This past weekend I ran away from home. I did not answer my phone or stay with family or friends, I just went away. It was lovely!

What took me to Portland was a class by an online friend, Velma Bolyard. I’ve been following her blog since I started mine in 2007, and we’ve emailed privately and sent actual objects back and forth. I leapt at the chance to see her in person, and to see what she had to say about contact printing using foraged materials and metals.

The class was held at the Southern Maine University Portland campus, in a beautiful new building. It was organized by someone with extensive background in book arts and paper who also possessed a sturdy capacity to organize. The day went beautifully.

Contact printing is far simpler than I expected. The process consists entirely of three steps: collect, arrange and cook. Foraging is used loosely to indicate it does not matter where you find the material. I pulled leaves off trees, ferns out from under my house and fungus from a neighbor’s log. One woman brought all her old spices and dried food, several people brought seaweed and other local flora. And THEN we all traded around.

Placing the material on the paper was not so hard as folding the paper to keep all the bits inside. Once the paper was folded around the plant material, it was clipped onto pieces of flat metal. The combination of metal (mostly iron and copper, in the form of can lids and pipes but also a big handful of pennies) and plants would color the paper in all kinds of unexpected and interesting ways. One of the most coveted metal pieces was a flattened box grater – all the holes made compelling patterns on the paper. My best find was a bottle-cap that had been in a parking lot over the winter. It made a great little corrugated circle on one side and a rusty blob on the other.

From there, you just boil it for a while. You could steam it too. But really – an hour or so, and we fished out the wrapped bundles of paper and unwrapped them and found these beautiful colors and shapes. If control matters to you, and you want a particular outcome, this might not be so gratifying. If you are willing to explore the garden, freezer and grocery store with an open mind, there is some good fun to be had!

I just finished the second tree. I will post a trip report soon.

The short story is Portland! Velma! Contact printing – on paper!!! but it is worth fleshing out a little.

This tree is well ahead of the actual trees outside my window. We have not even reached the brilliant green haze part of spring, where the trees bloom and pollen is everywhere and tiny tiny leaves start over all the deciduous trees. It will happen. Eventually.

I have packed materials and foraged greenery for a class in printing from wild things. When I’ve printed from nature before I have used paint and made prints. In this class we will learn about what things already have pigment that can be set set using scraps of metal (found along with the foraged greenery I assume). I will report back! With Pictures!

This is not quite done yet – it needs either leaves or blossoms scattered across it, and stitched down in a way that will let them floof (that’s a technical term) out away from the flat surface.

I realized when I’d made the second one that they looked like Truffula trees, from the Dr Seuss book The Lorax. Well, sort of.

The moral of my story is that it has taken me a while to focus on the next big piece, but I was obsessed with these today, and worked on them more or less all day, and it was fun. So I am glad I temporarily put the more serious piece aside, and I swear I will work on it next, but I think I needed to goof around a little!

Finally, now that the melting has started in earnest, the end of the long icy winter piece.

This is one of the more realistic geographical pieces, related to the summer river through Hadley I made for a show last fall. This depicts a section of the (mighty) Connecticut River from French King Rock through Turner’s Falls and into Sunderland and South Deerfield.

North is to the left, the river flows south.

The tech before the storm, or something like it. Scaffolding, chain link fence and platforms at various levels, all working to support the actors and give them an interesting environment to work in. The auditorium is remarkably quiet and empty as we set cues. The quiet will end Monday when the sound hardware comes in, and we start running the show end to end to end, getting it smoother and faster.

a close up of a 2×4″ section at the north end of the piece – the river is in place, and needs definition

In other news, liquid water yesterday in the afternoon (photographic evidence)

temperatures well below zero Fahrenheits last night, and liquid water again this afternoon. The horses are shedding, the birds are singing, the days are getting longer, and hope is starting to spring again. Or maybe that is just spring, springing again.