With the new year well under way and I am taking that perceived newness and foraging a little off the path. Whether it is ultimately a little detour, or a parallel path, or something entirely new, I really don’t know yet; but, inspiration has whispered something into my ear, and I’m going to find out!
In doing so, I’m not abandoning the processes that I usually use (the results from them are too good to pass up). So, my first step was, as usual, to coat my wood with a coat of hide glue.
I like to use distilled water for this purpose because soft water makes the process quicker and the glue dissolves more completely. But, I didn’t have any on hand and I was just reaching for the tap when I realized that all the nice, soft water I needed was just outside my studio’s door!
So instead of using the tap I packed together a couple of snow balls (it’s probably a good thing that the children were elsewhere, otherwise an escalating incident may have occurred …) and put the beaker on the stove top. By the time I was ready to use it, I had my water.
While is it a very small detail, one of the things I like about winter is that the stove is always on, which is a great heat source, and the snow is beautiful (and useful too).