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Midsummer glow
June 21st, 2014
I just love how evening light filters into the studio at this time of year. Happy solstice!
Blog
Printing at Penland
April 9th, 2012
When Jessica and I were in North Carolina last summer, we had just enough sightseeing time to squeeze in a short trip along the aptly-named Blue Ridge Parkway.
Between the dappled sunlight,
the lush Southern greenery,
and the unexpected splashes of color,
we were enchanted in an instant.
(I, for one, was tempted to do a little Katniss Everdeen impression—just run away from it all and head for the hills.)
It wasn’t hard to imagine sitting down and breaking out the paper and paints, with all that blue haze as inspiration.
The folks at the nearby Penland School of Craft certainly agree. Since Lucy Morgan founded it in 1929, Penland has become a national center for craft education. Widely respected for its preservation of handcraft traditions, Penland is centered on total-immersion study and both traditional and experimental techniques. Settled in a quiet pocket of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s an inspiring setting for focused work. Thanks to its reputation and location, the school attracts some of the country’s best artists and fine craftspeople to study and teach in the Penland studios.
So you can imagine how thrilled and honored Jessica and I were when they asked us to come and teach a letterpress workshop there this summer.
We’ll be teaching a one-week printing intensive, and doing our very best to turn the printshop upside down. This ain’t your grandpa’s letterpress. Here are the details:
Letterpress: Old Dog, New Tricks
A printmaking intensive with Chandler O’Leary and Jessica Spring
Penland School of Crafts, Penland, NC
Summer Session 7: Aug. 26 to Sept. 1, 2012
In the class, we’ll work with both hand-set type (don’t worry, we won’t monkey with any linotype machines…) and photopolymer plates to produce editioned prints that combine the two techniques.
We’re going to get pretty technical, pretty fast, but don’t worry—the workshop is open to all levels of experience. That way we can bring letterpress newbies up to speed quickly, and give more experienced printers the chance to go nuts and geek out with us.
“Unnatural Light” by Jessica Spring
You’ll be doing some death-defying typesetting by hand, using Jessica’s acrobatic techniques,
On a Mission Dead Feminist print
and I’ll teach you the ropes of designing for photopolymer, so you can throw a three-ring hand-drawn circus into the mix.
So get thee to the mountains and join us! Registration is open now, but don’t wait too long—the class is capped at 12 students.
See you in North Carolina! Save me some grits, will you?
Holdouts and harbingers
October 4th, 2010
Somehow I’ve managed to tear myself away from the massive pile of drawings a couple of times in the past two weeks—once for a quick trip to the wonderful Olympia Farmers Market to pick up a few things. (Look, fractal geometry!)
Okay, maybe “few” is stretching the truth a bit, since one of those items was fifty pounds of organic romas, destined for tomato sauce. These babies are a month late, and we’re lucky to have them at all. It’s been a dismal summer for tomato growers here—but hey, it’s nice to have that one last bit of summer when you can get it.
The other time was for a little taste of the winter to come—at the Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival. The place had me dreaming of winter silence and warm, woolly sweaters.
Maybe if we hurry up and can those tomatoes, sweater weather will come faster!
Blue blazes
July 29th, 2009
They’re predicting 105 degrees today here in T-town—that’s an all-time, record-breaking high. Now, if you’re in the Midwest, the South, or the Southwest and you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking, “And this is news how?” Well, this is where the part about “all-time” comes in—since white settlement of this area, at least, it has never, ever been this hot before. This place ain’t made for 105°. Almost nobody has air conditioning, but the discomfort is only the half of it. Who knows what this will mean for the snow pack in the mountains, or the water supply?
Beastly or not, though, it seemed a shame to let all this amazing solar energy go to waste. So over the weekend the Tailor devised a passive food dehydrator out of old window panes (buying an electric dryer, to us, seemed to defeat the purpose of home sustainability). Our first attempt at drying berries seemed successful, so at 5:30 this morning,before the heat kicked in, we headed to the Blueberry Park to pick about three gallons more. (The berries are happy with the heat, even if nobody else is!)
Here’s how it works: four nylon window screens (don’t use aluminum! It reacts with the food) hover over the pavement, propped up on wooden beams to allow for air circulation. Tied to each screen is a black linen cloth to absorb more heat and provide a clean surface for the food, while still letting air pass through. The glass windows fit right on top, providing the perfect space to trap hot air, just like a greenhouse.
Now, on to the fruit itself. For blueberries, at least, the dried yield ends up being about a quarter of what you started with (so for example, two quarts of fresh berries will become about a pint dried), so it’s best to start with a big batch—another vote for a large, homemade drier over those tiny electric ones. Our drying system will hold five or six quarts of fresh berries.
Wash the berries and remove any stems, petals, grass and unripened fruit (and especially spiders!), and set a large stockpot of water to boil. Place about a quart of berries into a steamer —the berries will dry faster if you split the skins first, and smaller batches seem to be more effective than boiling the whole batch at once.
Once your water is boiling, put the steamer into the pot, and boil for thirty seconds—just long enough for the skins to split. Then remove the steamer and dump the hot berries into a colander in a cold sink (the ice water stops the cooking process).
Here’s what the split berries look like; they should feel squishy, and you should be able to see the pale interior flesh on some of them. (Sorry about the photo quality—that red tile just kills the light.)
Okay, now you’re ready to take ’em outside. Distribute the berries evenly over the cloth-covered screens,
and spread them out until you have a single layer.
Now, just put the glass back into place, and let the sun do the work. It’s amazing how quickly the humidity inside the glass disappears, and how hot it gets in there. The ideal temperature for drying blueberries is about 140°F, but we’ve already seen our dryer get up to 155°. It doesn’t seem to hurt the final product, but at the hottest part of the day we cover the glass with a sheet for an hour or so, just to cool it down a bit.
About once a day it’s good to redistribute and un-stick the fruit, which helps it dry faster and more evenly. It takes about three full, sunny days to dry the berries completely—unlike raisins, you want blueberries to be so dry they rattle. You should end up with hard little husks that don’t squish and don’t stick together.
Here you can see the difference between fresh, split berries and ones that are almost done. Once they’re dry, pasteurize them for fifteen minutes in a 175° oven to kill any residual germs, and store in a sealed, air-tight jar.
Since we’ll probably use our dried berries for a wide variety of recipes, we left them unsweetened. That way we can reconstitute them for pancakes, sauces and baked goods this winter without any recipe guesswork. They’re still sweet enough to eat plain, too (trail mix, anyone?), although if you prefer your berries pre-sweetened, you can coat them in simple syrup before drying.
Either way, you’ll end up with sunshine in a jar.