lay the bottom half of your cut to one side of the spread and the top half of your cut to the other.  You could glue the split halves down at this point, or go a step or two further like I did.  I never glued down the bottom half of my split cut.  I left it flopping in the middle.  This later became the place where I attached the door image.

I am enjoying finding ways of making more interesting layers by playing with some of the pages that get sandwiched when you glue down all the different parts of the spread.  What I did on the left side was simply rip (vertically) half of a page from beneath the top half of the "split cut."  This left a rough edge.  Then I punched holes into this stub with a square punch, tucking some orange transparent film under the "windows" and then glued the ripped portion of the page down to the left background page.  Lastly I glued down the top portion of the symmetrical split-cut on the left hand side.

True to my stenciling obsession, I interesected the word "door" crossword puzzle style on both sides of the spread. I splashed watercolor over the text and then accented the lettering with water soluable crayons.  Lastly I finished off the flip-flop door by punching holes around it's edge and then finished it off with fuzzy red yarn.

 

Pretzel Sighting #15

Spring is official in my area when the Fruhlingsfest takes place!  My favorite booth is Kaese aus Bayern, where oven fresh pretzels are made into warm sandwiches with your choice of cheese and meat toppings.  Yummy.

The folks working the booth were also friendly and generous, even thrilling me with an additional pretzel paper bag for my scrapbook since the one containing my melty cheesy treat was too greasy to save!

The booth itself is a marvelous piece of artwork, pretzels integrated throughout the design.  The expression on the girl's face clearly illustrates that her purpose in life is to pass out twisted goodness.  

What a romanticized visual representation of what I'm trying to do here at Studio Mailbox.  Except instead of leaning out of a window in a bosom-enhancing dress, I'm reaching out to you in cyberspace digitally breaking bread. 

Red Green Images

Simultaneously while working my way through April daily creative actions, I've come across some wonderfully groovy red and green images that needed to be reserved for installation in my Red-Green Altered Book. 

As you can see, it's now so fat that it refuses to cooperate and lay flat for a photo.  Naturally it's also getting harder and harder to work in it.  I suppose I've learned the lesson to remove more pages of the original book at the start!

Who knew I was starting such fashion trends?

Late Easter Greetings

Here are some images of Easter from around my neighborhood. There are colorful plastic eggs suspended from garden bushes everywhere, the evidence of the Ostern Hase!

In Germany, today is still a holiday.  We're enjoying good weather and lots of candy and chocolate!

I'm hoping the bunny was generous to you too...

March Daily Action

Just as in January and February, I tried to continue producing a small daily creative action in March.  My 2009 goal is to simply do a short "warm up" exercise which forces me to physically go down into the studio as well as shift mentally into creative mode. 

March is what I'm referring to as "Brainless and Painless" month! 

Sticking to solid colored cards, I created one for each letter of the alphabet using assorted stencils and stamps.  This worked out well because there are only 26 letters of the alphabet but 31 days in March.  Having been miserably sick for at least a week out of the month, I wasn't stressed out for missing a few days here and there.

What was nice about a project like this was that you didn't have to "come up" with an idea each day.  It was simply "today is letter P" and I sat down and made the "P" card.  The other convenience was that I used the same sets of stencils and stamps over-and-over-and-over so there wasn't really any clean-up or gathering of materials involved.  This also gave the overall set of cards a continuous style.  March cards took me approximately 8-12 minutes to create.

Lots of books I've read have said that these types of creative actions shouldn't be something that you're making with a secondary purpose in mind.  I on the other hand sort of believe in "dual purpose" projects.  Once these cards were done I realized I could use them over and over.  When they were laying all out in front of me I natually wanted to start laying out words.  At that moment I suddenly wished I had signed and dated them on the backside. 

The drawback of the month was that I did get a little bored.  I was really happy when "Z" rolled around.  I was sick of stencils and stamp pads laying everywhere when I needed to use my table for something else.   I think doing numbers 0-9, months of the year or days of the week might be a little more fun because there simply aren't so many and the result would be quicker.

One other thing I should mention is how suprised I was at how well light-colored pencils can cover a rather dark solid card stock.  CARAN d'ACHE (Swiss) Pablo permanent color pencils are amazing.  I had only ever used them on white or cream paper before so I was startled at how they performed on darker backgrounds.  I'm lucky that I can buy the pencils individually here in Germany and slowly build up my collection instead of incurring the cost of a luxury box set.

Click over to see more images and the entire ABC collection...