CS NO. 3 (Collage)

CS No.3, 1-25-10,  16" x 18"

This was a fun piece to construct and went together fairly quickly, once it decided what it wanted to be. 

As usual, I started with a  piece of masonite (I love to recycle), which I covered with two layers of Wonder Under. Onto that substrate, with a hot iron, I collaged several whole sheets of melted magazine pages.

Wanting to change the background color a bit but also wanting to show the beautiful patterns and peculiarities of the original papers, I created a glaze combining a 50/50 mixture of gloss and matte mediums with a hint of Golden acrylic paint in dioxazone purple.

Once it was dried, I embellished the background with textile foil in copper. I continued to collage more cut pieces of magazine pages, again using Wonder Under as my adhesive.

 

(Detail)

(NOTE: for the Citra Solv/magazine trick, please see the most recent issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors or my first blog post about it (scroll down about halfway to find it.)

I Must Be Crazy

I've been playing with silk lately, specifically 8mm Habotai silk veils that I've been cutting into smaller pieces and parfait dyeing, using fiber reactive dyes. I wasn't thrilled with the first batch out of the dye baths.

(Parfait Dyed Habotai Silk)

While the lengths of silk were lovely, and their colors rich and deep, there was little to no discernible patterning- none of those crisp, complex landscapes of shifting color that flow across the cloth when you parfait dye cotton.

(Parfait Dyed Cotton Muslin)

Most of the colors in the silks seem to have blended together so that they almost read as solids. Beautiful, but not what I want.

Enter the Brain Trust over at The Dyer's Forum.

There's been a lively discussion lately on the subject of snow dyeing**.  Being a southerner, we don't know from snow, and I've been suffering from serious Dye Envy of those lucky enough to be able to play with this variation of scrunch dyeing.

However, there have also been some excellent suggestions for closely replicating snow dyeing, for the more snow-challenged among us. The most likely successful technique suggested, it seemed to me, was to wet, tightly scrunch, and then freeze your fabrics before applying the dyes. But while this technique has evidently proved to be successful on cotton, I haven't seen any discussions about it's viability with silk. Thank goodness I'm adventurous.

So, leaving nothing to chance for my next experimentation- and still chasing those beautiful, crystalline patterns I've achieved previously on cotton-  I cut two more silk veils into sixteen pieces, each measuring approximately 12" x 12".

This time, instead of soaking them in soda ask, I soaked them in straight vinegar for several hours. Then this is where it gets a little looney. I scrunched each piece of silk up into a wad about the size of a meatball, tied them off with string, and stuck them in a baggie in the freezer.

I felt odd doing it (the words of my Aunt Peg whispering in my ear, "Nice girl- a 'lil strange,") and the kitchen reeked of vinegar for a full day, but my results were much closer to what I wanted, this time.

After a day in the freezer, the mini silk meatballs had their strings removed (I want patterning, not tie-dye) and then got popped one at a time into a tall, slender container, in this case, the only container I had that would fit the bill- a modified blender cup. Each one received a splash of one of nine dye colors starting with yellows, and then moving into greens, blues, purples, reds and finally ending with orange.

After the silks had been allowed to batch set for about eight hours, and I was sure they were thawed, I steam-set them in the microwave for about a minute and a half. The wash-out cycle then proceeded as it does with cotton, with hand-washings followed by machine washings in Synthrapol. One key difference between cotton and silk is that the silk must be ironed when very slightly damp or you'll have a bear of a time getting the wrinkles to fall out.

I got a lot of very pretty patterning, though way more white areas than I wanted. More dye solution, possibly poured more slowly onto each piece, could solve that problem. However, my real mistake with this batch- also easily correctable, thank goodness- was my color progression. Once the orange dye at the top of the pile mixed with the purple and greens below it, it was all brown, brown, brown from there out. Fortunately, the brown I got was luscious and coppery and shimmering.

So in the next batch, hopefully the final experiment before launching into full-sized veils with a much larger dye bath, I will keep what works and tweak what doesn't: I'll soak the silk in vinegar (I could be crazy, but the colors were richer and deeper than when I soaked the last batch of silk in soda ash), tie it off, and freeze it. And then I'll go back to my usual color progression (yellow to orange to red to purple to blue to green) to achieve the color scheme I'm looking for. I'll post my results when I have them.

In other news, I got a lovely gift box from the folks at CitraSolv. 

These goodies (with plenty of Concentrate for my next Nat Geo massacre!) came last week in a beautiful upholstered box that I can use to keep... well, magazines, what else? Thank you, Melissa!

Also, I've entered into an arrangement with the folks over at LQuilt to host and moderate some surface design forums for them for the next few months. I was excited to be asked, I love their technique videos, and it should be a fun experience getting some discussions going. I'll give you more details about the forums once all the kinks are worked out.

Coming up this week, I'll be posting photos of my week 3 CS collage and of my newest stitched piece, which is coming along nicely.

In the meantime, happy creating!

**(Here is an excellent blog that describes snow dyeing.)

A New Collage, And Silk

This week I want to talk a little more about a mixed-media piece I finished, and a little less about fabrics- but if you can stay tuned until the end of this post, I promise to help you get your silk ya-yas on!

As I stated in a recent post, I spent an enjoyable afternoon playing recently with a product called CitraSolv Concentrate and several hapless National Geographic Magazines. The resulting product- reams of fascinating papers to use in mixed-media projects- excited me. I determined then to do one collage a week out of these papers either until they run out, or my substrates do.

Here is week twos' collage:

CS No. 2, 1.2010. 16" x 18"

Like the last piece, this one was created by fusing solvent-melted magazine pages- this time in torn strips to help emphasize the unpredictable nature of the process used to create them- to a piece of masonite board with Wonder Under.

As I added more and more strips, the collage began to look like a cross-section of the Earth's crust, an effect I found very appealing. In order to help reinforce that earthy feeling, I wanted to add one of my own nature photos somewhere in the piece, a desire which led me to consider incorporating something else I was playing with last week- a product called Sheer Heaven.

Sheer Heaven is a synthetic paper with unusual properties. Unlike other synthetic art papers such as Yupo, which is opaque white and smooth to the touch on both sides, Sheer Heaven is somewhat translucent, and one side- the "right" side- has a soft, suede-like feel to it. This is where you do most of your work, evidently.

It arrived only a few days ago, so I haven't had a lot of time to really put this product through its paces, but the results I've had so far have been interesting, and the product itself is just fun to play with.

I started by running a few sheets of Sheer Heaven through my computer printer, printing out some of my own photos. On the Sheer Heaven web site, there's a brief tutorial for photo transfers using your injet printer and 70% Isopropal alcohol. The tutorial covers transfers onto watercolor paper, but I wanted to test the technique with fabric. My results were less than thrilling- I didn't even bother photographing them- so more testing is in order.

However, a really fascinating thing happened with the SH paper- after I transferred this photo:

 

...to the Sheer Heaven, and then onto fabric, I noticed that a good deal of the original photo was still visible on the SH paper, a faded version that had great texture. I started to wonder- could I treat the SH paper as if it were a dye-charged silk screen as would be used in a deconstructed silk screen technique? Maybe if I kept layering photos one top of another, discharging just once after each run through the printer, I could just keep discharging layer after of layer of ink.

I ran the sheet through the inkjet printer again and printed this photo on top of the first now-faded image:

For this attempt at discharging, I used the same piece of fabric that I had discharged the first photo onto, hoping to get a more complex impression. Again, the fabric was a failure- but the SH paper was magnificent.

Both the image of the Spanish Moss-laden branch and the cardinal sitting on the fence could be seen and yet the paper was still sheer. Even more fascinating was that the images had now taken on the look of the weave of the muslin I'd try to use for discharging! I knew then that I didn't want to run this piece through the printer again, I wanted to use it as is.

Because of SH's translucence, though, the CitraSolv/masonite background was bleeding though the birds' breast and face, an effect I didn't like. To combat that while still allowing the background to show through around the shape of the bird, I turned the SH over to the back and painted in the outline of the bird with two coats of gesso. Still, I wasn't totally satisfied with the muted appearance of the cardinal's coloration... in the original photo, his feathers had been brilliant red. I wanted to revive some of that color.

Out came the oil pastels and ink pens. I used the oils to brighten up the red and black feathers in his body and make his feet a little more prominent, and then I gave him a soft outline with ink. I brightened the area directly around his head and body with some pale umber pastel in order to draw attention to him and make him a real focal point. I liked the way the pastels blurred the bird a bit, so I didn't go back in and add much more detail.

I brushed the background with a quick wash of burnt umber liquid acrylic mixed with semi-gloss liquid medium, which not only sealed the piece, but helped to softly unify all the colors.

This collage wound up taking a lot longer than I plan on these pieces taking in the future- I want them to be "jump starters" to creativity, not works of fine art, but even still I think it was worth the extra effort.

Evidently, the CitraSolv folks noticed a little activity coming to their site from mine (thanks, readers!) and in response, they sent me a lovely letter thanking me for my usage of their product. They have also offered to feature me on their artists' page and, because I was so determined to find their product the first time, they say they've sent me a little thank you gift, as well! A very nice lady named Melissa has been emailing with me about it since last week. Thanks, Melissa!

Also on deck last week, Mom and I put the new wet studio to the test and did some experimenting with silk dyeing.

 

I'm hoping to come close to reproducing the amazing effects I've gotten with parfait (cotton) dyeing except on silk, and towards that end, I've been purchasing small amounts of it to putter with. I purchased two 8mm habotai silk veils and Mom and I cut each one into four pieces. We soda-soaked the eight pieces as if they were cotton (a suggestion I got from several reliable sources), scrunched them one by one into a coffee tin, and poured quarter cups of dye solutions in eight different colors onto the silk pieces, one at a time.

Then the whole coffee tin was covered and the silks allowed to batch for about 6 hours. Finally, I zapped in the container in the microwave, allowed the silks to sit in it until cooled, and washed each one out with synthrapol. I wrung them in a towel to remove most of the moisture, and ironed them on a low setting to dry them and bring back the silky hand.

Pretty, but not what I'm looking for, so I'll be doing more of this in the future and you can expect to see discussions of it here soon.

And finally, today's down-and-dirty of a piece I've already begun stitching this morning:

Happy creating!

Helping Haiti

Please give what you can to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief And Development Fund. Thank you, friends.

Rescuing Ugly Fabric

(I'm so sorry this tutorial was so slow in arriving, life jumped up and got in the way of its completion!)

We all have them, even if we don't admit it: fabric scraps we bought on the sale table at the craft store ten years ago, stuff that was included in kits we never completed, and even more that we don't recognize but that wound up in our stash, nonetheless. We know we won't use these neglected fabrics. Not in their current state, anyway.

But there is hope for such castoffs, using inexpensive supplies from your local hardware or craft store and a little imagination.

I took this fabric:

... and turned it into this:

I also took this, a really horrible fabric that I would never use:

And turned it into this, a fabric I probably will use in the future:

 

Fair warning before you begin: this WILL change the "hand" of the fabric. The fabric will become anywhere from slightly to moderately stiff by the end of this process. However, it still stitches beautifully and as long as you're mindful of the limitations of your sewing machine needle- or your hand needles- to go through tough fabrics, you can add virtually endless, thin layers of stamping and paint.

Here's what you'll need:

~ Any fabric you know you will never use in its current state. The uglier, the better. Smooth fabric can yield good, crisp (stamped) images and more heavily textured fabric will yield a more distressed image, so choose according to your needs. I use cottons almost exclusively, so I offer no guarantees for how this will work on man-made fabrics!

~ Padded surface for printing. An old towel folded up will do perfectly, and it has the added benefit of being able to pin your fabric to it to keep it from shifting.

~Safety or straight pins. Inexpensive pins are fine for this job- they're going to get covered in paint anyway, so you won't be using these on fine textiles.

~ Acrylic paints in several coordinating colors. Craft paints work as well as artist quality paints for this technique. There are also several brands of excellent textile paints on the market, as well. Spend as little or as much as you like.

~ Fabric or textile medium. I use Delta Cermacoat or Liquitex Fabric Medium because it's what I have in the studio, but most acrylic paint companies make their own version that should work just as well. PLEASE NOTE: for this technique, If you are using paints specially formulated for textiles you will NOT need an additional fabric medium!

~ Stamps. This is the time to pull out and strut those hand-made stamps. Making your own stamps is incredibly simple and there are an almost endless variety of materials you can use, many of which will yield stamps that you can use for years. (I'll be working on a tutorial in the near future for making your own stamps and printing plates.) If you're using stamps that you haven't created yourself from original images, please be respectful of international copyright laws!

~ Paint palette or palette paper.

~ Cosmetic sponges or sponge brushes, and sponges that don't get stiff when dry. I find these sponges- great big yellow ones- in the hardware store in the cleaning supplies aisle. When I get them home, I cut them into smaller pieces. It's important to use these sponges for this technique because you want them pliable when dry.

~ Mister filled with water.

What you'll do:

~Using safety or straight pins, pin your fabric to your padded surface, making sure to pull the fabric taut without stretching it. This step is helpful but not critical with small pieces of fabric, but if you have a large piece of fabric you want to paint, it's going to want to shift and move a lot, even if it is pinned. If it isn't pinned, it could quickly become frustrating. Don't bother ironing out the wrinkles, they'll fall out by the time you're finished. You can use the fabric with its right side up or down, it doesn't really matter- you'll see little to none of the original print in the final product.

~ Spritz fabric lightly with water. You're not aiming to soak it, just to dampen it.

~ Set up your paint palette. Place a large dollop of each of two or three coordinating paint colors (in my case I used golden yellow, orange-red and red ) side by side. Then below them, squeeze out a large dollop of textile medium. I try to use a ratio of about 50:50 but you should read the directions on your textile medium because it may be different. Finally, off to the side of the palette, I often squeeze a smaller dollop of titanium white.

 

~ With a foam brush or sponge, swipe through one or two of the paint colors and the medium, picking up all three on the brush at the same time.

~ Brush paints and medium onto the dampened fabric, covering the original print as much or as little as you please. This is where the thicker paints will come in handy- they will provide more opaque coverage than thinner or liquid acrylics will. Allow the colors to blend on the fabric as you work, or if you prefer more defined blocks of color, you can do that, too!

 

 

~ Cover your fabric with paint, picking up occasional bits of titanium white to add variety and value changes.

 

~ Before the fabric dries, use the paint still in your sponge brush to add texture. "Slap" the fabric lightly with the flat edge of the brush in a pouncing movement. This will distribute unexpected splatters of paint across the entire surface.

~ The next step- stamping- can be done while the paint is still wet, or it can be done once the paint dries. For the sake of time and because I already have my paints and tools out and set up, I usually just work wet-into-wet.  Load a dry, pliable sponge with no more than two colors of paint (more and you risk muddying the colors) and a dab of the textile medium. I usually do this by mashing the surface of the loaded sponge gently with a craft stick to distribute the paint throughout the sponge. Dab the paint onto your stamp, covering the surface with a light coating of paint. Don't overload the stamp with paint or it will give you a smeared, blurry image.

~ Pick a spot on your fabric and stamp. More gentle pressure will yield a lighter image with a more distressed look. Firm pressure will yield a clearer impression. Continue stamping, changing paint colors (use clean sponges if necessary, to avoid muddying the colors), until you're happy with the design.

 

 

~ Allow fabric to fully dry. If your paints or textile mediums need to be set for color fast permanence, be sure to closely follow the instructions on your textile medium or fabric paints.

Mixed Media And A New Studio

The garage studio remodel is complete and I now have the wonderful, brightly-lit wet/dry studio I've always longed for.

This is what I started with:

 

It's always been a wonderfully workable space that I've filled with my art supplies and tools, really my favorite room in the house, but even so, it had serious problems. For starters, it was a typical garage- poorly lit with just two naked bulbs overhead, no insulation to speak of, and prone to catching dust, dirt and leaves blown in from outside. The uninsulated garage door had large gaps down each side between the wall and the door, so all the cold air in winter, all the heat and humidity in summer, and all the bugs in the universe had a standing, open invitation into my work space. It made creating art in there challenging, but I still I did it for many years.

Now those problems are history. This is the space today:

It may not look that different, but trust me, it really is.

Let's start at the top and move down... the bare bulbs in the ceiling are gone, replaced with three sets of track lighting, each with four halogen bulbs. Two of the tracks light my work table and the walls, and one set is aimed at what will become the design wall. (That part of the job hasn't been finished yet, I still need to get the supplies for it, but it will measure about nine feet across.)

(And speaking of my worktable, I added a carpet pad to the top to make it easier to stamp, screen print and DSP. No more carting small padded surfaces from the painting studio where they live, to the garage studio and back again.)

I also tasked the electricians with giving me wiring that provides more current in the hopes of later adding a mini-fridge to store my mixed dyes. They installed four new plugs with all that wiring, two for me and two for my husband.

The plumbers came in and added a desperately-needed, deep, 2-sink laundry tub.

On the wall above it, you can see the new air conditioner/heating unit. This is a relatively new technology that allows you to heat and cool up to 4 rooms with ductless, wall-mounted units. Of course, it needs professional wiring and plumbing, and the compressor unit, which sits outside, is sizable but still smaller than whole-house units.

None of these improvements would have made much difference, though, if I hadn't insulated the space, too. I had a heavy, insulated garage door installed (with a door opener, for hubby) and had insulation blown in the attic space above the garage.As an added bonus, the garage door has four small windows, so for the first time ever, I have natural light in there during the day.

It feels like a whole new room added to the house, although my husband's side still contains typical garage items- tools, household chemicals, lawn gear, etc. It will still serve all the functions it did before, but in a climate-controlled, well lit space that is a joy to be in.

To celebrate, I did a little mixed-media art, something I don't spend much time doing anymore. An article in the newest Cloth, Paper, Scissors offered something I didn't think I'd ever find again- a new way to play with paper. After spending years and years making, altering, painting and destroying paper, I thought I'd seen it all, but I was wrong.

 

 

3 examples of papers made with CitraSolv

In "Creative Spirits- Transforming papers To Make A Unique Painting Surface" (pages 18-20), artist Cathy Taylor shows us how to use a de-greasing product called CitraSolv Concentrate to "melt" the ink of a National Geographic magazine in order to create amazing papers for use in mix-media art.

The process is simple- paint each page with CitraSolv, squish it around a little and after about 20 or 30 minutes, peel the pages out and lay them aside to dry. Here are some of the pages I did after removing them from the magazine.

So that you all can learn from my mistakes, I'll tell you a couple of things the article didn't mention. For one, evidently this is the only product that will achieve this particular effect. I didn't have any CitraSolv and couldn't find it in the two grocery stores I checked, nor in either Lowes or Target. I thought that one citric de-greaser is probably about the same as another, so I tried it with Goo-Gone. Didn't work. I just wound up with a soaked, unhappy-looking mess.

Fine, I thought, this is such a unique technique to me that I'm motivated to make it work. Off to the web I went in search of CitraSolv. I bought some, anxiously awaited its arrival and then dove on it when it showed up. Another sopping wet National Geographic magazine later, I realized that I had NOT bought the product called "Concentrate", I'd purchased some other CitraSolv cleaner.

I really wasn't happy with myself, but I gave it one more shot, bought the correct product and used it. And yeah, it really works! The Concentrate melts the inks, which, when you peel apart the pages to dry, slides around the paper, mixing and making great patterns. Some of the lettering can still faintly be seen, and ghostly remainders of the original images can also show up. It makes an entire magazine's worth gorgeous of paper.

Which brings me to my next caution: if you do this, be sure to have LOTS of flat surfaces to dry your sheets of paper on. If the papers touch one another, the wet inks will interact with each other. That can form great edges and such, but for the most part, you'll want to dry them separated, and a typical NatGeo magazine has about a hundred pages in it. 

Another interesting tidbit that I found after doing some research into the subject is that National Geographic coats their paper first with metallic gold paint before printing on it. This helps to give their photos that iconic glowing, high-quality look. But it also means that when you melt the ink off, the metallic becomes more obvious, so all the pages now have a lovely sheen.

I decided to use some of the papers immediately in a collage.

CS No. 1, 1.2010, 16" x 18"

(detail)

I used a masonite scrap left over from a shelving unit we built several years ago as the substrate. I didn't prime it all. I fused Wonder Under to the backs of the papers and then fused them right to the board. I may play with it a little later on with paint or somesuch- or maybe I won't, just not sure.

I did make a small commitment to myself, however. I have ten or eleven of these masonite scraps and dozens and dozens of magazine pages I melted, so I'm going to create quick and simple collages once a week with them, until I run out of masonite. You'll be seeing those posted here each week.

The fabric painting tutorial is almost finished, though it might end up being posted a little later than I was hoping- if you don't see it here tomorrow, look for it a little later in the week. Mom arrives tomorrow to stay for a few days and we're going to experiment with some silk dyeing, so it may take me away from finishing it up by tomorrow evening. I even hope to offer the tutorial in a clickable .pdf format for free download. Wish me luck figuring out how to do that. (Hubby says it's easy.)

Until then, happy creating!

What Was I Thinking?

A few days ago I told a fellow blogger in email that I had taken a forced vacation from art. I must have been out of my mind. I strolled into the studio this morning to be sure it was in readiness for the launch of a new work week (and year!) tomorrow, and realized that I had evidently spent much more time immersed in creative pursuits during my "vacation" than I was willing to admit to myself.

For instance, I took this perfectly respectable, small-scale commercial fabric that I think is pretty but would never actually use as it is...

and turned it into this:

That was so much fun that I whacked another piece off and did this to it:

 

(And while I'm at it, I might as well own up to the fact that I broke my own rule and used a stamp I didn't design and carve myself. This one's a commercial stamp.)

I started a tutorial for transforming ugly fabrics but then I realized that most of the folks reading this blog probably already have that skill in their arsenal. However, as stated in a previous post, I'd be happy to finish writing that tutorial if there's any interest in it.

Also during my "self-imposed vacation" from art (it sounds so important when it's said like that, doesn't it?), I dyed fabrics. These little beauties, to be specific, or rather, the top eight pieces, anyway:

Are we seeing a pattern here? Yeah, not only do I live in a state of denial about exactly how much time I really spend in the studio (way, way too much, I'm starting to suspect), but also, that sometimes I can't seem to get away from a specific color palette. Apparently, I had violet on my mind last week, and everything wound up influenced by it.

Like these lovely papers:

From top to bottom we have Yupo painted with Dye-Na_Flow. Yupo is a thin plastic that behaves much like watercolor paper except that you have the ability to lift the color all the way back to white with the application of a wet brush, if you choose. This allows for some pretty cool effects. It comes in a pad of sheets just like watercolor paper. This sample was actually painted several years ago, but the colors were weak and uninteresting. This past week, I dug it out and gave it a light wash of violet. When it dried, I sanded some areas back to white.

The middle sheet is cold-press watercolor paper (which I prefer to hot-press for its' more textured surface) and the bottom piece is a large sheet of Bristol velum. The Bristol was painted with the off-loaded pigments from the other projects I was painting and puttering with. The artist Sherrill Kahn aptly names these bits of painted work, "serendipity pieces".

And speaking of off-loading pigments, I also keep baby wipes on my desk to mop up all that color I willy-nilly splash around. Once dry, I reward their hard service by giving them some character with a little paint and stamping.

They're now ready to be stitched or glued onto a future project. I used these hand-made stamps...

Do you make your own stamps? If not, would you like to learn how? Let me know... it could be another tutorial in the making!

Finally, in my obsessiveness this week with stamping, making stamps, painting,  dyeing, and violet- all that stuff I convinced myself I was on vacation from- my stamping board took on an interesting character...

This board was made by covering a piece of masonite with an old towel, turning a length of ugly fabric to its back side and wrapping the board/towel in it, and then painting it with several coats of Gesso. I may soon have to pull this cherished tool apart to use this now not-so-ugly fabric in a quilt!

It's a new work week, and it's a new year. There are so many things to get to this year that I'm bursting with energy.

In the first few months of this year I will:

~ Take myself slowly and carefully through the book Experimental Textiles, by Kim Thittichai. Kim was a Cities & Guilds instructor in England and taught this class for years until her retirement. There was such an outcry that her cirruculum might be lost, that she recorded it in this book. The first half of the book are exercises I am very familiar with, so I will skip those after a careful reading (it never hurts to brush up on familiar subjects) and then move on to the lessons I have yet to learn.

~ Take myself slowly and carefully through Gloria Hansen's book, Digital Essentials.

~ Using Gloria's book, I will teach myself how to use the new copy of Photoshop Elements I just installed on my machine.

~ I will complete my client's art installation.

The garage studio remodel is coming along beautifully. The AC/Heating unit has been plumbed and wired, the drywall has been repaired and the electricians have begun running wiring into the attic. Next, the sink, the track lighting, the insulated garage door and the new electrical outlets will be installed. It's possible that most of this work will be completed by the end of the week! I'll post before and after photos when it's all complete and put back together.

Until then, happy creating!