The Boards Are Glammed!

Here are some photos from 3Text’s team-up with the ESA to glam the bulletin boards in the English Students’ Lounge. Many thanks to Jason Nielsen, Paul Hebert, Hilarie Ashton, and everyone who came out and crafted with us!

GC students, please sign our roster with the DSC! Here are instructions, if you need them: https://3textstudio.wordpress.com/for-gc-students/.

Our next event in on Wed, Oct 22, from 4:30-10 pm in 5409. Hope to see you there!

by Alec Magnet

By Alec Magnet

The small board

The big board

By Brian Witoszynski

By Hilarie Ashton

By Hilarie Ashton

Hilarie, Jason, and Jojo

By Paul Hebert

By Jason Nielsen

By Jason Nielsen

Hemingway got glammed! (By Jason Nielsen)

By Jason Nielsen

Jason and the big board

By Jojo Karlin

By Paul Hebert

Paul and Hilarie

By T Meyerhoff

UPCOMING: Freestyle Crafting with 3Text on Wed, Oct 22!

There are two upcoming 3Text events on back to back Wednesdays! The first will be on Wed, Oct 15, in the Thesis Room of the English Students Lounge, from 5-9 pm. The next one will be on Wed, Oct 22, from 4:30-10 pm, in the usual room, 5409. There’s no theme, so come with your creativity and freestyle craft!

UPCOMING: Glam the Boards with 3Text and the ESA

The next 3Text event is a little different. We’re teaming up with the ESA to make some arts & crafts and decorate some bulletin boards in the English student lounge. Whatever program you’re in — or even if you don’t go to the GC at all — please come and join us!

We’ll be in the thesis room of the English Lounge (room 4406.11 — it’s immediately on your left when you walk into the lounge), next Wed, Oct 15, from 5 till 9 pm.

You can take home anything you make, or you can display it on one of the ESA’s bulletin boards in the lounge for as long as you want.

The ESA is providing wine & snacks, and 3Text is bringing our treasure trove of crafting supplies. Many thanks to Jason Nielsen and Paul Hebert, the ESA co-chairs!

​You can join the event on Facebook here. We hope to see you there!

You Don’t Happen to Have a Silver Salver, Do You?

Last night’s card-themed crafting party was a blast, and people made some beautiful things! I wish I could find a youtube clip of John Wayne teasing Shirley Temple about her crush coming by to drop his calling card onto a silver salver. I’m sure these photos will fill the void!

cards by Alec Magnet (recto)

cards by Alec Magnet (verso)

Mary Catherine Lowrance

Mary Catherine Lowrance

Suminagashi and stamps by Mary Catherine Lowrance

Mary Catherine Lowrance and her stamped and dyed cards

Chrissy, Gloria, Becky, Sharon, Annie, and Rong

Monique and Alec being serious

Monique and Alec telling jokes

Rebecca Traynor and her cards

cards by Rebecca Traynor

cards by Annie Cranstoun (verso)

cards by Annie Cranstoun (recto)

Becky, Sharon, Annie, and Rong

cards by Gwen Shaw

Chrissy, Gwen, Sharon, and Annie

Jason Nielsen and his creepy pumpkin-card doll

Jason Nielsen’s card-clutching doll

Shooting grandma card by Jason Nielsen

Mary Catherine and Xiang

Monique Whitaker with greeting card

Monique Whitaker with box and journal

Rong Wu

Frame and card by Rong Wu

card by Ryan Tracy (front)

card by Ryan Tracy (inside)

Ryan Tracy with open card

Ryan Tracy with closed card

Xiang Ni with cards

cards by Xiang Ni

card by Sharon Bogart

card by Sharon Bogart

card by Sharon Bogart

Mark your calendars, at least tentatively: We’ll almost certainly be holding a bulletin-board decorating party in the English Student Lounge (room 4406 at the GC), as well as a regular 3Text crafting event on Monday, Nov 3, in our usual room, 5409.

Upcoming: What Would You Put on Your Rookie Card? — Tues, Sept. 30

Mark your calendars for our next 3Text event — What Would You Put on Your Rookie Card? — coming up this Tuesday!

What Would You Put on Your Rookie Card?

Tuesday, September 30, from 4:30 till 10 p.m. (Stop by any time!)

At the CUNY Grad Center, Room 5409.

The theme is cards and card-shaped things — artist trading cards, regular trading cards (remember theory cards?!), calling cards, 19C flirtation cards, and the ever-crucial grad-student bizniz card. Here are a few from last year:

Series of balloon and panda cards by Alec Magnet

Hope to see you there!

Glammed Notebooks & Glamorous Crafters from Last Night’s 3Text

It was a delight to see so many of our wonderful 3Text friends again last night — and a joy to have so many fabulous new crafters join us and make such beautiful things!

Monique and her notebook decorated with GRE-flashcards. Somehow this is Monique’s first appearance on the 3Text blog, though she is an indispensable and bosom member of the group!

Elizabeth and Lindsey: applause!

New friend Angela with notebooks and cards!

Angela hard at work, 3Text bastions Chrissy and Monique perhaps wishing I weren’t waiving a camera around

Jojo demure . . .

. . . Jojo sassy!

Lindsey and Kaitlin: jazz hands!

Courtney!

Becky!

Indispensable 3Texters Chrissy and Monique; new, fantastic 3Texter Lindsey

Check out some of the amazing notebooks we glammed! Hover your cursor over each image to see who made the art and/or craft it depicts in the caption:

Rebecca Traynor’s notebook

Colleen’s notebook

Christina Nadler’s notebook (outside)

Christina Nadler’s notebook (inside front)

Christina Nadler’s notebook (inside back)

Monique and her sesquepedalian notebook

Courtney notebook

Courtney’s collage

SAJ’s octopus

Angela Dunne’s Notebook

Angela Dunne’s cards

Jojo Karlin’s notebook (inside front cover)

Jojo Karlin’s notebook (outside cover)

Elizabeth Decker’s notebook

Jojo Karlin’s notebook (inside back cover)

Kaitlin Mondello’s notebook

Alec Magnet’s notebook

Alec Magnet’s notebook

Lindsey Albracht’s notebook (front)

Lindsey Albracht’s notebook (back)

Lindsey Albracht and her haunted notebook

Yeonju Lee’s box sculpture card (?)

Yeonju Lee’s notebooks

Our next event will be on Tuesday, September 30, so mark your calendars! We’ll be messing around with cards — artist trading cards, calling cards, 19C flirtation cards, and the ever-crucial grad-student bizniz card — from 4:30 till around 10 pm in room 5409 at the GC. Hope to see you there!

Monday, September 8: Glam My Notebook/Bedizen My Calendar!

Hello, crafty friends! It’s a new semester — a whole new school year! And how could we start without newly glammed notebooks and newly bedizened calendar pages? We couldn’t — that’s now. So stop by 3Text’s first crafting get-together of Fall, 2014:

Glam My Notebook/Bedizen My Calendar!

Monday, September 8, from 4:30 till 10 p.m. (Stop by any time!)

At the CUNY Grad Center, Room 5409.

We’ll have some notebooks for you to decorate and lots of materials for you to make your own from scratch. (It’s super easier, and they look amazing!) We’ll also have calendar pages for the remaining months of 2014. But go ahead and bring your own notebook or calendar if you have one you want to make fabulous. As always, we’ll have drinks, snacks, and all the arts & crafts supplies you ever dreamed of.

Save the date for our second get-together of the semester, too, which will be happening on Tuesday, September 30, also from 4:30 to 10 p.m. in 5409. We’ll probably be doing something with cards — artist trading cards, calling cards, 19C flirtation cards, and the ever-crucial grad-student bizniz card. (And, hey! After glamming & bedizening on Mon, Sept. 8, you may have a whole new calendar to write save the date on!)

For some inspiration, check out some of the wonderful things people made last year:

Can’t wait to see you there!

Scenes of Crafting and Listening to Lynda Barry

For the last 3Text event of the semester, we listened to a fabulous interview with Lynda Barry (streaming on the CBC’s website) and did some free-style crafting. It was an absolute blast! See:

Charlotte delighted by the bounty of our supplies!

T & Gwen: woot!

Annie with razor focus

This time, we’ve got lots of photos of the beautiful crafts everyone made. Usable stationary was a common theme:

SAJ, for example, created this incredible, glittery 3-D calendar page.

See how 3-D it is?!

SAJ also made a whole writing table’s worth of lovely note cards & envelopes.

Watching Annie Cranstoun paint this root system was mesmerizing.

Series of balloon and panda cards by Alec Magnet

T Meyerhoff’s boldness with color always inspires.

Gwen Shaw was enviably prolific and creative! The next six are hers:

(I wish I had a panda in a jar, as Gwen does.)

(I do, however, have a print-out of the same bibliophilic hedgehog up on the wall of my office at CCNY.)

Gwen’s two water-color cards are stunning!

Here’s the other one.

Gwen number 6.

Sharon Bogart made some wonderful, icon-like cards in gold and green.

Here’s the first set with one more that she made after I left.

Sharon thinks there might be too much red in this one. I think it’s perfect. Tell us your thoughts in the comments!

I wish I had a larger photo of Sharon’s stunning green series.

Continuing the stationary theme, a brief, lovely visit from Charlotte Thurston produced a gorgeous card.

My blurry photos do not do it proper justice!

Our summer schedule is not yet final, but we’ll certainly be crafting away. After all, what better way to beat the heat than wine spritzers and collage? Watch this space for details — we’d love to see you there!

UPCOMING: Lynda Barry-inspired crafting on Monday, May 12

Our last gathering of the semester will be next Monday, May 12, in room 5409 of the Grad Center. We will be playing a wonderful interview with Lynda Barry in which she discusses her writing process, the necessity of play, and a  bunch of other fun and interesting stuff. 

Come by anytime between 4:30 and 9:30 p.m. for stamping and crafting, or stop in around 6 p.m. when we’ll begin the interview. As always, we’ll have delicious food and drink, as well as myriad crafting supplies and some printed-out pages from Barry’s fantastic What It Is.

Our last event, Chance and Happy Accidents, was a blast. Appropriately enough, though, we have no photos to record our aleatory crafting on the internets. Still, if you run into me (Alec), you should check out the suminagashi calling cards I dyed at the event. And for those of you who were really into the I Ching, there’s a pretty great website called I Ching Online that will toss it for you. You have to click the button at the bottom of reading marked “Read the Original Text” to get the version I was using (and, somewhat irritatingly, you have to do click it for each separate tab: the original hexagram, the changing lines, the hexagram it changes into, etc.). Here’s a copy of the instruction sheet, too: I Ching how-to.

UPDATED: Chance and Happy Accidents now on MONDAY, APRIL 28

Fuxi with trigrams from the I Ching

UPDATED WITH NEW DATE: Mark your calendars for the next 3Text gathering, “Chance and Happy Accidents: An Aleatory Art-Making Workshop,” which is [now] happening on Monday, April 28, from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. in room 5414 at the CUNY Grad Center (365 5th Ave btwn 34th & 35th St). Available activities will include:

• Creating suminagashi — Japanese paper and fabric marbling
• Using “Oblique Strategies” cards and making a set to take with you
• Composing cut-ups (in the tradition of William Burroughs)
• Consulting the I Ching
• Throwing some very unusual dice, and
• Using our collection of fabulous rubber stamps and other materials

There will be drinks and snacks of course.

“Aleatory,” from the Latin for dice, refers to composition practices that leave something up to random chance. Here was our pitch to the DSC, which gave us a generous grant fro the workshop:

In her writings about making art—and in the studio class she taught at the GC—Eve Sedgwick celebrated art-making as an experience of what she called “the middle ranges of agency,” where subject and object are not the distinct roles we imagine. In this workshop, 3Text will provide materials, tools, and instruction for participants to experiment with a wide range of aleatory art-making practices—practices that emphasize the role of chance in creation. We will explore, for example, conceptual incorporations of chance (John Cage’s use of the I Ching, Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies”), techniques and materials that restrict an artist’s control over the outcome (suminagashi silk-dyeing, working with resists), and final products whose use incorporates chance (books as decks of cards to be shuffled, images on magnet backings or dice).

You can play with Oblique Strategies or the I Ching online, but we’ll have physical copies at the workshop. Hope to see you there!

Suminigashi from wildmandesigns.blogspot.com

Original Oblique Strategies deck by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt from 1975

Bowie and Eno working on “Low” in Berlin, 1977

John Cage performing “Water Walk” on “I’ve Got a Secret,” Jan 1960. Watch the whole, amazing thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U

John Cage’s aleatory music (image from andremount.net)

Hans Arp – Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance), 1916-17, MoMA