Drying the dishes in style

This week we have spent our hard earned pennies on some lovely printed tea towels - you can never have too many (not even when they take up two whole drawers in our tiny kitchen). I couldn't resist the pink spotted one with old fashioned jelly moulds, printed by Fran Squires. I have one of her gorgeous aprons too, but I can only wear it when I'm not cooking anything too messy...
We also bought a 'one lump or two?' tea towel from MrPS in Big Blue Sky, a gallery in Wells-next-the-Sea which sells many wonderful things, all made in Norfolk. The postman brought us these three tea towels, which came all the way from the US, from Patapri, one of my favourite textile shops on Etsy. The two alphabet tea towels were designed by Linzie Hunter, and we love them too much to put them away in a drawer, even if it is the drawer for tea towels that only come out on high days and holidays.

This week I finally managed to finish off my little landscape print that has been patiently waiting on the dining room table for a couple of weeks! In our last post I mentioned that the sky had gone a bit wrong the first time round - it has now been (hopefully!) rescued with a thin layer of grey ink, and a cloud.

The end result is a 15 layer reduction print, measuring 5.5 x 5.5 inches. The photographs and the scan don't really bring out all the colours and texture of the overlapping layers of ink very well, but I'm pleased with how it looks in real life, and its given me plenty of ideas for future prints! Now available in our shop.

This weekend has been lovely and sunny, so we've been out in the garden filling up spare pots with summery bedding, and planting rows of marigolds inbetween our rows of veg. The mini greenhouse is full to bursting with lettuce and tomato seedlings, so in a few weeks we can start feasting on our own produce - unless the army of slugs beat us to it...

Water Tower

Jon's new print of a splendid water tower near Baconsthorpe in Norfolk, carved and printed over the snowy Easter weekend. Below is a composite of all the different stages of the print, from the light grey background to the dark green of the fields.

There are actually five different layers of the print, but during the excitement of printing we forgot to take a photo of the light brown layer before we printed the dark green. East Anglia has a plethora of lovely water towers, and this print may well be the first in a series!

Water Tower is now available in our Etsy shop.

We have been taking advantage of the good weather over the past couple of weekends to work in the garden, rather than printmaking. The seeds we planted last weekend are just starting to peep through in the greenhouse, so we'll be munching on tasty tomatoes and lettuces before we know it!

My new landscape print is nearly finished, I just have to print the different layers that will make up the sky. Unfortunately, my first sky layer went a bit wrong but I should (hopefully) be able to rescue it this weekend!

This photo shows some of the prints drying, with the first eleven layers of the fields printed - its quite hard to see the detail at this scale, so I'll post better photos when it is finished.

I'm really pleased with how it has turned out, and I'm looking forward to getting on with the sky this weekend, and hopefully getting it finished. There will nearly twenty different layers once it is finished - its the most complicated reduction print I've done so far!

Easter Tulips

Tulips, originally uploaded by spoonergregory.

The Easter weekend has been cold, wet and snowy so we have stayed inside and worked on some new prints.

Jon has finished a new black and white linocut of some tulips on our coffee table, surrounded by our new favourite mugs, a pile of books and our fruit bowl. Here he is quietly cutting out the tulip leaves whilst I was busy in the kitchen...

I have been working on a small multi-layered landscape print, which requires lots of slow, steady cutting and careful planning. I'm very pleased with how it is shaping up, and Jon thinks that its one of my best so far... Watch this space for the finished print!

The tulips print is now available from our Etsy shop!

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!

Thank You!

Another foray into letterpress this week - I made these simple notecards one afternoon whilst Jon was at work. We've sent them to everyone who gave us a wedding present.

We are still without rollers for the Adana, so we're still hand inking the type with our tiny roller - fiddly but it seems to be working alright for small things! We are busy with another fun letterpress project this week, but its a surprise for someone so we can't reveal any details yet...

We have been working on lots of our ideas for new prints since we got back from Sussex. Above is a pile of my favourite sketchbooks in the sunshine. I love beautiful sketchbooks and I can never resist a new purchase...

However, some of them are too lovely to despoil with my scrawl so only two of the ones in the photo above have ever been used. I've joined a new group on Flickr, 365 Sketch, which is encouraging me to sketch a little every day, but I haven't plucked up the courage to upload any of my efforts... yet!

Spoonergregory make it official!

We tied the knot in style on Saturday 19th January! We then spent a very happy week in an early 18th century hunting lodge in Sussex. The lodge is known as Fox Hall, and is owned by the Landmark Trust (a UK based charity that rescue historic buildings and convert them into wonderful holiday homes).


The plain red brick facade hides an opulent interior -


Needless to say our trip has provided us with lots of inspiration and lots of sketches and ideas to work up into designs for prints.

All is quiet on the printmaking front at the moment, we managed to finish all our ongoing projects before the wedding. We're both looking forward to getting all the tools, inks and other paraphenalia out again at the weekend and getting started on some more engravings and woodcuts.


Today is a lovely sunny day, so I've managed to take some sunny photos of the 'Pegs' notecards - available now in our Etsy shop!


Our living room is full of the heavenly scent of these hyacinths - I'm planning on doing a little watercolour sketch of them this afternoon with a view to perhaps turning it into a wood cut.

Bookplates and other things

Happy New Year to all our readers!

Engraving the bookplate, originally uploaded by spoonergregory.

Before Christmas we were busy working on a commission for a bookplate, and here it is in various stages of completion! The image on the bookplate is a fairly typical Norfolk landscape with a round towered church, based on All Saints in Keswick.

The bookplate was engraved on a 4x3 inch maple block. The photograph above shows the block under the magnifier during work on the landscape, and the one below shows the completed landscape.


The completed block -


Jon found it quite difficult to engrave super sharp lettering on maple, but the end result still looked lovely and crisp once printed. Here are some of the printed bookplates drying on our bed...


I also managed to finally finish my print of three brightly coloured pegs by adding a simple silver hinge. I'm really pleased with how the pegs have turned out - I liked them so much that I made some notecards too! Hopefully it will inspire to do some spring cleaning...

'Pegs' is available now in our Etsy shop.


At the moment we are busy with another bookplate commission, which will be finished and printed by tomorrow night.

All our other printmaking adventures are on hold for a couple of weeks - we are getting married on Saturday and then are away on a surprise honeymoon! We did manage to get to grips with the Adana whilst printing our wedding invitations (photographs to come), so at last all our type is sorted neatly into trays. Hooray!