The Grind & Bind Art Alchemist's Guild

A great instructable because you don't need a whole shop to do it, just a few office supplies.

I'm going to try this one today.

Finally.

It only took weeks of letting copper sit in a vinegar sauna (but no touching!) and a day of double-boiling off the liquid to get... about 5g of pigment. Nevermind the toxic fumes and toxic everything else and the fact that Verdigris is super aggro to other colours.

Worth it. I feel like a renaissance artist, minus the radiation and lead poisoning. My sinuses feel weird.

What it looked like in the jar before I scraped it out:

For fun, art, and acitivism.

Written instructions:

1. Crumble three handfuls of moss and 3 cups of likewarm water into a blender.

2. Add 2 Tbsp of water retention gardening gel and half a cup of buttermilk. Blend.

3. Transfer to a bucket. Paint onto rough concrete or wood with a paintbrush.

4. Mist with water weekly.

Basic hand-weaving or lap weaving is a lot like making spicier friendship bracelets. If you use tiny strings and add beads, it's pretty much beading, too.

Weaving is one of those skills with a thousand uses if you're very into DIY. Learn to weave and you can mend clothes, make rugs, baskets and hammocks, and even build fences.

Festival du Voyageur is a cold, snowy, musical, drunken-sledding prairie tradition I'm so so fortunate to have joined for a few sporadic years.

If it's cold and snowy where you are, you can make ice sculptures, too. A video link on the page shows you how.

You can even go the easy route, like I did this year, and use silicone moulds to make ice-ornaments and hang them outside. Use food coloring for extra fun.

As long as it wasn't done with a pen, pencil, marker or anything you would buy in a store, you can post it here. It doesn't even have to last very long.

Some ideas:

• Charred wood
• Scraped against a surface with a rock
• Mud on anything
• Stomped into snow
• Glue and sand on paper

Psychologists have used this question to gage openmindedness and creativity in children.

What can you do with a paperclip?

After weeks of filtering, drying and washing - which isn't a lot of work, just a lot of waiting, I finally have another batch of pigments. These are my favorites.

Everything except the iron oxide was made using the lake pigment method. I made the iron oxide from steel wool decomposed with hydrogen peroxide and salt water. I can get reddish to almost black (like here) depending on the material and... other things about the process I haven't quite figured out yet.

The three different avocado colours are from the same batch with the ph adjusted, the darkest one is from adding iron mordant (rusty nails in vinegar.) The spinach gave me two colours from using aluminum phosphate for the darker batch and aluminum sulfate for the yellowier one.

Watercolour: https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2020/09/25/making-handmade-watercolours-with-jacksons-artist-pigments/

Tempera: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/how-to-make-egg-tempera-paint

Inks: https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2023/04/03/making-natural-ink-process-recipe-yellow/

My own recipe for alcohol inks:

• Pack a bunch of a colourful thing into a jar of 99% isopropyl alcohol, like avocado pits and skins, spinach, red cabbage, lemon peel, etc. Cover tightly and let sit in a warm place for at least two days.

• When enough colour has leached into the alcohol, filter out the solids, discard them or use for another batch, and either let the liquids sit open in a warm place or set in a double boiler. Iuse the same jar throughout the process, usually putting a bunch of them in the water bath together. Slowly let the alcohol evaporate until the desired consistency is reached. I keep a brush and paper nearby to test every 15-20 min. Colour should be rich and dense. Usually doesn't take me more than two hours of double-boiling to reach a good point.

• Mix in gum agaric solution, about 1 part to 3 parts ink. Test again.

• You can keep reducing the ink, but at this point it will turn gel-like or hard if you evaporate all the alcohol.

Acrylic is a hard one to track down since it's a modern paint and most every company has their own secret formulation. It's a mix of glues, monomers, binders and solvents, and I haven't had any success trying to make my own from ingredients. In most cases it's cheaper and easier to just buy acrylic medium (paint without the pigment) to mix your own.

If you want to go deeper, and I can't imagine not wanting to discover hidden secrets, here's a whole paper on it: https://www.rroij.com/open-access/chemical-formulations-for-acrylic-matt-and-acrylic-gloss-paints.pdf

Celebrate the new year with some home-made pyrotechnics!

I've made saltpeter/sugar smoke bombs before, and they're a lot of fun. I haven't tried with baking soda and crayons, though.

I used a campstove outside to "cook" the bombs, in case the mixture ignited, and wrapped them in cupcake-sized tinfoil disks with a bunch of matcheads.

Without colour, the smoke burns white and the fire is purple.

Try not to breathe the smoke and don't die.

If you manage to perfect the art or flint knapping — you can upcycle any dense, broken glass into usefull knives, too.

My first attempt at blacksmithing — a butter knife made from a piece of iron rebar.

It doesn't take a whole lot of equipment to forge a knife, but it does take significant practice. My cousin (who owned the forge) made much nicer pieces. The forge itself was only a couple hundred bucks, but we easily went through a tank of propane in an evening. Didn't help that we fueled ourselves on a case of beer.

Also pictured: some cool rocks. Oh, and I made that red ceder shelf out of a canoe seat that didn't fit right, when I was building canoes.

Jessica Angel is a New York based artist who bridges physical and virtual spaces with her reality bending work.

I met her once, in person, where I found her passionate and genuine. She delivered an eloquent message on the language-transcending nature of art.

She gifted me the leftover screen-printed wall coverings from an installation (so she didn't have to haul it back to New York.) I've since used them in a ton of pieces and still have plenty left.

An update on the haul I got from the florist.

This paper is from all the red flowers after I extracted the dye, I'm working through the colours down to the white.

I made three different size papers purely from roses, these are the smallest. I got impatient and dried them fast rather than the right way since I prefer just ironing them later, anyway. Those pieces are the same, front and back, showing the difference between the rough(exposed) and smooth(screen) side. I left the pulp extra pulpy, for texture, so I can use it later for book covers.

Fun paper facts: Some commercial papers have a rough and a smooth side, too, especially with thicker artisan papers. In mills, pulp is pulled from the slurry on the "string" which is the screen. Mills use either one string or twin strings, with the later producing paper that's equally smooth on both sides. This production method also creates the "grain" of the paper, the way the fibres align in the direction the string is pulled. The grain is an important factor in high speed and mass printing operations.

Rate my set up:

I have my pulp bucket, screens and deckles from cheap canvases, screen material is from an old silk scarf, gloves are essential, sponge for sponging, board for drying, and a glass of water because I stay hydrated, homies.

...or get better at, or fantasize about, or buy all the tools for and forget about.

Nalbinding predates knitting and crochet, literally "needle-binding," where lengths of spun fibre are joined together using a needle.

The perfect technique if you want some authentic clothes for your costumes and re-enactments, or just want to channel some old school weavers from odin-times.

A much better set of instructions, since my quick and dirty run down on my last post left a lot to the imagination.

I made my screens and deckles from old matching picture frames and dollar store canvases, where I pulled the canvas off the frames and stretched old polyester or silk scarves for the screen half.

Here's a diagram with the staple order to get the tightest surface if you're MacGyvering your own paper-makers. It won't seem intuitive if you've never had to stretch your own canvas, but I've stretched dozens of screen and canvases — this is the best way. You'll get a better result if the fabric is wet, but careful not to put too much tension on a weak frame.

If it gets cold enough where you live, you can make huge ones outside out of six gallon pails and stock pots. Some Inuit and northern communities use similar techniques to make animal-proof ice fridges, especially when camping in winter.

I prefer the half frozen method, myself, I just stab a hole and let the water drain out for a natural cavity without fucking around taping cans to each other. I don't recommend any containers with ridges, pick smooth things or else it's way harder to get the ice lantern out.

A florist let me scavenge their trimmings yesterday. After two hours of separating everything by colour, I set the red, green, orange and yellow things to simmer for dye. That left me with all these white flowers, so I decided to soak them for paper making.

Making your own paper is simple:

1. Soak in softened water (add baking soda) because the final product should be PH neutral. Acidic/basic paper will break down faster and alter/bleach anything put on them. Organics are naturally acidic, so I add baking soda and do a PH test before dipping my screens.

Optional: Cut up and mix in any uncoated paper waste you have laying around.

2. Blend, remove/strain out any large bits that won't blend. I use an immesion blender.

3. Make screens out of old, thin cloth and wooden frames. Polyester/silk/satin work best, anything that lets water pass through that the paper won't stick to.

4. Pour the paper soup into a large, square container — big enough to fit the screens. Start lifting sheets out of the soup on the screens, let drain about a minute before flipping onto a flat towel. Alternatively, let the sheets dry on the screens.

5. The best sheets are made by sandwiching between screens and hanging to dry. Whatever your method, uneven drying will crinkle the paper — but you can always iron it out later on between sheets of parchment or silicone.

The florist told me to come back again on February 13th for another big haul.

Inspired by Theo Jansen's strandbeests, shelly is a giant, rideable, light-up hermit crab using Jansen's open source linkage design for the crawly bits.

How about some old school photo developing to make better use of nature's dark room? That is, if you're as far north as am? Otherwise, I'm sure you could find a nice cave or a dark forest to practice the wilder prints methods.

Note: Potassium ferrocyanide isn't the same as potassium ferricyanide. Don't take my word for it, but I believe they might be interchangeable here.

'Tis the season for gifts. Whether you celebrate Saturnalia, Kwanzaa, God Birth, Krampus Attacks or Chanukah — the pressure is on to practice giving and gratitude and strained smiles.

How are you sticking it to the Corporate Them by making your own crap? Nevermind how much those fabric scissors cost or why you need Bosch brand tools you only use twice a year, hand-made is heart-made.

What'd you make? Who was it for?

Alternatively, what was the best gift you've made?

In a highly innovative process, wheatgrass root is cultivated in 3D-printed templates that are then carved into beeswax. This guides the root to grow in certain patterns or shapes. In just 12 days, the roots bind into a naturally woven material, this is a great example of ‘bio-design’ and it creates a textile that is low-tech, organic, and biodegradable.

I recall seeing a compostable wedding dress made by her. I wonder if it's too scratchy to make underwear.

A one-off idea turned into a week of insanity and mutiple trips to the hardware store.

I had walnuts, I make paints, I'm decent at carpentry and I'm just getting into bookbinding — It should have been easy.

Now? My fingers are covered in super glue and I burned off all my knuckle hairs.

It started with figuring out how to cut a walnut into two perfect halves — there is a technique. For all my neat dremel cutting bits, the best method was this youtube video.

My neat dremel bits cleared out the inside and I used wet/dry sandpaper to make the edges flat.

But I made the rookie walnutsmith mistake of adding that silver wire border before anything else. The smallest hinges at the store were still too big and I didn't want to wait for an order or make my own. While grinding down the screws, stupidly while they were still attached, the shell cracked and the wire popped off. Superglue came to the rescue, even though I'd decided by then that I hated the wire.

I cut pieces of soft leather to cover the hinge, which looked marginally better, and imbedded a metal button on each side to wrap the leather cord for closure. They also make a platform for the walnut to sit level when it's open. Mineral oil and beeswax was my finish/waterproofing.

The paint dividers are stiff belt leather, and I made the paints using the lake pigment method with my watercolour recipe:

20g of dry pigment to 20g of watercolour base (80g gum agaric solution, 20g glycerine, 20g honey and two drops of clove oil.)

Green came from spinach, yellow from lemon rind, which smells amazing, and the dark brown is iron oxide from steel wool treated with hydrogen peroxide and salt water.

The book covers use the same scrap leather as the cord with a few slices of watercolour paper cut to fit, sewed together with cotton thread.

On the whole, it's more neat than practical. I'm new to the walnut craft so hopefully the next one will be an improvement.

I'm still going to my next live painting group with this as my "kit" to see what happens.