Xmas and butter tarts!

The month of December is about birthdays and xmas in my house - and cooking! We did the annual gingerbread cookies earlier in the month (I posted the recipe last December), made birthday cake for my husband shortly after and decorated the tree last weekend. My last ceramics workshop of the year took place last Thursday, and my husband & I were gifted with this beautiful wreath by a fellow workshopper who has also been taking a flower arranging course! 

I have plans to make my annual butter tarts in the next few days. The filling recipe is courtesy of my Newfie sister-in-law, and I only started making the tarts when she moved back to Canada about ten years ago. [Prior to that, the butter tarts were her annual "Canadian" xmas treat!]

Use your favourite pastry recipe for a dozen tarts. I use an easy one from DK's The Ultimate Cooking Book by Jane Bull: 1) Rub 125g/4 oz butter into 250g/8 oz plain flour 2) Add 4-8 tsp water to flour-butter mix 3) Squeeze into a dough ball, roll out, and cut with a pastry cutter or the floured top of a glass (that's what I use!).

For the filling: 1) Cream together 50g/2 oz softened butter and 120g/4.5 oz brown sugar 2) Beat in 1 egg, 1/2 tblsp lemon juice and 40g/1.5 oz  currants or raisins. 3) Add mix to pastry shells (in greased tart tin) and 4) Bake at 190C in preheated oven for about 15 mins (edges of pastry are delicately browned).

Yum! Happy Christmas and a safe, healthy and wondrous 2018!

William Crozier: The Edge of the Landscape

I was really glad that I went to see the painting exhibition William Crozier: The Edge of the Landscape at IMMA (The Irish Museum of Modern Art). I had only recently heard of Crozier (1930-2011) because of advertising for this exhibition and another exhibition of his work in Cork.

From black and white ads, however, I have to admit I wasn't hugely interested, so it was a great surprise to see large, vibrant paintings when I found myself at the show!

Because of the layout of the exhibition space, I  was coming at the show from more recent work and moving backward through time.

This was fine as I encountered the really colourful, oft-times politically engaged work that he created after moving first to Spain in the 1960s and then to the west of Ireland in the 1970s.

I was attracted to the wild colouring of his paintings

and also to the drawing aspects within the paintings.

When I got to the final rooms (actually the historical start of the exhibition)

I was intrigued by the starkness of the images

but again there was the beautiful painterly drawing! I even thought it quite beautiful the way Crozier incised his signature, rather than painting it (something that oil painting allows easily).

These are works painted in Britain in the 1960s, expressing a bleakness and sorrow for the post-war world. Crozier was a young teen at the end of the war and horrified by post war images that came out of Germany and he later associated with the philosophy of Existentialism.

Stones - a stick book!

My original idea was that the book Stones would be a created as a stick book, companion piece to Sticks. I talk about the two books in a previous blog, along with showing simplified templates for both. In order to put Stones together I worked methodically: I scored the Khadi paper prior to printing and scored the Fabriano endpapers. The covers were made of a heavy duty, acid free blotting paper; only the front cover needed to be scored to facilitate folding when opening the finished book. 

Stones is a book of five intaglio prints based on pebbles at the seaside. The intaglio is done on 800 micron acetate plates and I printed the plates using my pasta press. I have given extensive details on how to convert a pasta machine into a miniature flatbed printer here.

After all prints were created, I decided on the page order. This is the first printed page.

Page 2.

Page 3.

Page 4.

Page 5.

Page six is an information page (signature, title, edition number, date). The pages were sandwiched between the endpapers and then wrapped with the blotting paper cover. I used a page of white paper, some corrugated cardboard and a lion clip to hold everything in place while binding holes were created using a drill press.

Stick binding is a variation of Japanese stab binding (instructions here). The stick, however, allows the binding thread to pass through the same hole consecutively, without unravelling. Although I originally planned to use real sticks, I was hit by a bolt of lightening and decided to create my own sticks in the ceramic workshop I am taking weekly. I simply rolled out some coils, hand-formed end bits, and used a real twig to press in some texture. Because of the colour of my prints (various mixes of Permanent Green, Payne's Grey, and Cobalt Blue) I chose a slate blue glaze for the sticks. I matched this colour to the six strand cotton embroidery thread I used for binding.

I started binding at the top, back to front and around the top of the stick then down to the next hole, and so on. This process was repeated going back up the book, tying several knots at the top back and trimming to the desired length. This is the back of the book.

Here are several of the bound books, showing the slight variation in the ceramic sticks.

I was very pleased with the finished books. Stones is in an edition of ten books.