gocco swapping and lessons (always lessons)
Tuesday, February 19, 2008 at 06:52AM (charlotte, don't look!)
that sarah is so smart.
i may have mentioned that sarah is the one who directed me to leslie's shop when i let it slip that i might be looking for a gocco (how quickly i went from "looking for" a gocco to owning a gocco!). and sarah is the one who prodded me, gently, encouraging me to open the box and try the thing already, when i was too nervous to unwrap the package. and then sarah devised the gocco swap. just the push i needed to try something new with my little print-gocco.
i had grand visions of multiple screens and a stunning winter print, but the weather was mild here in the weeks leading up to the swap deadline, and i was sorely lacking in the winter inspiration (read: tree branches covered in snow, icicles hanging from the eaves, frost covering anything at all) i had been hoping for, counting on.
but all of my wishing for winter weather (and one miracle snowstorm) led me land on snowflakes as my mid-winter inspiration. i had images of paper-cut snowflakes dancing through my mind, and when it became clear to me that i wouldn't be able to produce the sort of paper-cuts i had imagined, i moved on to doilies. i found some beautiful lace doilies on ebay (one of the items on my birthday list, checked off), knowing that they would make just the snowflakes i had in mind.
the doilies were even more beautiful in my hands than i had imagined when i saw them on the computer, which makes the next part of the story a wee-bit bittersweet.
occasionally, in my exuberance over a particular project, i forget to consider every single detail. and in this case, i hadn't thought about how (of course) the doilies wouldn't photocopy because they're white. yeah. (photocopying is an essential step in the gocco process - the carbonized image is what allows you to burn the screen from which you print.) i did, at one point, photocopy the doilies on a black background, thinking that i'd use the reverse-image, but gave that up because it didn't produce the snowflake effect i was looking for.
and unlike erin (who is brilliant), it didn't occur to me to use photoshop (was it photoshop, erin?) - because i don't use photoshop - to reverse the black and the white in the photocopied image. i can't tell you how hard i smacked myself in the head when i read how she had done that, because it would have solved all of my problems. the gocco problems, and the problems with my husband teasing me incessantly because i - are you ready? - dyed the doilies with grape koolaid in order to give them enough color to photocopy them and burn the screen. yeah. he gave me a hard time that night that i asked him to stop off at the store on the way home from work to pick up some grape koolaid for dyeing doilies. (he wondered why i didn't just spray paint the doilies black. another idea that didn't occur to me.)
so i dyed the doilies purple. (but only two of them, and not my favorite one, because i couldn't bear to ruin it!) which was fun, in itself. when was the last time you opened a jar of koolaid powder!? because that smell, it will take you back (even if your mom never let you drink koolaid like my mom never let me drink koolaid, it will take you back to the neighbor's house where you drank koolaid anyway). and it will give you a sugar rush, too - just the smell of the powder. and it will make you laugh, regardless. especially if you're standing at the kitchen counter at 9pm pouring the grape koolaid into pyrex baking dishes so that you can dye lace doilies in order to photocopy them.
anyhow, after they were dyed, the doilies did appear in the photocopies. but never as well as i would have liked them to. live and learn. the copies were too dark or too light, and the ones that were alright were just that - alright. and the screens that i burned from the alright photocopies were also alright. i would have loved crisp, clean lines like these. and these. but alas, i got a more ethereal effect. which might be just fine for snowflakes. and i learned quite a bit about what to do, and what not-to-do, next time.
there were many lessons along the way. about how much ink gets soaked up by cardboard and linen. about how it is impossible to find the moleskine cahiers with black covers exactly when you want them. about how the white ink and the silver ink do not mix into the lovely pale silver-y color from my imagination. about how much fabric ink it takes to keep a screen well covered.
and then there were these two lessons, my personal favorites: a thing does not have to be perfect in order to be lovely. and, the ideas inside my head are only ideas until i work them out of my head and into reality, at which point they take on a life of their own, and that is an essential part of the process of creating.
of course.
i loved this gocco swap - in the end, and all along the way. i loved the concept, i loved the project, i loved the lessons, and i am loving the bits of joy i am receiving in my mailbox lately. (i'll share those later.) and through it all, the good and the bad and the learning and the making - through it all, i enjoyed the process immensely. thank you, sarah, for all of it.
Reader Comments (17)
and thanks to you for telling me the gocco swap idea wasn't crazy in the first place, for helping me wrestle through the logistics, for being my sounding board throughout.
thanks too for sharing so much of your process. it's really fun to learn more about the mysteries of gocco from each other don't you think?
i was knitting with my kool-aid dyed yarn last night thinking of your description of dying the doilies, realizing that it might be hard to take myself seriously wearing a sweater knit from kool-aid dyed yarn. it does have such the giddy factor!