Cutting...

This week we have been working on some linocut illustrations for the first Lapwing Printworks book - 12 poems by Andrew Bailey with six linocuts by us, and letterpressed text. It seems like a big project at the moment, but we're very excited about it!


Jon has also started work on a new engraving, using three seperate blocks. The first colour will be this lovely sagey green...

Today has been a beautiful sunny day, so we headed down to Dunwich Heath for a nice walk along the coast and across the heath.

Not a cloud in the sky! The wind was whipping in across the open heath, but down in the more wooded bits it was still and warm in the sunshine, and it was lovely to get out of the office for an afternoon and walk our cares away.

Notebook obsession

My name is Sarah and I have a problem with buying lovely notebooks and sketchbooks... Above is just a couple of my favourites. Next to my computer is a pile of exactly twenty notebooks of various sizes (not including those pictured or my other stashes around the house). Now, there's nothing wrong with buying so many as long as they actually get used. But, here's my confession - the ones pictured above, and the pile by my computer are all blank and completely unused.

I keep telling myself that one day I'll get around to using them, but the pile keeping getting bigger and I still can't bring myself to put pen to paper.

Sometimes I feel guilty about my habit and I suspect that my scrupulous recycling of waste paper might be undone by my collection of pristine, empty pages.

So, when Folksy announced their Upcycle Christmas competition, I sat eyeing up my pile of notebooks on the desk and decided that I should try and make a notebook with upcycled paper.

Here's the random selection of books that I got in our local Sue Ryder shop (although the Printing Processes book didn't make it as far as the cutting mat...)


Another find in Sue Ryder was this rather grim black bag, which I took great pleasure in cutting to pieces...

Underneath the lining fabric was this horrible foamy stuff, which disintegrated and got everywhere!Once I'd unpicked the stitches, the bag material gave me quite a big bit to work with.

Then I cut the music sheets, the Dover book and some of the road atlas to make pages. The Dover book of stencils was made up of lovely, thick creamy paper, and each page was blank on one side, so I used these for the bulk of the new pages, intermixed with the odd page of music and road atlas.

I covered the back of the bag material with some of the sheet music to make the covering, and then sewed the whole thing together.

I incorporated the zipped outside pocket of the bag into the cover of the notebook, making a pocket perfect for pens, or other little bits and bobs.

About half of the pages are completely blank, and the stencil patterns in the Dover book mean that other pages have bits of floral designs on them with plenty of room to write around them.

At 24cm by 19cm, and 3cm wide, it's a nice chunky book, with 160 pages.

You can see the book on Folksy here, as well as all the other competition entries too.

Christmas is coming!

Yesterday I popped over to our local branch of Sue Ryder to pick up some bits for the Folksy Upcycle Christmas competition.

My entry will involve this lovely bit of sheet music, the Dover book of Victorian floral stencils, a complimentary Barclaycard road atlas from 1990 and 'Introduction to Printing Processes' (which is actually quite interesting and might be saved from the cutting knife!).

Find out how to enter yourself here.

With Christmas on our minds, we're really looking forward to having a stall at the Pick and Mix Maker's Fair in Holt on December 12th, which promises to be a lovely day out, especially as The Tea Lounge from Norwich are doing the food! Find out more about the fair here.

After a recent burst of activity we've got a little box full of tiny offcuts of leather and marbled paper, the perfect size for making teeny, tiny little books like this one -



It measures just 4.5cm - not much use for writing a novel, but the perfect size for small striped bears.

The East Anglians

Last weekend we headed over to the Sainsbury Centre to see The East Anglians, an exhibition of photographs by Justin Partyka.

It was excellent - lots of atmostpheric photos of Norfolk and Suffolk. It definitely captured the East Anglia we know and love, which seems less like 'a largely forgotten rural world', and more like normal rural life to us.

If you're in Norwich, then do pop in and see it. The rest of the Sainsbury Centre is very nice too, and they do splendid cake. And there's a nice shop.


This week we've been busy working on a pile of hardback journals using some lovely decorative papers, and some marbled papers.

This navy blue and cream paper is Jon's favourite.

I love this blue and green marbled paper. My little raku jar is from Jude Allman's Folksy shop.

This splodgy marbled paper in mustard, dark red and navy blue is another favourite at the moment.

Journals in these papers and more are now available to order from our Etsy and Folksy shops.

We are still here!

Honest!

After reading Lupin's post on the Etsy forums about good blogging today, I guiltily realised that it's been nearly a month since our last post! Eek!

Since we last posted we've enjoyed a gorgeous week away in Wales at Stockwell Farm, another Landmark Trust property, which really recharged our batteries. This is the view we woke up to every morning - the hills in the distance were once the Forest of Radnor, and some of it is now a firing range. They were further away than they looked...


Now we're back to our more usual view from the office window, and the nights are certainly drawing in now that it's October. It feels like we've neverbeen away now that we're back in the thick of it again!


Now that it really feels like autumn I've started to plan out some ideas for Christmas decorations for our trees - this one is a prototype that I made this afternoon. Excuse the slightly dodgy photo taken in the dim early evening light! I really like it with plain white paper, but I can't help but feel it would be even better if the paper was printed with some kind of Christmassy linocut...

The John Jarrold Printing Museum

Today was the last day of this year's Heritage Open Days, so this afternoon we dashed into town to visit the John Jarrold Printing Museum, a magical wonder-world of presses and ink and bookbinding and lithography and type...


We had a lovely afternoon peeping into type cases and chatting to the volunteers who run the museum, and who are very enthusiastic and keen to share their tips with novices like us!

They had a nice little Heidelberg press up and running (above) - they don't turn the huge ones on for big public open days (health and safety), but one of the volunteers said that they do run them during the museum's normal opening hours (Wednesday mornings).

There are some more photos in our Flickr photostream.

Do go if you ever get the chance, it's a lovely little place, and packed to the gunwales with presses and type and cameras and litho stones and guillotines and loads of other interesting bits and bobs.

A quick peek...

...at a big lino block I'm cutting at the moment.


It's quite a big block - roughly A3 sized, so there's a long way to go yet...

Yesterday we had a lovely trip to Big Blue Sky, a really nice shop in Wells up on the coast, where everything is made in Norfolk. They're going to be stocking some of our work this autumn, which is very exciting.

More news soon, promise!