Back from our holidays

We spent a lovely and mostly sunny week in north Devon. We stayed at the Library, another Landmark Trust property - plenty more photos here.

It was Jon's birthday whilst we were away, and for a surprise I gave him a linocut of our house that I have been secretly working on for several weeks - I'll post some photos of the finished print, and some 'in progress' shots this week.

Now we are back we are busy working again, but I have been working on the flower project mentioned in our last post. I've spent a couple of evenings cutting out lots of different shapes in various colours ready to make up into finished flowers.


Not all of these flower shapes are going to end up being sent off for the project, but I have a plan for the leftovers!

Flowers and macaroons

I did find some time this weekend for a little bit of crafting (poor Jon has been chained to his computer unfortunately...). Here is a prototype for Christine's flower collaboration that I blogged about a few weeks ago. It's just three layers of some block printed paper that I had stashed in the spare room, cut into flower shapes and sewn with a button in the middle. Simple, but effective I hope! I'm going to experiment with different papers, colours, buttons, shapes and sizes - there are a few weeks before the deadline, so I've got plenty of time to play around with them.

And plenty of time to stuff myself silly with salty-peanut-caramel macaroons from our new cookbook, Ottolenghi, which is brilliant - we've tried a different recipe almost every day this week, and they've all been delicious.

Finishing touches and a prototype

After letting the block sit on a shelf for a long time Jon has been busy adding some finishing touches to his wood engraving of St Winifred's Well (the Landmark Trust property that we stayed at in May), after a test print or two showed up some areas that needed more cutting.

We're going to print the newly cut block tonight on the press...

I have been busy making prototype wedding invitation cards using thin card and a square of thinner block printed paper. It took a couple of cards to get the folds quite right, but I'm really pleased with how they've turned out.

The final invitations are going to have a different patterned paper on them, and letterpressed text inside. Fingers crossed, they'll be ready to go out to our very small number guests at the end of next week... Hooray!

A Great Big Heavy Printing Block

On Friday we drove off to the Post Office depot to pick up our new printing block, a chance purchase from eBay. The block itself is 9 inches square and about 2 inches high, made from several pieces of wood joined together, with the design made up of various metal shapes pressed into the wood. According to the seller it was originally used by Liberty to print fabrics, and looks like it might be one block from a larger repeated pattern.


It looked good just sat on the shelf, but obviously we couldn't have it and then not print from it, so yesterday we had a bit of an experiment. The thin, sharp metal surfaces were tricky to ink with the roller, so we ended up doing the fiddly bits with a brush. End result was great, a really sharp and interesting print. Perhaps a good chance to use our gold and silver inks, maybe on black paper... The colours of the image below have been inverted to show the pattern more clearly.


In other news Sarah has been busy beavering away with felt and linen bags. The anti-plastic bag revolution continues!


Currently listening to: Bonnie Prince Billy, The Letting Go.