LisaRuth Creates

This is the story of the journey of a father-daughter collaboration to create an illustrated poetry book.

In 2009, my dad came to me with a collection of haiku he had written almost daily about the birds he observed in the backyard and along the river bank of my family home in Washington State. Together we have enjoyed sitting along the riverbank observing the bird activity, and over the years the bald eagle pair and their offspring in the cottonwood trees across the river have become part of the extended family I regularly hear about in our weekly phone calls. He asked if I would illustrate the birds in the poems and would I like to create a book out of it. I decided to use my preferred medium of paper collage to depict the birds. Using a torn paper mosaic style also had the effect of giving a “feathered” look to the birds.

At the time I was helping out a papermaker/book artist/printer with some of her book projects. I began to imagine typesetting the poems and printing the book by hand. Aside from the painstaking process of creating the birds, without any experience in bookmaking, it took quite a while to decide which format the book would take. Consultation with a couple of friends who are book and layout experts helped me get farther along. From the perspective I now have post-completion, I realize that making an artist book is a complex equation of trigonometry, geometry, and algebra combined, with serendipitous discovery along the way. Finding a hardbound book, A Net of Fireflies: An Anthology of 320 Japanese Haiku containing haiku paintings solidified the book’s form. The book was not bound using signatures, instead the folds are on the outside edge of the pages. Utilizing this format offered the convenience of concealing the relief from the typeset pages, as well as the possibility of adding another Japanese book form to complement the haiku: a stab bound spine.

I selected a smooth, off-white Mohawk paper from the incredible selection at FLAX Art & Design, which I cut down to print size and then later cut to half that size for binding. The setting of the type by hand—by me—and printing—by the paper mill—was done as a trade for my creation of a paper mosaic at the entry to the paper mill where the lead type, Kluge printing press, guillotine, and other tools were available to me. The paper mosaic features several types of paper made by the mill: from cotton rag and cat tails. The light blue—and a limited number of dark blue—cover papers of the book are made from denim and cotton rag, made in part by my friend Drew Cameron of Combat Paper Project. The silk thread used to bind the books was hand dyed by me with natural indigo, in vats I had access to as an artist/weaver in the Berkeley Art Museum show, “The Possible” in 2014.

I chose six birds from the 21 species my dad wrote verses about, reluctantly not illustrating a few favorites like the pileated woodpecker, mergansers, and the eagles. Because I wanted the birds to appear as close to life-sized as possible, these three birds were more complicated to imagine as part of the project. I started with the Washington State bird, the goldfinch. Definitely included were other bright birds like the western tanager and Steller’s jay. My father’s favorite, the mourning dove, had to be part of the mix. And a couple with detailed plumage like the northern flicker and cedar waxwing made the cut. A sketch based on photos sourced online became slowly filled in with color from saturated magazine pages. I worked from the bottom up, so the paper pieces would lay on top of each other as the feathers do on a bird. Each dot on the flicker’s white feathers were cut out individually. The original collages were reproduced on Hahnemühle rice paper as high quality digital prints by LightSource SF, whose staff really helped integrate the illustrations into the project beautifully.

Ultimately, all the pieces of the book came together in June 2018, nine years after my dad suggested the idea. There were several life projects that came in between me and finishing the collages and figuring out the complex math of putting the puzzle pieces together. The ultimate wrench in the works: being forced out of my home in 2013 by the wave of economic changes in San Francisco. I believe that if I hadn’t been looking for three years for a home starting that year, I would have completed the project several years ago. Now, cozily settled into a cottage perched on the slope of Bernal Heights, with all my supplies around me and space to create available, I have the ability to assemble and bind the edition.

The book, 28 Days in May: avian observations, by Len Elliott, and illustrated by me, LisaRuth Elliott, is an edition of 50. As of March 2019, 42 of these have been sold or given away. A percentage of the sales was presented as a donation to the Rainier Audubon Society in King County, Washington in January 2019.

As we were discussing the printing of the book in 2013, my dad sent this observation, a 29th poem to add to the collection here:
Curled around feeder,
Pileated woodpecker
Gobbling up suet.

I began experimenting with using foraged plants and flowers and food scraps in my own kitchen as natural dye materials in 2017. For regular updates on this, head over to my IG feed: @sfurbanwanderer. For a fiber and textile fanatic who loves color, this was probably an inevitable exploration. I am the kind of person who takes photos like this at museums (from the Vasa Museet in Stockholm) and reads books like this for fun.

As I began to learn to weave over a decade ago, I realized how many more skills there were to learn to take step after step deeper into the understanding of the materials you are working with and where they have come from. Some—like dyeing and spinning yarn and using complex patterning like ikat or batik—seemed pretty far out of reach, but things I thought I might get to sometime down the road.

Aside from having great access to indigo vats when I was weaving as part of “The Possible” at BAM/PFA in 2014, I am mostly self taught in all my areas of creative work, so I slowly poked around in various places to begin to work with natural dyes on my own. There are a few people I follow on social media who have offered easy baby steps into the world of understanding the process, and the two who made it seem too easy not to try were Rebecca Desnos (using avocado pits and skins, and later soy as mordant) and Karen Hess’s Local Dialect (oxalis flowers).

Oxalis flowers growing at Alemany Farm, April 2018.

It just so happens that I love avocados, and oxalis flowers love the hillside I live on, so I have easy access to both. And neither of these two dyestuffs require preparing your fiber with a mordant (which allows easier bonding of the color with the fiber), so I could jump right in without having to understand too much of the chemistry at the beginning. That would come later.

I am also an urban farmer at Alemany Farm (since 2010), where I often work with first time volunteers who get very excited about growing food there. One of the things I love about working at the farm is introducing the many OTHER things that the farm offers—like a complex and buzzing ecosystem of pollinators, the many native plants we grow not for consumption, the plants that are edible but don’t look like food, etc. So when I started foraging and using the invasive weeds of oxalis to dye yarn, I enthusiastically shared the end product with my fellow farmers. The folks tending to the medicinal and herb garden have been growing traditional dye plants like madder for some time now, so it’s not a new concept to have dye plants on the farm. I did get into the Alemany greenhouse recently to start some zinnia and flax seeds, and repot some indigo starts, but my angle is definitely to look at what is already in abundance in front of me and using that.

I was asked to give a workshop on using natural dyes, so another volunteer, Musette, and I gave an introduction to using natural dyes in May 2018. The workshop, Bring Local Color into Your World: Using Natural Dyes, took place at Alemany Farm in San Francisco, and I covered using foraged plants and kitchen scraps, and Musette talked about using madder and other dye plants we’ve cultivated in the medicinal and herb garden specifically for the purpose of dyeing.

Here is a bit of a chronicle of my various experiments in using natural dyes. I am not a person who is in love with using pink or yellow in my textile creations, but something about the beauty of the sunsets lately made me imagine I’m pulling the sunset energy inside.

My initial experiments included dyeing with avocado pits and skins, oxalis flowers, coffee grounds, eucalyptus leaves, and fennel. Here are some of the results.

OXALIS FLOWERS

AVOCADO PITS

EUCALYPTUS LEAVES

COFFEE GROUNDS

I started a new project today, or rather, I picked up the threads of a project I first seriously took on in October 2009. I’m weaving at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.

Quick history: Over 4 years ago I bought a plywood laser cut backstrap loom from Travis Meinolf, aka Action Weaver. Having seen his weaving projects, I had mostly been inspired by his approach to craftmaking as an alternative to high art and capitalism. I got a chance to do some basic weaving under his guidance at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (RIP) in SF in October 2013. After that I was hooked. You can see some of the projects I have done using that loom on my Textiles page. They’re very humble. Over the years I’ve been gifted lots of yarn, thread, implements, and even an upright loom by a friend’s mother (thanks Bente!), and I’ve had fun weaving and knitting with the colors. As my inspiration and range grew, I was somewhat impatient about the limitations of a simple backstrap loom. I began to experiment with making patterns on that loom, knowing a floor loom and more complicated projects would come my way when the time was right. My latest project on the backstrap involving patterns I actually started plotting out in November 2010 (yikes!) and it’s still in progress. I decided to create a log cabin design.

I reconnected with Travis Meinolf in November 2013, as he and his family had recently moved back to the Bay Area from Berlin and were looking at doing a project in 2014 at my friends’ Berkeley space, the Subterranean Arthouse. He proposed building floor looms and having us learn that process from start to finish, ultimately crafting our own looms, and also weaving six yards of fabric that would be his payment, but would really be set out on the street for those in need of a free blanket.

My inquiries about the project at the end of January prompted Travis to instead invite me to help out with one of his current projects of building five looms at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) as part of the current exhibition “The Possible.” Here’s the write up of the show:

The Possible is a radically new model of exhibition, a framework for constantly evolving artistic experimentation. We invite you to get creative with guest artists and fellow BAM/PFA visitors in a series of Sunday workshops that are at the heart of this interactive exhibition. The Possible incorporates a series of interrelated spaces for creativity, collaboration, learning, and display, and is anchored by four main studios: a ceramics studio, dye lab, print shop, and recording studio.

Travis’s piece of it with the looms is a roaming part of the show, as the floor looms are collapsible and built to be mobile.

Today we worked on getting one loom created, and my role was to fashion 80 string heddles to complete the 240 needed for this first loom. I also paid attention as he crafted various parts of the first loom—the beater, the treadles, the front beam, the warp beams, and the heddle bars. I brought a rainbow of yarn to donate to the project that had been gifted to me. What a perfect place for all those colors to land!

I also spent a little time wandering through the other “studios,” getting super inspired by the natural dye lab particularly with its indigo vat and olive leaf and olive baths. We will have access to these vats for our weaving project yarns, and I have white and natural colored yarn I can’t wait to dye to include in our weaving projects!! I sat on the huge circular Domestic Integrities rug while working on the string heddles, but after awhile I wasn’t very comfortable using my jig with nails sticking out of it in a space where lots of toddlers were rolling around. The whole exhibition was basically a kids’ paradise, and lots of fun for their parents too. There was a scent library near me on the rug, I saw lots of steam coming from the dye vats outside, the ceramics table and print space were well occupied all afternoon, and I ran into Amy Franceschini who will be making beeswax candles in a few weeks as part of the workshops. Amy Trachtenberg is also doing a project called “Minimum Dwelling,” I ran into Ivy McClelland who is working with the Healing Art Project, and the Subterranean Arthouse folks are doing songwriting and folk music showcases. There was really pleasing experimental music from “The Something” music studio wafting down to us. At the end of the day, there was even a local street dance troupe who used the expansive lower floor to showcase their moves against the crafty backdrops.

While unlocking my bicycle outside the museum I heard one kid say upon exiting, “I liked EVERYTHING in there mom!”

I’ll be helping Travis out at least once a week for the duration of the exhibition. Sundays are open workshops from 11 AM – 3 PM, with music and innovations spicing them up each week. Come out and create!

Here are some photos from the first week, with studio shelves all stocked and beautiful and ready to get messy.