Two more new prints

It's May Day bank holiday today, and we've spent all weekend busily carving and printing ready for Open Studios.

Jon has finished an engraving of a bunch of daffodils in my favourite spotty jug -


It's engraved on plastic, rather than wood, and printed in black oil ink on Zerkall. Here's the block at various stages of completion -


This one has taken a fair few recuttings and proof printings to get it just right. The little spotty jug is from Ark in Cambridge, and is often filled up with flowers.

I've been working on a reduction woodcut of East Ruston water tower, which we saw on a walk we did in Happisburgh and East Ruston on Easter Monday. Jon did a woodcut of Baconsthorpe water tower a while ago - perhaps one day we'll do them all? Well, all the Norfolk ones anyway...

Here's the finished print - two images of the water tower side by side.And the block in the early stages of cutting -


And the first four layers of printing (the fifth and final one is the green layer) -

Of course, they are in our Etsy and Folksy shops now!

This weekend we had a go with our new book-making leathers - the result is one nice red leather journal, with some more gorgeous marbled paper inside.

If you join our email mailing list (sign up on the right!), then you can get 15% off (plus free shipping) on any of our leather journals this month. We promise not to spam you :)

Right, we've got rosemary breadsticks to bake for dinner, to dunk into a baked camembert... It's strange how I'd never dream of eating a whole camembert to myself raw (as it were), but I don't have the same qualms about a baked one...

More books (and some bookplates too)

This weekend we are busy getting ready for the next Clutter City and H@ndmade Cambridge - Jon is working on a new engraving, and I've been letterpressing plenty of cards and notelets.


We've printed a batch of Penguin bookplates, and letterpressed 'Ex Libris' in black oil ink on the Adana.

We popped out into Norwich yesterday to buy some leather offcuts from Norwich Art Supplies and Anglian Fashion Fabrics to make some more hand stitched books... We picked up lots of lovely brown leather, and a really gorgeous piece of soft grey suede.

We've got plenty more to keep us busy over the next couple of weeks, including new prints!

Woodman's Whippet Ale

Woodman's Whippet Ale, originally uploaded by deaconswood.

Goodness, it's been over a month since our last post - how remiss of us!

In our last post we mentioned a little surprise letterpress project we were working on - here are the results! We printed a set of beer bottle labels for our brother-in-law, James, for his birthday. Jon did a small wood engraving of a whippet for the central image, and we used Plantin 24pt for the text.



Here is the block (a 4x5cm maple block) and the type set up in the chase ready for printing.



We are both working on ideas for two large landscape relief prints at the moment, but its slow progress as this is such a busy time of year for us - we will post more details soon!

Bookplates

Its been quite a while since we last posted here, partly because the main project we were working on (an engraving for a bookplate) had to be kept secret until this weekend as it was a surprise wedding present! And partly because its spring and we've been out frolicking.

The design for the bookplate was engraved on 'new' formula resingrave which is meant to be less prone to chipping than the old one, though we weren't sure it was that noticeable a difference... The lettering was a new challenge and required lots of painstaking drawing of guidelines and double-checking in a mirror to make sure nothing had gone too awry.

The picture at the top is a view of the cathedral across the rooftops of Ely, and those of you who know it might spot that the tower and the lantern have been squashed together to make them fit in the space! This was the biggest edition we've ever tackled in one go, 50 copies in total, all on Zerkall paper.




















We're currently planning our contributions to the Periodic Table of Elements printmaking project, which aims to recreate the entire periodic table using a unique 6x6in print to represent each element. Loads of printmakers are involved and it'll be intriguing to see how it develops! We've been allocated selenium (Jon) and Neodymium (Sarah) and, armed with a few scraps of information courtesy of Google, we're already thrashing out some design ideas. As usual, watch this space!

Currently listening to: Gruff Rhys, Candylion, after seeing his wonderfully mad live show at the Arts Centre last week.

Friday night printing

Managed to finish off the house print this week after several trial printings and inking mishaps. The resingrave didn't take kindly to having large areas cleared away, but two evenings with the square scorper sorted it out. Looking forward to moving on to some maple blocks for the next engravings. Anyway, here's the final version of the print (now in black rather than green!). Speedball ink on Windsor and Newton 220gsm Smooth paper.



Currently listening to: Seu George, The Life Aquatic Sessions