Frosty mornings

We have been enjoying the walk to work for the past couple of days. We walk through Eaton Park every day which is lovely on frosty mornings, and on crisp autumnal mornings with bigs piles of leaves to kick through.



This week we have been busy preparing things for a stall at the Pick n' Mix Makers Market in Holt on Saturday - we'll have a few new things on our stall as well!


The Market is in St Andrew's Hall from 10 until 4, and there will be lots of other lovely makers there, including Robin Glass, Red Red Blue and Silverpebble.

Do come and say hello if you're in Holt on Saturday!

A new block

Today we had some spare ink on the Adana after printing a special order, so we did a quick print of our newest block - a rather nice deckchair in the garden with a couple having summery drinks.


The block is slightly worn in places, so the first print was a bit patchy, plus we didn't bother to redo the packing on the press first... Hopefully the next one will be more uniform!

Still, a nice reminder of summer days now that we're on the cusp of autumn.

Starting all over again

A couple of weeks ago we had a lovely week in Northumberland, staying in an eighteenth-century farmhouse thatched with heather. We walked many miles along Hadrian's Wall and blew the cobwebs away.


We were certainly in need of a break - I have just finished my doctoral thesis after four long years! Hurrah! It's nothing something that we've often written about on here, but it has taken up a significant portion of our lives (and our creative energies) for the last year in particular.

So, now that's it over, we're ready to pick up our tools again. Jon has worked on a few commissions over the past year, but, apart from the odd bout of letterpress printing, I haven't touched any lino or wood, or our cutting tools since last December.

So, for the first time in nearly a year I'm planning a new print, which is exciting but also slightly nerve wracking. What if I've forgotten how?

Motivation

A lovely package arrived in the post this month wrapped up carefully with this nifty packing tape...


And with lovely extra little things inside...


And once I'd unwrapped all the bubble wrap (and popped it)...


Something to inspire me through the last weeks of writing my thesis...


Visit Rob Ryan's website here, and his Etsy shop here.

Camping!

Last week we took our new tent for a whirl in the Peak District, and fortunately our first camping trip coincided with some of the hottest weather we've had this summer.

This is the view from our tent - a lovely sight to wake up to every morning.


We walked along the old course of the Leek and Manifold Valley Light Railway which is now a footpath and cycle path. The railway only lasted for 30 years (from 1904 to 1934), and included a stop near Thor's Cave which was a popular local tourist destination. We climbed up to the cave along a slippery paved path and some steep steps, and had the cave to ourselves.


It's quite big inside, but we didn't explore too far without a torch. The walls inside have become smooth and slippery from years of visitors like us.


We also had the Neolithic henge at Arbor Low to ourselves, apart from the company of the cows and sheep.

Haddon Hall, near Bakewell, was a bit busier than our other stops, but we still enjoyed looking around the house and gardens - the Tudor kitchens were brilliant, and the tea shop was well stocked with yummy slices of Bakewell tart.


We've put the walks we did on a Google map - eight miles in the Manifold Valley felt like a lot longer in the heat, plus our ankles aren't much used to Derbyshire gradients compared to our favourite Norfolk footpaths...

Books, Cake and Sunshine

This week we have been working on a big batch of these letterpressed notebooks to take to Big Blue Sky in Wells next the Sea.


They will also be available in our Folksy and Etsy shops soon!


We have also been enjoying the fine weather which means we can have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the garden, which is looking nice and tidy at the moment with some new hanging baskets.

Tomorrow we're off to the coast, via Holt to pick up Jon's new jacket from Old Town. Fingers crossed that it stays sunny long enough for us to dip our toes in the North Sea!

We'll be having a big wodge of this coffee and ginger cake on our picnic - it's fast becoming a favourite recipe, which you can find here.

Seed Packets

This month our hand printed seed packets are featured in Country Homes and Interiors, which is very exciting! Their shop of the month is Big Blue Sky, a lovely gallery up on the North Norfolk coast, which stocks some of our prints and other bits and bobs.


This weekend we've been printing yet another big batch of seed packets, as well as planning a nice long walk down in south Norfolk for tomorrow - we feel the need to get out into the countryside after spending the last weekends working! Fingers crossed for sunshine and big, open Norfolk skies!

Happy Easter!

We have had a very relaxing Easter weekend, if a little different from usual because it's been too cold and wet to venture out of the house very far.


So we've been unadventurous and stayed at home eating Nigella's lemon and passionfruit meringue cake, which was well worth the slight amount of effort it took to make. And, for once, it turned out looking something like the photo in the book! The recipe is here.

We've got a pile of little notebooks to sew together this afternoon (with a big slice of the cake and a cup of tea alongside naturally) ready to update our shops with in the coming week.

A long break...

Hello! We are still here, and only realised this week that we haven't blogged since December - eek!

Our not-entirely-intentional break from blogging has been mostly down to my new job, which is going very well, but has been pretty relentless and has meant that we've had to take some time out from printmaking for a few months.

We've just come back from a very relaxing, restorative holiday in Snowdonia. We stayed in Rhiwddolion (pronounced Ruth-0-leon), which is a semi-abandoned village in the hills above Betws-y-coed. The Landmark Trust own three properties there, and we stayed in the oldest, Ty Uchaf, built in 1685.


The house was a fifteen minute walk from the car along a very pretty (and muddy!) path, and the fields around the house are full of interesting ruined old cottages and farmhouses.

We enjoyed exploring Snowdonia and there are a lot more photos on Flickr.

But now we're back, refreshed and ready to embark on some new prints!

Pick 'N' Mix Market

We had a brilliant day at the Pick 'N' Mix market in Holt on Saturday. The market was really busy, especially in the morning - our most successful craft fair ever, due in part to the great coverage of the event in the local press!


We got some yummy chilli preserves from our neighbouring stall, Chillis Galore, swapped notebooks for beer with the Grain Brewery, and I got a lovely pair of silver earrings from Emma Mitchell, and a jolly good day was had by all.

Getting ready...

This week we have been busy getting ready for the Pick 'N' Mix Makers Market in Holt this Saturday. We're really looking forward to it, and have got all sorts of new printed goodies for our stall.

Here's a peek into a box of books and other little things all packed up and ready to go -

We've also been printing new notebook covers on the Adana - my new favourite thing is bright orange paper...


And we've got a few new prints as well, including a new engraving by Jon using this lovely dark blue ink -


There are going to be lots of other lovely handmade, vintage and edible treats on offer - so we'll hope to see some of you there on Saturday, from 10am to 4pm in St Andrew's Church Hall, Holt.

The winners of the Folksy and Sue Ryder Upcycle competition have been announced! You can read all about the winners on the Folksy blog, and all the entries are now up for auction on ebay (100% of the winning bid will be donated to Sue Ryder). You can bid for our upcycled black journal here, and we've got our eye on a few of the other entries too!

A Saturday Ramble

Today we made the most of some winter sunshine and walked from Ashwellthorpe to Fundenhall...

Hearts

Today I've been printing lots of little hearts in red ink on various papers, ready to make into gift tags and notebook covers and other little things.


I find it quite therapeutic to print the same small design over and over again, several hundred times (at least, it feels like several hundred times for my fingers).

We're trying out some non-lino blocks like these ones from Lawrence (although we got ours from Norwich Art Supplies). They seem much harder to cut into than normal lino, and the cuttings don't ping off all over the place but need a sharp tug or cut to remove them, which makes for a tidier table, but is much less fun than seeing how far a gouge of lino can make it across the room...

In the meantime Jon has been building us a new computer, as our current one is sloooooow to the point of being next to useless at times. Hopefully this weekend we'll be up and running with the shiny new one!

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.