Much of a muchness

I like this paper. I will confess I relented and bought some more from Paper Source as I still can’t find a source of funky modern designs here in the UK. However, I have found another good supplier of lovely paper called the Paper Studio. They are based in Tempe, Arizona and the studio ‘ is a teaching studio and paper arts shop created and run by Cindy and Gary who are mixed media and book and paper artists’. It’s no good, I am just going to have to move to the USA.

I have been tagged by Kylee over at Bijoux and Banter to tell you all about my studio. I think calling it a studio is over stating it a bit, it’s more of a work room. I do have to confess though that in the interests of making my fledgling business sound a bit more groovy and professional than it actually is, I have called it Limetree Studio. This is a business card which uses a photograph I took in my garden last summer.

Artist name: Diane Aldred

Business name: Limetree Studio

Website/blog: This is it! New one on the way. Honest.

Do you have a dedicated studio/artistic space? Yes. I used to work in my kitchen but I moved to a spare bedroom.

Where is it located? On the top floor of my house.

Is it a large or small space? It’s quite big, it doubles as a study and all my books are up there as well as a TV and a sofa.

What medium(s) do you work in? Paper, I am an addict.

Do you have a separate area for each? If I was organized I would have a separate area for gluing as keeping glue under control is the bane of my life.

What one word would you use to describe your studio? Comfortable.

What do you think is the best feature of your studio? My plan chest keeps me organized.

What would you change if you could? I’d buy more storage so it was tidier.

Can you share an organisational tip? Tidy as you go (that’s rich coming from me…..)

Describe the usual state of your work table? A disaster zone

Does your work table face out into the room or toward the wall? Towards the wall (which has a large painting of my lovely boys on it) and which I am going to paint soon (as soon as I can get someone to help me move the plan chest…..)

What’s one drawback of your studio/artistic space? It’s too far from the kitchen (2 floors away) so I am constantly running up and down stairs to make tea/answer the door.

Do you have an idea wall or inspiration board? No. I take inspiration from the papers I buy.

Do you listen to music in your studio? Yes, loud music which I sing along to.

Do you display your own work in your studio? No

Other artists’ work? I have paintings on the wall.

What’s one quirk or unusual feature of your studio?
My desk where my laptop is, is always tidy but my book making work space is very untidy. Not sure why….

Whose studio space would you like to read about? I would like to tag the following artists to reveal their studio spaces….

Kim at Laketrees.

Astrid at Tulibri

Amy Hanks

Jane at My Wooden Robot

And now for my weekend. Click on all images for a larger version.

I had a lovely weekend. The weather was fantastic, warm and sunny. I went for a walk around the Fleet on Sunday and then stopped for lunch at a pub in Langton Herring. I must confess I ended up watching TV as it was the last match of the football season and my team Manchester United were tied for first place at the top of the Premier League so everything depended on this last day of matches. Without boring you with too many details, suffice it to say, my boys won the title for the 17th time. All in all, a fantastic day.

I’m off to London for a couple of days tomorrow. I’m meeting up with some old friends who are visiting from Australia. The last time I saw them was about 6 years ago and before that I hadn’t seen them for about 20 odd years. I just hope the trains don’t let me down this time…..

This is another of those plastic coated cotton fabrics. It’s really fun and waterproof and wipeable. Which I found to be quite useful when I spilled a glass of juice over my work area. Oops.

It’s all very odd. I was checking my stats and for the last couple of days I have had a huge spike in page views. Everyone seems to be reading a post I wrote in September last year called ‘Back to the Drawing Board‘ - 1107 page views yesterday. It was all about an album I made for my (then) boyfriend’s son and was also the post where I first tried out the woven binding - which I repeated using foam a few days ago. Very odd indeed! Today, there is another spike, this time for another post in September called ‘Double the Fun‘. I don’t quite know why these old posts are suddenly so popular but I’m not complaining!

I’m going to a dinner thing tonight. As usual, I have been trying every item of clothing on in my wardrobe looking for something suitable to wear. It’s black tie so I need something dressy. My only problem is that I have put some weight on since Christmas, which I have been trying half heartedly to lose. When you have no will power, it’s hard, believe me. I think I have found the solution though….

Now that’s my kind of diet. Maybe I should exercise more but then there’s always the danger of this…..

….instead of this.

Now that’s what I call exercising to music. Very cool tune isn’t it? Well, these guys think so…..

I originally made this photograph album as a gift for a friend who celebrated her birthday last week, but as with the best laid plans, I didn’t finish it in time and so ended up buying her a gift instead. This album is much larger than the usual books I make (as you can see from the photograph) and was subsequently much more difficult to make as handling large pieces of gluey paper is really difficult. Well, it is for me! This was also going to be a dry run for an even larger album I am going to make for another friend who wants it to match two albums she already owns. I’ll keep you posted how I get on…

I’ve had a really action packed weekend. It was a Bank Holiday here in the UK. As is often the case, the weather was horrible - very wet and cold but I still managed to have a good time. The weekend consisted of a friend’s birthday party, meeting up with various friends and lots of eating, followed by lots of walking to counteract the effects of the eating. You may have noticed my blogging has been sporadic recently, to say the least . Unfortunately/fortunately, this may have to continue as my social life has picked up markedly mainly due to the fact I have (at the risk of sounding like Jane Austen) - a potential ‘gentleman caller’. Here is Jane’s advice on how to find Mr. Darcy…. (it comes at about 1m 15secs)

It seems the amount I am able to blog varies inversely with the state of my social life! The social drought since Christmas has led to a very productive phase on the book-making/blogging front but this pace is difficult to maintain at the moment, so I intend to aim to write something every few days rather than every day. Just so you know. If I suddenly pick up the pace on the blogging front, you will know why….and I will be back to this….

Just as everyone returns to work after the holiday, the weather has improved and today was wonderfully warm and sunny - great for tennis - apart from the fact I didn’t give my tennis skirt it’s first outing of the year (as the sight of my white legs would have probably blinded the other players) so I was actually too hot wearing joggers. As it was such a gorgeous day, I put the hood down on the car for the first time this year when I was driving home and drove along the coast road. I spotted a glimpse of blue by the side of the road so I parked and found this. Click on each image to see a full sized version.

I went up to London yesterday. I won’t bore you with the tedium of the journey there and back but suffice it to say it was a sorry catalogue of delays, misinformation and outright porkie pies.

Example, on journey home:

Announcement 1: ‘delay is due to operational misunderstandings at Waterloo Station’.

Announcement 2: ‘delay was due to an electrical storm in the Wimbledon area’

Announcement 3: ‘delay due to major signalling problems just outside the station’

Drives me mad especially as on the way there, the train was 30 minutes late because there was a problem with the train doors which meant they decided not to stop at all between Southampton and London. ‘Hurrah!’ the passengers cried, ‘A faster journey!’ -until the train ground to a complete halt and just sat there for 30 minutes.

Anyway, I had a nice time in London. Falkiners is even more yummy than usual as they seem to have had a bit of a re-organisation and all the lovely papers are now catalogued beautifully so that you can see everything they have in stock and not just the relatively small number of papers on display. Result? I spent probably twice as much as I would have otherwise - genius!

I then walked to Paperchase on Tottenham Court Road and bought some more paper and then walked to Liberty to buy a birthday gift for a friend and yes-you’ve guessed it yet more paper! Surprisingly, Liberty had a really good range of Japanese Chiyogami papers and some pretty gift wrap. So it was a very successful shopping expedition.

I’m sorry I’ve been AWOL this last couple of days and especially sorry I haven’t been responding to your comments but yesterday, I met up with some girlie mates at a friend’s house and we had a very pleasant time making books. I showed them how to make ribbon books a month or so ago and they have caught the bug! It was really interesting to see their different approaches to materials and their ideas for extending what you can do with the books. It might even galvanize me into trying something new!

Last night I went for a long walk with a friend. We drove to a village called Langton Herring which is a mile or so inland from the Fleet and Chesil Beach. I’ve mentioned Chesil Beach before. It is a shingle beach which is 18 miles long and runs from Portland to West Bay. The stones on the beach are much larger at the Portland end and gradually decrease in size towards West Bay. It used to be said that sailors who were washed up on the beach could tell where they were by the size of the shingle. For 8 miles of it’s length, the beach encloses a lagoon called the Fleet. It’s famous because it is where Barnes Wallis tested the bouncing bombs which were used in the famous Dam busters raid during World War 2.

This is a photograph of the Fleet and Chesil Beach I took last year.

The walk from Langton Herring on a cool sunny evening was quite spectacular. It was silent apart from the sounds of skylarks singing and seagulls calling. The lambs in the fields were playing and leaping about, some of the field were bright yellow with oilseed rape. And when we arrived at the Fleet, the water was flat calm and the sun was setting, it was so peaceful and beautiful. here are some of the photographs I took. You can click on each thumbnail to see a larger version.

The other good news is that Abbotsbury Swannery which is also on the Fleet and had to close earlier in the year because of bird flu, has now re-opened and has just had the first cygnets hatch! Apparently, this has happened much earlier than usual and as the arrival of the first baby swan is said to herald the first day of summer, this is good news indeed!

This gorgeous image is by Geoffrey Franklin of Christchurch, Dorset and was taken from a slide show of his swannery images on the BBC website.

I have been getting all experimental. If you have a really good memory (and have been following my comings and goings for a few months) you may remember I tried one of these woven cover bindings a while back. The last one was made with card covers, this one uses foam sheets which I spotted in my local art shop - I liked the bright colours. They are quite fun to make but the foam sheets aren’t terribly sturdy so I may try it again using leather pieces.

I bought some leather samples from Hewits, it was a starter pack and they said it would contain six pieces of various colours of leather for £37. I thought this was a bargain so I ordered one and it arrived today. It’s amazing value - there are actually 10 large pieces and they are all great colours - I am well chuffed!

I was checking out Astrid’s wonderful blog (which she writes in German and then translates into English) and she has been trying out some of the two and three section bindings from Keith Smith’s book using leather from a leather furniture swatch book. They are amazing so I may use some of this leather to have a go at some of these too. Here’s my first effort…

It’s a very simple one but I hope my future efforts will improve and I intend to try some trickier ones now that I’ve got the hang of Keith Smith’s rather complicated instructions! This is the next one I want to try…

See what I mean? :-)

It may have to wait though as I am up to my eyes at the moment making photograph albums for two friends. One is for a birthday gift and the other is for a friend who has two huge albums which she bought years ago and she now needs a third one, so I am trying to make one to match the other two.  They are the largest books I have ever made so I am taking it slowly and hope to be able to show them to you as they progress. I am off to London tomorrow - to visit Falkiners for some paper and to go to Liberty to buy a birthday gift and I maybe also look for a dress for a birthday party on Saturday night.

I am going on the train as you may remember that I am rubbish at parking, so I avoid driving in London whenever possible. I have mentioned my parking phobia many times and today, I found the perfect method for successful parking in a confined space.

There. Sorted :-)