Boiled Books

It all began with a beautiful day at the beach,
we met at Brooms Head for a home school day looking at marine life and exploring the rock pools, it was such a fabulous day, and we saw the whales . I was so excited.

I came home with a bucket full of sea weeds and plants from beach combing.

and used them to create a boiled book.

 This was my first attempt after watching this fabulous series of videos

My pages are beautiful but I think I was too chunky with my plant matter  and quite a few of my pages ended up torn and ripped.

The patterns and details are so beautiful, delicate and I got quite a range of colours.

It is jacaranda time here and my town of Grafton in northern NSW is a purple haze this time every year and on my morning walk today I started thinking about doing another book so I collected some leaves and flowers and hurried home.

I was much quicker putting this one together for the dye pot.

I also made sure I used a thin layer of leaves and flowers 

and kept my pages in a neat stack within the edges of my tiles.

I added some dark green dye to the pot this time as well 

The pages are very different 

and I love them 

I cant wait for them to dry

 so I can bind them together into a new book.

They almost look like xrays 

and when held up to the light you can see colours inside the pages.

Art Box - Felt making in the park

We had such a lovely workshop out at Copmanhurst last week, our local council The Clarence Valley Council has a fabulous program tied into our skate parks where they have 3 converted shipping crates that travel around the valley offering different activities and workshops to locals and visitors for free.

I am one of the local artists working out of the Art Box 

and I have just started offering felt making workshops.

We had a great turn out with

 lots of boys and girls and mums joining in on the fun 

and getting some  exercise in the fresh air. 

We kept it quite simple making balls, beads and ropes that will be sliced when they dry into a different type of bead.

Everyone chose lovely bright colours and the beads all turned out so different from each other.