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!