Truccioli--wood shavings

I've retreated to work some more on my Maple Branch keyblock as I'm still licking my wounds after the sizing debacle. (Although, looking over the sheets there were actually TWO usable half sheets.)
I had forgotten the obvious that while increasing the size of my drawing with the copier by 100% meant I'd have an easier time carving the details but the block surface area has quadrupled and it just takes longer to carve a large block. Especially one with lots of curvy, spiky lines.

This is a 16" x 20" block of which I'm really using just a 14 inch square ( and will cut off and use the long strip left over).

I'm working zone by zone. Outlining a leaf and stem; clearing a trench around the area with my larger U-gouge then going back in with the toh to outline all the lines before clearing the area. I'm trying to be good about clearing and cleaning up as I go so I won't have tons of cleaning to do when I'm done.

I have lost some bits and pieces of the thinner lines and I'll have to glue back in some wood to recarve a few key areas.

Sizing Disaster

One good corner....
I'll lead in with the one good corner of the one good (well, usable) half sheet from my first attempt at sizing my own paper. I used--I thought--a relatively weak recipe:
45g rabbit-skin glue to 23 g alum to one liter of water.

Sizing pot/double boiler

Work Station

But before anyone thinks they want to follow my example here are the rest of the sheets:

I think my size was too strong--too much gelatin anyway-- and I tried stacking the sheets to "even out the moisture" but even after the 4-5 minutes I needed to brush out 5-6 half sheets, I couldn't then get them apart, and attempting to pull them apart they stretched and pulled fibers off. The paper was a bit soft and thin and once dampened with size it just got too soft and rippled with the moisture. Those ripples became creases and areas that would catch the size and while I didn't get any dripping there was definitely too much size at the R and top side of the paper where the brush, moving R to L would touch down.
The one decent sheet I got was one I brushed out alone, immediately hanging it to dry.

They didn't look too bad hanging but they dried curled, uneven, puckered and mottled.
Despite the damp outside, our indoor heating (radiant floor and bright dry day inside) I think contributed to the paper drying too fast.

At any rate--it is almost completely to trash--I did cut down the better halves of each sheet and I'll try printing on them; I hope when they are dampened and printed on they might even or flatten out a bit but I fear that the wavy bits will dry that way even once they're printed.

I have a few ideas for next time and despite this result, I do want to have another try:

--more hands. A helper would have been very helpful--hanging the sheets was more of a hassle/problem than I imagined (clothespins didn't hold, pieces fell off...)
--smaller 1/2 liter batch to try 3-4 sheets only--I didn't use all the size I made and wanted just enough to be able to fill the brush and try it out.
--half the gelatin--I think it was just too thick/gluey.
--hang each sheet as soon as it is brushed rather than trying to stack them.
--turn off the heat in the room where they'll dry. I need to slow the drying time down so they don't curl so much.

On the good side the small pieces of paper that don't look too bad have a nice feel.
The 40g/m2 paper that was a bit thin and soft definitely has more body and feels like it would be good to print on if it wasn't just so badly sized.

Carving again

Enough baking.
Time to do some more work.

I've put off any more of my road sign pieces until I can get some plain white/fine mica. I wanted a shift in color anyway.
I had planned on moving into a bigger piece for one of my sign works but a small outdoor sketch of the one Japanese Maple we have in the fields came out looking very
Secession-like and I prepped it for a small print but when I went to xerox it to make my hanshita the copier was set at 100% and it doubled the image.

Hmmm. That would be MUCH easier to carve I thought (as I was wondering if my eyes/hands/skill and cherry would tolerate the thin lines) but scaled up it would probably fit a piece of Shina plywood I've been saving.

So, work has begun.
I'm carving the keyblock for what should be a 14" x 14" print.
I'm happy to be carving again and can't wait to try printing something this size again too.

English Muffins

Home-made, Sourdough English Muffins

Certain things are just hard to find over here.
While I hesitate to actually complain, the food and variety here is still quite amazing, but certain comfort foods just aren't on the local shelves.

English muffins for example.
Used to be I had to bring in 2-3 packages in my suitcase; I hear they show up from time to time in the supermarket/specialty stores but I shy away from the supermarket these days. While the home oven isn't great ( I miss the wood oven I built in Santa Cruz) I still make bread and cookies and have been keeping a sourdough starter alive since we moved back to Florence.
So time to pull out the sourdough starter from the fridge and cruise the internet for food blogs.

Sure enough; "Wild Yeast" (wildyeastblog.com)had some great photos and a recipe for sourdough English muffins.
While the taste wasn't quite "Thomason's" it was close enough to satisfy the homesick-for-trash-food-void while being infinitely more tasty and nutritious.
And since they're made with local eggs; organic flour (a mix of semolina, soft wheat, and kamut) and my sourdough starter I know that they're real food.

Fork split and toasted with fresh butter and fig jam for me.
The boys instead went for my version of the fast-food breakfast muffin.

While we haven't stepped foot in a McDonalds or BurgerKing for years, I did enjoy making my own version of the Egg McMuffin:

Free range egg, romaine lettuce, home-made English Muffin and Lonzo di Maiale (truffle-infused pork loin from our foray to San Miniato last weekend that B smuggled into the house).

Four muffins went to the American Aunt who lives down the lane, and the remaining 8 vanished quickly.

One Way (Left) Ahead

"One Way" 4" x 8.5" Moku Hanga color woodblock print.

Another go at a finished version.
Hand carved stamp for the little seal.
Still too silver but acceptable.
Still a test print.
Hope to do something bigger so I can really play with the wood texture/imperfections and play with the bigger brushes and looser printing.

I suppose I could play with the metaphorical/political implications and print bunches of these pointing either Left or Right but I'm not feeling very political these days despite the feeling of impending doom.
The Italian government is falling; the Eurozone looks doomed/imperiled;there's a health crisis looming and I'm still making woodblock prints of beetles and road signs?

Arrow(s)

I printed a few more proofs/test prints of my little, One-Way arrow sign.
I printed several copies on Shin Torinoko--a machine-made Japanese pulp and linen paper and about 7-8 on Nishinouchi. The latter is a tan, strong mulberry paper but it tends to vary in thickness across the sheet as well as in sizing--it turns out--and I had trouble again in getting it to print evenly and to not have some paper fibers pull up; if I pressed firmly enough to get a good even impression it seemed to want to pull up the paper fibers more often.

I printed the white arrow first using Zinc white and some rice paste and I did 2-3 impressions to get the white to look opaque and dense enough.
Then I printed the blue block. Again it seemed to require many reprints to get it even halfway dark. I started with Ultramarine pigment dispersion and a bit of paste and gum arabic and eventually after 2-4 impressions added a touch of pthalo blue to get it dark/covering enough. The wood grain is still pretty visible (which is fine) but I still think the blue should have been deeper; and the paper would have been happier with a few fewer impressions.

Next I printed the white block again, but this time with a mixture of zinc white and gum arabic and pressed very lightly with the baren to transfer this to the arrow shape. Then I lightly dusted brushed on some "mother-of-pearl" mica powder using a very soft, squirrel-hair mop brush. Then I brushed off the excess with another brush.
This mica turned out much too silver in color so I had to go back and print a light coating of white thinned with paste again to beat it back a bit so I lost much of the sheen I was after but I didn't want it to look like a silver arrow.

I think it looks pretty good if the lighting is right.
As a test print it has definitely been worthwhile.
I'm going to try a few copies on good, well-sized paper and see if I can have another go at printing--hope I can find some plain or white/uncolored mica.

One Way

A little temporary diversion.
I've been threatening for years to do a series of prints based on my favorite Italian road signs inspired by my forced attendance at Italian driving school. (There's an oxymoron for you). ((Forced due to residency requirements not any traffic infringements)).

Two small blocks of Beech (Faggio). These are leftover cuts of one of my beetle blocks and are about 4"x 9" in size.
A little too short to faithfully represent the actual road sign this is inspired by.
While not actually one of my favorite signs it will do as a test print.
I wanted to see if my locally-sourced, Japanese paper (unsized) would work--it didn't.
And whether I could get a decent opaque white printed on tan paper....fair but not convincing. I'll need to do multiple impressions to get the deep blue and the opaque sparkly white I want. Third, it will give me a chance to print with mica powder now that I found a local source of mica today (the ever-helpful folks at Zecchi Fine Arts) so I can now forge ahead once I finish cleaning up the blocks.

Not worth showing the results this round as the blocks are still more interesting than the prints.
Need to clean out the hollow areas--they seemed deeper before washing off my hanshita/drawing paper.