Spent the weekend finishing off a tiny engraving on an offcut of unidentified end-grain wood, possibly maple, part of the mixed bag we bought a few weeks ago. It felt strange to be engraving on wood at first, after weeks of plastic and resingrave, but it was nice not to have to worry about the surface chipping or lifting away!
The engraving was based on a sketch of fields around Edgefield, near Holt in north Norfolk, from a long walk we had last summer on the Holt-Mannington trail. The simple patterns of hedges and plough furrows suited the small area of the block (about 5 x 3 cm). Printing was a bit hit and miss at first and we tried lots of different methods: laying the block on the paper (with padding underneath) and pressing down with weights, laying the paper on the block and burnishing by hand, and a combination of the two, although this generally meant the block would shift and blur the print as we flipped them. We spent large parts of Sunday night looking longingly at presses on the internet!
While I was engraving on Saturday afternoon Sarah took it upon herself to create a neater way for me to store my tools, which since I've bought them have lived variously in a roll of bubble wrap, in an old Stilton and Port tin, and scattered across the dining table. Now they have their very own little roll, courtesy of some old curtain fabric from Freecycle, and Sarah's 1950s sewing machine (a hefty lump of splendid engineering).
