November 2015
An Old Fashioned Sharing Day

A concept originally from Judi Dampier, we have often tried to duplicate those wonderful days many of us shared years ago. 

Our guild owns a BIG SHOT machine now and that seemed to be a hit at the meeting with many members lining up to emboss card stock to be used at a future time on cards or maybe even their Christmas cards! 

 
Another table was set up to try our hand at painting abstract flowers. No rules! just fun! Basically just add a blob of colour to your paper and then pull the colour around. This is what we were going for (see photo below), some had amazing success! I regret that I cannot remember the artist's name who created the first flowers and wrote a book.......

 
We also made Weathergrams. Originally from Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College in Portland, OR, a take on the Japanese art form, weathergrams have now been made by artists worldwide. You need a 10"X2½" strip of kraft paper, preferably from a heavy brown paper bag, some biodegradable string or twine, a hole punch, vermilion coloured ink for the versal and some waterproof black ink to write your poem or message. In the beginning Haiku were what was used but I think as calligraphers we have used anything we wanted to write. I have even gilded in my message with ok success. When your ink is dry, the idea is to hang weathergrams outside in the elements from solstice to equinox or vice versa and allow them to weather. 

 
And the final table was seeing just what TYVEK will do when coloured with paint and heated with an iron - but don't touch the iron to the tyvek! it is plastic and melts with heat. It would coat an iron quite disastrously! We sandwiched the tyvek between two sheets of cooking parchment paper.

A fun day!