The Forest Café is an Edinburgh institution. Ask anyone, they’ll have at least heard of it and most people enthuse on its brilliance and importance.
Having only recently moved into their new premises on Tollcross, a very different space to their previous home, there are still kinks to be knocked out. The parallel concrete floor and ceiling provide a tinny, clashy, clamour where people have to fight to hear or be heard.
As these things usually happen, a dinner time conversation has grown into a proposal on my part to reduce (hopefully eradicate) this problem with some sound buffering fabric installations.
Industrial felt is what you need, I said.
Industrial felt it is, in this case in the form of recycled wool rich carpet underlay
(I used this for the wadding on my print table, useful stuff.)
As I build my studio having this project to work on is brilliant, keeping the stress and therefore motivation levels at a comfortable high. It will allow me to work out my new set up and get me printing not faffing.
I came up with a few ideas, and through a couple of meetings we settled on these two for now with an aim for the oblong one to be done by Christmas. (comfortably high)
These are just wee paper examples, as I work out the unavoidable measurements headache the shapes will develop.
Print wise I return to familiar ground, rock structures and patterns created by geological formations. I can run, but I lost my legs and am building them from scratch so for now, I’m walking. Colour wise I will use the warm mottled grey of the felt to match with and I’ll try out a few colours and textures of print. The panels will be roughly sewn together with bright, gaudy yarn.
I should be printing tests by the end of the week, I am fortunate to live around the corner from Edinburgh Contemporary Crafts. Head crafter, Lou, has been brilliant letting me coat two A3 tester screens which I will expose there tomorrow.