Busy Busy

We have had a busy couple of weeks, but sadly without much time for printmaking! We spent the last two weekends at my parents house enjoying the sunshine and their big garden. Our own is looking splendid and everything is romping away.

We did find time to set up our new shop on Dawanda - a European site for lovely handmade things (a bit like a European version of Etsy). We haven't got all our prints listed in the shop yet, but hopefully they should all be there by the end of the week. The site is priced in Euros, and during Euro 2008 you can get an 11% discount in participating shops (including ours!) - the discount is applied automatically but is only available whilst matches are being played.

We had a nice surprise this week when Jon's little Penguin print turned up on a cool crafty blog that I enjoy reading - thank you Lupin!

To make up for the lack of printmaking related photos, here is one of Hal falling asleep in the sunshine instead...

Cock-a-doodle-doo

This weekend I have finally managed to find the time to finish my cockerel print - carving out the final layer and then printing a lovely dark blue colour. Jon helped with the printing when he wasn't out in the garden, and we're both really pleased with how he has turned out. If only we could have a real one of our own! Maybe one day...

We don't have the space at home for a proper studio so all our printmaking activities take place on our dining room table (helpfully covered by a wipe-clean striped oilcloth). My favourite place to sit and carve is in the chair opposite the window, which gets the most sun. Everything gets moved to one sie of the table (or onto the floor) when its time to print, so we often end up having to eat our tea on our laps because the table is covered in wet prints and other printing paraphenalia.

We've interviewed a fellow printmaker, Ellen Shipley, for the Prinsty (Printmakers of Etsy) team blog - read it here.

It has been very hot and sunny here for the past couple of days, which has meant lots of time in the garden tidying up and planting things out. It's all looking lovely and tidy out there now. This is the first year that we have tried our hand at growing strawberries. These ones are in a hanging basket outside the back door, above the herbs. I've got all my fingers and toes crossed that they ripen!

A wet bank holiday weekend

Another wet bank holiday weekend here (although it was sunny yesterday, so Jon got lots done in the garden), so we have been stuck inside with nothing to do but carve woodblocks, print, eat toasted fruit loaf and drink plenty of tea.

I have been busy carving and printing the next layer of a square print of a cockerel. The background colour and the first layer of his feathers are all printed, so today I did some cutting before printing the next layer of feathers - a dark orangey-red. It is working out very well at the moment, but will probably take at least a couple more weekends work before I manage to finish it.

Jon is busy working this weekend, so hasn't had much time for art - but he is busy coming up with plenty of ideas for his entry for the 71st annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers - the submission date for entries is in the first couple of weeks of July and both wood engravings and other types of relief print can be submitted.

Yesterday, when it was still sunny, Jon took a lovely photo of one of our home grown alliums. I only cut one to bring into the house but now I wish I'd cut them all as they have now taken a bit of a battering from the rain...

And with these pencils...

...I shall do great things!
New prints from both of us today - a pot of pencils from Jon, and a little pansy from me. Both were done on lino - our first lino cuts for a while. It was strange cutting lino again after doing so many woodcuts! It seemed much harder to cut (whereas I used to say that about wood), and it makes our hands smell of secondary school art classrooms. But, we still enjoyed it!

I have also got going on another woodcut of a rather splendid cockerel against a sagey-green background. The background is all printed, and the outline of the bird is cut out, so hopefully this afternoon I'll find time to print the first layer, which will be a glorious orange. Jon is busy creating great things with his pencils and pens, and has a whole stack of ideas for prints for the next couple of months.
In the meantime we are going to have lunch in the garden and enjoy all the glorious sunshine we've been having!

Printsy!

Printsy is a new Etsy street team to promote the work of all the wonderful printmakers on Etsy!

The team has a new blog which will feature lots of interesting interviews, articles about printmaking and much more. There is also a Flickr group, and a wonderful treasury curated by Sonia aka She Rides the Lion made it onto the front page of Etsy.

Hooray!

We are really excited to be a part of it and there are lots of very talented printmakers involved.

There hasn't been much time for printmaking at Spoonergregory Acres this week - we have both been busy with our day jobs. For me that meant taking a group of students from the Landscape History course at the University of East Anglia around the park at Wimpole Hall - the sun shone, lambs frolicked, and everyone (apart from me) saw Joanna Lumley on the home farm!

Here we are at Wimpole talking about the location of one of its many avenues. This is the final week of the university term so from next week I'll have plenty of time for printmaking (and my thesis, naturally).

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!