Everyone's printing on lokta

Lokta is one of my favorite papers. I've always loved the deep and varied colors it comes in: everything from a glorious garnet red to sea green. And it is easy to glue...it doesn't curl up and get nasty the way that some machine-made papers do. (I like to say that it behaves itself.) The paper is handmade in the mountains of Nepal from the inner bark of the lokta bush. Lokta is one of the strongest paper fibers, and since new growth regenerates quickly it provides a renewable resource.

Just this season, there is a whole new batch of lokta papers coming out with some great silk-screen designs. Paper Source (which does their own designs, I believe) has these two fun and funky prints:

Note to Paper Source...I love your new batik lokta as well, but not the color.

Wet Paint has a new assortment as well. (And yes, the picture was taken of paper brought home from the store!)


And Paper Mojo has some Japanese-themed loktas which are very trendy, but still lovely.

One of the most well known manufacturers of lokta is Lama Li, a firm in France that produces wonderful designs. Everytime I visit their web site (you have to get a password from them) I wish there was a way for all of their gorgeous papers to get to the U.S. It almost makes me want to get in the paper distribution business!

Konnyaku

Wet Paint invited me to do a demo for them on konnyaku starch and I had a blast. One of my favorite things to do when I'm feeling low is to go and look through their paper folders. (I always tell them that they should serve beer on Friday night and it would be a nearly perfect place.) So it was an incredible thrill to go behind the paper counter and talk to my fellow customers.

Konnyaku is a starch made from the root of Devil's Tongue, a plant that is a member of the philodendron family, and is widely available in Japan and China. Papers treated with konnyaku become stronger and more flexible. Wet Paint buyer Ann Snowden shared the demo with me and we both had experimented with a number of papers to see how it worked. Any paper that had long fibers (most Japanese and the Nepalese loktas, for example) responded really well. Short-fibered papers, like most American machine-made, became a little more flexible but didn't seem to gain any strength from the starch.

A small paper purse stitched out of paper and a few samples of paper before and after being treated with the starch.

We had a lot of questions about how to use it; I think it's simplicity was almost puzzling to people. Really, it's just brush it on the paper (both sides), let dry, use. Crumpling at some point makes it flexible but that can be done before, during or after. My preference is to brush the starch on the paper and when it gets damp dry, to crumple it up. It's such a great product; there's not much that can go wrong. Even clean up is easy: just soap and water.

Paper prepared with konnyaku starch drying in my kitchen.

Konnyaku is quite economical. One small teaspoon of the powder makes up a little over a cup of the starch and it goes a long way.

Ann ran a couple of pieces of the prepared papers through the sewing machine...you can see here how beautiful the result was. I liked the starch for strengthening paper that I use in box joins or joints. I don't have a picture here, but it's possible to smooth out the paper flat again in gluing but have a much stronger join because of the starch. Japanese Paper Place owner and washi enthusiast, Nancy Jacobi, wrote me that "One artist, Loree Ovens, here in Toronto creates etchings on washi, crumples them up with konnyaku, then flattens them so it gives this wonderful texture after the artwork is printed."

The starch is available from Japanese Paper Place and Wet Paint. Currently Wet Paint has small portions of just 3 teaspoons (enough for 3 cups of starch) made up to sell so that you can try it without a big investment.

September, this golden month

I do love this month. I don't know a single person who doesn't have that "back-to-school, let's start all over again, this is really the new year" feeling in September. And it's doubly so for me this year, with my new position at Franconia Sculpture Park.

As per my self-imposed restrictions on blogging, I won't be talking much about the Park. (A reminder, my blogging rules are: No jobs, family or politics*...though that last one is so-o-o-o-o hard right now!!) I can say that I just have to break into a great big smile when I step out of the car at the beginning of my work day. You just never know what you're going to see that's new on the grounds. My "to do" list is long and the "someday" list is even longer, but I do hope to use Flickr, YouTube and other sites to allow others to see what I get to see every day.

I have been so distracted lately with my new work and other news (cough, Sarah Palin, cough) that it's hard for me to focus on anything. So in that spirit, let me just post about a few things that have caught my ADD-like attention lately:

These new labels from Paper Source just fill my heart with delight. They've priced them pretty high though: 8 labels for almost $5. Still, I might have to pick up one or two packets....there's nothing like getting a beautiful envelope in the mail.

BookGirl is on the board of a fine organization in Asheville, NC called Interlude Editions. They are holding a fund raiser this month to support their next artist-in-residence and are holding a raffle for this amazing collaboration. She writes about it here and also has a link to how you can purchase tickets. Asheville is in the heart of some fine book-making territory and participating artists in the collaboration include Dan Essig, Margaret Cogswell, Matt Liddle and Frank Brannon.

I don't work with leather much but I thought that this book by German artist/blogger Tulibri was beautiful in its simplicity. The best part? She made the cover from a pair of leather pants that someone gave her, even incorporating the pants seam into her front cover. Ingenious! She blogs in German and English...thank goodness!

Finally, I'll be doing a demo next Friday night (September 19) at my one of my favorite places in all of the world: Wet Paint Art on Grand Avenue in St. Paul. They've asked me to experiment with a Japanese paste called Konnyaku. The paste is a starch made from a root. When the starch is used on papers, they become so strong and flexible that they can be used as fabric. So that's this weekend's work (preparing for the demo)...I'll post some of my results here later in the week.

*Ok, I have to break this rule. The rumors are strong that Tina Fey will be playing Sarah Palin on tonight's premier of Saturday Night Live. If true, that is just excellent!

And now for the transition

The subtitle of my blog is “book arts, dogs, gardens, and transitions” and I’m afraid I haven’t served the last two items well on this blog. But I can say now that I’m in the middle of a new transition: I’m excited to have taken a job working with an wonderful group of people at Franconia Sculpture Park, just outside of the Twin Cities. I’ll be working on the administrative side while their Artistic Director keeps the artists supported on the large-scale sculptures that they build right on site in the park.

I’m excited about many aspects of the job. The park has a bit of that “Penland” feel in that there is creative work going on all the time. I’m looking forward to learning more about the materials and tools involved in big structures (I know that there is a blue-painted crane at the park and I’ve heard rumors of a pink fork-lift) and how a sculptor goes from studio-size work to really, really big sculptures. But my responsibilities will include keeping the money going in and going out in the right ways and working with the rest of the staff to help introduce the work of Franconia to more people. It’s not impossible that I could start a blog on the web site. In the meantime, you can search “Franconia” on Flickr and see some wonderful sculptures built in the park over the last 10 years.


After leaving my last job, I made the decision to take a full year off from work...an incredible opportunity for which I’ll never stop being grateful. I had the chance to rediscover my hometown, build a community with my book arts friends, and find meaningful volunteer work teaching ESL to immigrants through the Minnesota Literacy Council.

This isn’t a farewell post by any means. I like blogging too much! It does feel like this is a big enough transition that it deserves a mention, though. But maybe I’ll change the subtitle a bit. Perhaps something like “book arts, dogs, and gardens I love.” (You’ll have to come visit the Franconia site for updates on big sculptures!)