Brain work done, I think, and iris leaves experiment under way

I ended up with a simpler work than I planned, since I found that the silk image I printed of the brain shape, no matter how I handled it, made the whole thing look too symmetrical and uninteresting. So it will be part of something else, and meanwhile, here's my brain on dreaming!  The painted canvas was from a kit given me by Cynthia C, partly to see what would happen to it.  And as you see, various things did.

It's in a 12 x 12 shadow box frame, currently black metal, but I might change that and paint it metallic, I'll see.  The canvas, with burlap behind, is painted in gold, and there's stitching and acrylic painted shapes there, too, torn from dried paint which I save for this sort of use.  I believe there's a website to send this too, at least once it's really done, must check that.

That's done for the moment, though more might happen yet, and I am on to a summer work, iris paper.  I had a large bag of last year's iris leaves from when I tidied up last year, and the experiment is to see how they fared after a year of freezing.  Pretty well, from the look of things.  

 Usually I would spend ages cutting the leaves into short sections, to cook faster, since you boil them for ages in stage one.  But here I wanted to see if freezing had broken down the fibers so I didn't cut them up.  We'll see how this goes.  Iris paper is quite a dark color, and I'm hoping it will work well with metallic paint.

I want to bring handmade paper as presents for the Artspace people I'm doing a workshop for in September, never too early to get the materials under way.

Summer's a great time for paper making, uses gallons of water, and you can dry the sheets outside.  If it rains, all to the good, since raindrops can make a great design on the pulp as it dries.  I usually slap off paper onto my windows, but this year, since they're brand new I think I might not do that.  I'm still quite respectful of them.