Textured Letters with Barbara Close

Photo by Laura Bernabei

Some catching up to do!  The last weekend in March, the San Francisco Friends of Calligraphy sponsored a workshop by Barbara Close, whose store of techniques and enthusiasm seem absolutely boundless!  I always appreciate an organized, yet flexible teacher, and Barb was certainly all that.

Within the framework of creating textured letters, we played with watercolor, collage, paste paper, embossing, shadows and doodles. 

Photo by Laura Bernabei 
Photo by Laura Bernabei

Photo by Laura Bernabei
Photo by Henry Silva
Photo by Henry Silva
Photo by Henry Silva
Photo by Henry Silva
We even made a lovely little folio in which to keep our creations.  (And always happy to find a use for my Czech glass button collection!)

Photo by Henry Silva
It was one of those more-process-than-product workshops where you leave with just a handful of creations but a veritable truckload of techniques and inspiration!

As an added bonus, Ruth Korch--my awesome table-mate and partner in crime--and I dashed over during lunch to the furniture sale in another building at Fort Mason and with Ruth's encouragement I scored this fabulous chair, covered abundantly with French calligraphy!

Photo by Laura Bernabei
All in all, a fun and relaxing way to spend a weekend.

Silk Purse from Sow's Ear


So after four-plus years of Blackletter classes at Atelier Gargoyle, I had acquired an impressive pile of butcher paper practice sheets that it seemed wrong to throw away.  One of my classmates had suggested I use them for wrapping paper, which was fun and different--very cute when tied with string.  For some reason I thought to grab a few sheets as I went out the door to an evening collage class with the inimitable Anna Corba, incongruously but delightfully being held at Knitterly, a favorite local yarn store.  We were provided with kits and lots of boxes of ephemera to dig through, and I thought my walnut-inked specimens were a nice contrast to the image elements.  (Don't look too closely at the letterforms, Linnea & Ward--the sheets are really old, okay?  That's my story anyway.)


We made collages on two pieces of matboard, then coated them with melted beeswax, which gave them surprising depth and dimension.  The covers were assembled with the notebook elements and bound together with ribbon.





 A fun project and a nice mid-week escape!