Turkey Thanksgiving Part Two - Painting Like Porter

I hope you all enjoyed learning about vinegar graining with our recent box project. It’s totally possible to do a very cool wood graining decoration on top of the box, too. In this project, however, we wanted to accomplish two more things: show off another American art form and show what New England looks like to someone who lives very far away in a place known for weird volcanic formations and caves. (Full disclosure: It turned out that Deniz was from Australia and the picture we painted looked like the farms back home. But she loved it anyway and when we went back to her office to ask about the Turkish bath’s hours, she had it displayed on a shelf behind her desk. In the cave office.)

Diane's Rufus Porter-inspired landscape.

Here’s some history about Rufus Porter (1792-1884) and his art. According to the museum’s website, he was an “artist, musician, teacher, inventor, and founder of Scientific American.” He started out as a portrait painter and itinerant muralist. Houses in New England, especially around Maine where he was from, still have the wall murals of farm and coast landscapes. There’s more on the site about his inventions (the revolving rifle, which he sold to Samuel Colt, for instance) and things he started (Scientific American magazine in 1845). He’s a very interesting guy with his fingers in an awful lot of pots.

Now here’s another interview with our talented guest artist, Diane Glim (aka Mom).

CB: Tell us how you learned about Rufus Porter and what drew you to his work?

MOM: I have always admired early 19th painted scenes, usually found in Federal period homes. Since I live in a house that was built in 1810, I was thinking about learning how to paint some of my walls. After assessing our hallway, and its height, I decided to take some courses on painting these murals. In class, we worked on canvas or boards and I decided to do some paintings in that style and line our stairway with them. Much easier than climbing up ladders.

CB: Primitive painting is actually a lot harder than it looks. It’s really easy to come up with something that’s embarrassingly dorky. Where did you learn to do this?

MOM: I took several courses at Fletcher Farm School of Crafts in Ludlow, Vt. Rufus Porter's murals are soft and ethereal, so it’s hard to get that feeling. While primitive painting is wonderful (think of Grandma Moses) it has a different feel. Rufus Porter usually has a body of water, several land forms, some boats, and houses, and trees. He uses five distinct planes to show depth and almost always has a large softly down tree right in the front.

Here are the materials we’re using:

• Acrylic paints
• Paper towels
• Palette knife
• Small paint brushes
• Glass jar
• Palette or make your own: plastic take out container, some damp paper towels and a sheet of butcher paper on top
• Polyurathane spray
• Pretty scrapbook paper
• Adhesive spray
• A pencil
• Scissors

1. The first step is to set up your paints. We already primed the surface when we painted a base coat on the box. Now we have to set up our paint so we can mix the colors.

2. You could use a fancy pants palette if you have one, but why not be extra crafty and make your own? We used a plastic container from some take-out – one of those nice big rectangular ones that they completely fill with Pad Thai even though the in-house serving size is never that big. I also use these for drying and storing steel shot for my jewelry tumbler. They’re probably good for a million other things, too. But I can’t list them here because now I’m completely focused on Pad Thai and I’m supposed to be explaining how we made this painting.

3. Okay, here’s the palette. A layer of damp paper towel with a layer of butcher paper (or wax paper) on top. It’s cool because you can’t spill because the sides are too high.

4. You actually don’t need a million colors. To make the sky we’re using yellow oxide, cobalt blue, Hooker’s green, and antique white. We mix it with a palette knife and just keep adjusting until we get the color just right. The color, of course, is all about mood and preference. Is it a sunshine day? (Yes, that is a Brady Bunch reference. This is about Americana, remember?). Is a storm brewing? (Rufus Porter did a lot of seascapes.) Then paint it on.

5. Then we painted in some wispy clouds with a fan brush. It took a couple of tries to get it exactly right. It should look like nice wispy clouds, not big white cheese doodles in the sky. (Hungry again.)

6. Next, put in your block of land. We’re doing a Vermont farm, so no water. We used raw sienna, Hooker’s green, and black, plus a bit of antique white and yellow, and cadmium red as needed to get different shades of green for variation, and also some dirt because in Vermont a lot of the roads on not paved. At this point you want to decide where the sun is so that you can do the areas where sunlight would hit lighter than the parts that are in shade.

7. Next we start putting in trees and buildings. Again, remember where the sun hits and lighten accordingly. The houses are basically little monopoly houses with the sunny side lighter. Black for the roof and windows, colors for the sides of the house. Often Rufus Porter would make a few wispy trees like these here. (link) We also used his technique for light houses (vertical stripes of lighter and darker shades of the same hue) to make the silo.

8. Rufus Porter hand-painted a lot of what he did, but he also used stamps to add some elements. That’s why you see a lot of exactly the same house or cow in his murals. We’re working on way too small a surface for that here so we hand-painted everything. And actually, you’ll see some of the animals are really just a collection of dots that hint at a sheep or a cow or a chicken.

9. Another thing Rufus Porter did was have a special symbol as his signature. His was always a man in a boat. This is my second box made under my mom’s close tutelage, and I’ve chosen for both a fox terrier as my signature. Because Annie, my fox terrier, is awesome.

10. Okay, so after a bunch of painting and re-painting by both of us, we finally have a finished illustration that we’re happy with.

11. The next step is to let it dry (fast –we’re using acrylics) and then spray it with some nice, easy-to-use polyurethane. We did this outside so as not to make a big mess.

12. The last step is to line the box. It’s a keepsake box, after all, so the inside should be nice. You can use fabric, the anti-tarnish material that’s used for jewelry, or paper. For this project I used some paper from my scrapbooking paper collection (by the way, I’m not a scrapbooker, but stay tuned for some other cool uses!). I picked a design that reminds me of the early 1800s, which tend to be small, delicate patterns. I picked red because back then people were very about the barn red dyes imported from, you guessed it, Turkey! They called it Turkey Red and you saw Turkey Red everything – fabric, shawls, rugs, …. Well, it seemed fitting.

 

12. I used the box itself to trace out a pattern for the lining and cut it out.

13. Then I tried it out to make sure it fit; took it out and gave the inside of the box a good spritz with adhesive glue, and fit the paper back in.

 

14. And here’s the finished box! Pretty cool, I think. Deniz liked it, too.

A Turkey Thanksgiving – with Two Sides of Americana

The Crafty Bee is very excited to introduce a guest artist for the next two posts. This talented woman is a long-time artist who is always busy with something – be it sewing, painting, knitting, “hooking,” reupholstering, … . Oh and she’s my Mom. How lucky am I? She taught me a huge amount of what I know and inspired even more of it! I’m very pleased to introduce Diane Glim!

So a little bit about our project:

Here’s the background. For my birthday this year (I turn 29 every year, but this was a big 29th birthday) I decided to fulfill a long-time dream of visiting Turkey. Why? Because it’s there. And it’s really cool! And they have amazing art and crafts and food and culture. If you haven’t been, look it up.

Anyway, I hooked up with two good friends and we put together a wishlist of all the really cool things we wanted to do and see like stay in a cave hotel, ride in a hot air balloon, visit ancient Greek and Roman ruins and check out an underground city. See? I told you. It’s amazing!

Then we (by we, I mean my friend Kathryn) sent the list to three local travel agents that we found from this excellent website, http://www.turkeytravelplanner.com/. (The writer is a friend of a friend of a friend – former Peace Corps volunteer, lived in Turkey, and has excellent info!) The winning response came from Deniz Turgot of Turkey Heritage Travel in Goreme. She gave us almost every single thing we asked for at a very reasonable price. So we wanted to bring a little something as a thank you.

Okay, what’s a good symbol of America that isn’t jingoistic or hokey or an $800 patchwork quilt? Luckily for us, my mom’s a huge fan of early American crafts and so I went to her. The result? A vinegar-grained keepsake box with a Rufus Porter-style painting on the lid.

We’re going to start today with the vinegar graining. In the next post we’ll do the painting and I’ll give some background on Rufus Porter.

Go With the Grain

CB: So what’s the deal with vinegar graining? Aren’t you just painting wood to look like, um, wood?

MOM: You can do all kinds of interesting treatments. You can make a box, for example, look like it is made of different kinds of wood, or marble or other surfaces. It's fun to use different items to get unusual looks. I use clay, feathers, index cards, fingers, saran wrap, and bubble wrap to name a few. Historically, wooden items were grained to make them look more luxurious. Sometimes the graining looks just like a certain kind of wood, such as expensive burled walnut, and other times it looks light and fun. Like, what tree does that come from?

CB: Ah! What kinds of things did people decorate with vinegar graining? And how was it displayed?

MOM: You can find examples in museums. Pieces that are beautifully vinegar grained are very sought after by collectors of primitives. They mostly did frames, boxes, dressers, chairs and tables. You can find lovely examples of entire bedroom sets that are grained. Often it was combined with primitive paintings.

CB: And how did you get into it?

MOM: I have always been drawn to the look of primitive antiques. I love the paintings and wall murals of Rufus Porter, an itinerant mural painter from the early 1800's. Paintings from that time are mostly framed in grain-painted frames. They just have an interesting look. I took several courses on painting in the style of Rufus Porter and made some frames for the pieces I completed. I was hooked and took two courses on vinegar graining.

Let’s take a look at the process.

Here are our materials:

• Foam brush 
• Box or frame or tray
• Light grit sandpaper – about 220 or 330
• Inexpensive bristle brush
• Latex paint for base undercoat. Here we’re using a gold-ish mustardy color and an eggshell.
• Raw umber dry pigment (Gamblin)
• Plastic teaspoon
• Gum Arabic
• Apple cider vinegar
• A few small glass jars
• Rubber gloves
• Objects to make designs such as graining tools, popping paper, saran wrap, cake icing edgers, business cards, feathers, natural sponges, … you get the idea. Stuff that would make an interesting imprint in the paint pigment.
• Shellac in Bull’s Eye Amber
• Polyurathane spray in clear gloss

Directions

1. Lightly sand your box or frame or whatever with increasingly fine grit sandpaper. 

2. Using the foam brush, lightly paint the surface with your base coat. Here we’re covering the entire surface. You can do the bottom too – but you’ll just have to wait a few minutes for it to dry.

3. Allow your piece to dry. It really doesn’t take long – maybe 5 to 10 minutes – but you can speed things along with a hair dryer. 

4. Mix about ½ a teaspoon of pigment and a little less than a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar together in a jar. You should get the consistency of heavy cream – if it’s too watery add more pigment; if it’s too dry, add more cider vinegar.

5. Next mix in some gum Arabic – just a couple of drops will do you. This adds the necessary stickiness to the pigment so it will adhere to the surface.

6. Paint the pigment over a section of your box. Make sure to keep it wet – if it dries, add a bit more vinegar. 

7. While it is still wet, use the tools of your choice to make a design in the pigment. What will happen is you’ll be able to move the pigment around to make lines, swirls, whorls, wigglies, etc., because it isn’t sinking into the surface material. It’s just sitting on top. The really neat thing is if you don’t like how it looks, just smooth it out and try again! Experiment with your different tools. Use your fingers. It’s fun!

   

8. Once you have a design you like, allow the pigment to dry. This takes a few minutes. Not too long. Believe me, my mom and I don’t have the patience for actually watching paint dry.

9. As you can see, we also decorated the edge of the box top in a different pattern. You can use painters’ tape (the blue stuff) to mark off different sections if you want to do different patterns, too. I guess what I’m saying is go wild.

10. Okay, we’re happy with the pattern. So now we have to make sure it stays there. To do this, we use the bristle brush to paint on a layer or two of shellac. Here’s an important pointer: NEVER USE WATER OR A WET BRUSH with shellac. What you will get is a clumpy unusable mess that you’ll have to clean with paint thinner or ammonia, or just toss. You can add another layer of shellac to make it shinier.

11. Okay, now the pattern is set so you can’t change it. Shellac dries quickly. Really quickly. Phew!

12. Once it’s dry, you can sand it very lightly with very fine grit sand paper (400 or up) to get the dusties out.

And there you have it! Vinegar graining!

Come On, Get Hatty!

I firmly believe in wearing hats that serve no real purpose, just because they make me feel happy. Yes, they're good for keep you you warm, dry, and protected from the sun. The hard ones -- and I do have one! -- are useful for protecting your head and keeping your brains intact. But sometimes, it's just nice to wear one because it's so darn pretty.

Many hats are made by stretching an unblocked hat "body" over a shape and letting it dry. It takes the form of the block underneath. I had bought this really funky shaped block on eBay about a year ago, and really wondered what the resulting hat would look like. I mean, it was hard to tell from looking at the wooden block. It has all these bumps and bulges and indentations and multiple "rope lines." I stared and stared and couldn't really imagine what I'd get from it.

Finally, I decided to just make something and see how it would come out. Luckily, Hats by Leko started selling inexpensive paper straw hoods from Japan called Toyo Straw. At $3.99 a hood, compared with $28.00 for sisal, I thought "Oooh - great for practicing!"

So here's how I made my new hat:

I started by setting out (most of) the supplies I'm using to make my new hat. I have a very cheap electric kettle (no thermostat means it won't turn off), petersham ribbon for the band, hat blocks and a spinner, clippy things, pins, scissors, stiffener, needle and thread, wire, saran wrap, and a straw "hood."

Here's a closer up view of supplies. On the right is my funky block that I'm going to use. The head-shaped block on the left I'm going to use in the next installment to make a free-form felt hat.

First, I need to make the straw more pliable by steaming it. This hood is actually made of a type of paper straw so it was cheap enough for me to buy a bunch for experimenting. Nice straw and felt hoods cost $30-50 in case you are wondering why hats cost so much. Don't even ask about the blocks. I stay up late trying to get them cheaper on eBay when other bidders have gone to bed.

The “spinner” raises the block so it’s easier to pull the hood down and work with it. To the right you’ll see my bowl of B&J’s red velvet cake ice cream because this is hard work and I need to keep up my strength.

It's also very important to give your atelier assistant a good bone so that she doesn't bark at you while you're working.

I (and everyone else) covers the hat block with saran wrap to protect it from getting gross with all the steam and dye and stuff.

Another view of the hat block on the spinner, ready for the hood.

So my hood is nice and damp (and HOT) when I stretch it over the block. I pull down with hands on each side - East and West, North and South, etc., etc.

Now I've pressed the hood into the ridges on the block and pinned it down. With straw I try to get the pin BETWEEN the straw so I don't actually break the straw fabric. I've also used a heavy boot lace to force the material into the ridge below the crown (this is called a rope line - in this picture it's decorative, but the bottom one is the cut-off point).

I have to keep steaming the hood, but I can't take it off the block so I made a tent with a (NEW UNUSED!!!!) wee-wee pad that has plastic on it. Really, it was fresh out of the package.

Steam under the tent.

I've used another lace to tie off the bottom rope line.

A close up of the top of the crown.

All tied off! Now we wait. It has to cool down and dry off. This is a "puzzle block," which comes apart so you can pull it out from under the hood without messing it up. Of course this is my first time using it so I could still mess it up.

I let the straw dry overnight and pulled the puzzle pieces of the block off the base.

Then I pulled the pieces out one by one. This allows me to make a hat that's narrower at the bottom than it is at the top without it getting stuck.

Oooo la la, I did not notice before that this block is from Paris!

Here's the straw hat pulled off the block and holding its shape.

The next step is to cut off the bottom excess fabric. I only want a small ridge to fold over to make a hem.

Here it is trimmed. I had to smooth it out a bit.

Next I fold the edge over. The ridge made by the rope line makes it easy.

Starting to take shape. Hey - it's a turban!

Doesn't my model Zelda look cute in it?

I sprayed the inside with hat stiffener to help it hold its shape.

Then I marked the back center spot with a pin. That's where the seam for the ribbon edging will go.

Next I cut a length of millinery wire. It's about 20 gauge wire covered in thread. I'll tuck it into the hem between the layers before sewing it together.

Zelda again. Now I’ve also marked the center front. It’s good to stay oriented.

And here’s the back:

Before finishing off the hem, I bound the millinery wire with "binding wire," snagged from my jewelry tools. (It's steel and won't melt when you heat it so I use it to tie things together when soldering.) They do sell these little joint thingys but my last two teachers said they weren't worth the trouble. So binding wire it is!

After I finished the hem, I decided to edge the hat in ribbon. Millinery ribbon, also called petersham, looks like grosgrain ribbon but the edge isn't bound so it's more flexible.

Now this block makes a 22-inch circumference hat. I think that because the straw I used was a little stiff it came out a little bigger. 22 to 22.5 inches is really normal. I have a TINY head - about 21 inches if that. I can actually wear hats from the toddler department. Anyway, I found this special drawstring liner that I sewed in so that I can make it any size I like. I pick tiny!

I lined up the lining along the edge. If I had thought of this earlier, I would have sewed it in before I but the ribbon edging on. Oh well.

I use clippy things from the beauty supply store to hold ribbon and stuff in place while I'm sewing.

Here it is with the lining. See? Ever so much smaller.

Then I went through my stock and pulled out some more Petersham ribbon to use for a decoration.

The thing about Petersham ribbon that makes it different from grosgrain is that the edge isn't bound. So you can make it wider on one edge and smaller along the other to go around corners and make flowers and things. You can stretch out one side by wetting the ribbon and spreading the fibers with an iron. It's called "swirling.”



I finished the edges of the ribbon with a touch of clear nail polish and then sewed them into "flowers" by running a needle and thread through one side (the "narrow" side) and gathering it and then sewing up the ends. Then I sewed them together to make two layers.

Finally, I sewed the flower onto the hat and finished it with a cute mother of pearl button. All done!

And from the right.

 

From the left side.

 

And a view from behind. All done!

 

My model Zelda sports my new hat!