Books, Cake and Sunshine

This week we have been working on a big batch of these letterpressed notebooks to take to Big Blue Sky in Wells next the Sea.


They will also be available in our Folksy and Etsy shops soon!


We have also been enjoying the fine weather which means we can have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the garden, which is looking nice and tidy at the moment with some new hanging baskets.

Tomorrow we're off to the coast, via Holt to pick up Jon's new jacket from Old Town. Fingers crossed that it stays sunny long enough for us to dip our toes in the North Sea!

We'll be having a big wodge of this coffee and ginger cake on our picnic - it's fast becoming a favourite recipe, which you can find here.

Handmade Books

Last Saturday we went on a brilliant course run by a local bookbinder, Judith Ellis. We learnt a technique called 'longstitch' binding, which doesn't require any glue.

In the morning we used pink and green PVC covers to get the hang of things -

But in the afternoon we were let loose on a selection of lovely leather covers, and marbled papers....
Jon used dark brown leather with a light blue marbled paper inside, and I used red leather with a matching red marbled paper.

We're really excited about experimenting with this technique - somehow printmaking, letterpress and bookbinding seem to be happy bedfellows. Hopefully we can remember enough from the course to make another one each this coming weekend...

There are lots more examples of this type of binding on Flickr.

Weekend treats and a little book

This week we had our first fire of this winter! It was lovely and toasty on a cold autumnal day, especially when combined with another weekend treat - Chelsea buns! These are from a recipe in Dan Lepard's book, The Handmade Loaf, which is brilliant. This week we also made cucumber pickle rye bread, with the pickle juice from an empty jar of gherkins - also very nice, although perhaps not quite as good as Chelsea buns...


In a few weeks it will be time for another Clutter City market, so I'm attempting to be organised and make some new prints and other things a few weeks in advance. Here is the first new thing - a little concertina book with lovely covers made from Japanese origami paper. Here it is all folded up -


And unfolded...


I'm so pleased with how it turned out, although the gold colours on the paper is really difficult to capture in a photograph - expect to see a large pile of them on our stall at Clutter City!

Clutter City and new stuff

We had a lovely day at Clutter City today - saw lots of people from the last time round, and lots of lovely new people too - so hello if you've stopped by after picking up one of our postcards!

We made lots of shiny new things for our stall, including the paper flower brooches that I made this week. They were really popular, so I'm planning on making lots more!

We also made a little pile of hand sewn books with hand printed covers, filled with nice drawing paper. I used a mixture of old letterpress blocks and larger wooden blocks, in all different colours. The ones below have got various 1960s 'dinner dance' blocks all over them. The dandy felt pincushion is by Lupin, and is the nicest thing in my sewing box!

Here they are all finished -

There are still some notebooks and brooches left over from Clutter City, so we'll be listing them in our various shops this weekend...

Paperback Penguin Prints

Since doing the Christmas card (see earlier posts) there have been a couple of small pieces of engraver's plastic lying around, and on Sunday we decided to make use of one of them and do a tiny print based on the classic Penguin paperback design. We have a growing collection of these and it seemed like a nice little project for a weekend afternoon.



By that evening it was engraved and we'd printed it up in orange (used by Penguin for fiction covers), followed the next morning by green (mystery and crime, see below). We then added a pink (travel and adventure) and a blue version (biography) to finish it off. You can see the finished print here on our Flickr page.



Currently listening to: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!