Seed Packets

The sweet peas in our front garden are in their full glory this week - they smell lovely!

Last week we finished off the seed packets that we started printing earlier in May. We finished them off with 'seeds' printed in 24pt Plantin underneath the little linocut - leaving plenty of space to write names, dates and notes.

In the background is my new orange Nutscene twine - I can't live without it. Well, I can, but the garden would be a sadder place without it.

The seed packets are available in our Etsy and Folksy shops now.

You can also win a little package of printed goodies by taking part in a short survey about buying artwork for a course I'm doing at the moment. If any readers have time to take part, I'd be eternally grateful!

Click here to take the survey

Otherwise, we are gearing up for another jolly weekend of Open Studios!

New project - seed packets!

This weekend I've been working on a little linocut of some vegetables to print onto some little envelopes.

I cut a pea pod, a leek, a carrot and an onion onto a small rectangle of lino (about 2 x 3 inches). I really like working at this scale, especially with a freshly sharpened tool :)

Our garden peas are racing up their pyramids, and the sweet peas started flowering this week too. We need to get lots of our seedlings planted out too, especially our climbing courgettes - we just need a dry afternoon!

Here is the block inked with some nice, new green oil ink -

The green looks really nice against the brown envelopes -


The next stage will be to letterpress some text onto the envelopes to turn them into proper little seed packets.

This weekend was the start of Norfolk Open Studios. We are doing the next two weekends, and we're quite excited about it! We'll post some more details about how to find us this week.

All I want....

....is a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

I say this at least once a day, every day. So here is that immortal phrase as a lino cut, complete with a steaming cup of tea and a cosy chair to snuggle up in.

Here is it in various stages of production - cutting out the light blue teacup to leave a thin dark blue outline...

Inking the final layer of lettering with dark orange ink -

And about to lift the print off the block after a little burnishing.

Hopefully having a copy on the wall means that I'll just be able to point to it, and Jon will know to go and put the kettle on.

In our Etsy and Folksy shops now.

This weekend we did a little bit of tidying up in the garden and planted these primroses in the pots on our front windowsill. We also got this years batch of chilli seeds on the go - hopefully they'll do better this year than last year!

We've also signed up for Twitter, so if you want to go what we're getting up inbetween blog posts then come and follow us there! Here is our profile.

We're off to make some drop scones for afternoon tea now, and light the fire for a cosy Sunday afternoon.

Gardens and gift tags

It's been cold and foggy here for a couple of days, so we've been keeping warm inside planning what to plant in the garden this spring, and ordering some seeds. At the moment we've got spring greens and chard on the go, with purple sprouting broccoli to look forward to in a few weeks.

But the bulbs are coming up and the lilac is covered in buds so our thoughts are turning towards the spring and summer... This year we're going to branch out with some more interesting varieties that we haven't tried before, such as munchkin squashes, trombomcino courgettes, and golden beetroot. If only we had room for more!

Apart from planning the vegetable garden, we've been busy stamping out sweet little gift tags from some of the pile of printed bits of paper and card in our stash.


I think they look rather fetching with some natural raffia tied onto a present, but I think we'll use them as price labels too.

There's a pack of 10 in our Folksy shop.

A very therapeutic activity for a wintry afternoon!

Dog Sitting and other adventures

Our first post for a couple of weeks - we have been busy dog sitting in the Fens and having various adventures, as well as trying to fit in some work as well!

We had lots of fun looking after three elderly dachshunds -not that anyone would know they were old, from the amount of mischief they get up to!

This is Hal, engrossed in a book (he sometimes likes watching tv too). We ate our fill of produce from the kitchen garden, which is much larger and more plentiful than ours is!

Today we explored the kitchen gardens at Audley End, which are even bigger again! We liked the glasshouses and the mushroom house best.

It was another grey and dull day, until we got in the car to go back home and now its really sunny! Hurrah! Still, summer is definitely over, and everywhere smells autumnal.

Anyway, no rest for the wicked - we are both working hard to meet some deadlines before we go away on our Landmark Trust holiday, so printmaking has had to go on the back burner - hopefully we might find time at the weekend!

Home Grown Produce

This week everything in our little garden seems to be suddenly ready all at once - loads of peas and beans, courgettes, chard, herbs, tomatoes and the first beetroot. One of my chilli plants has finally flowered as well - hurrah!

Here are some of our double courgettes...We made a delicious salad with them on Monday night - cut the courgettes lengthways into ribbons using a potato peeler and mix with the zest from a lemon and a lime. Make up a quick dressing with some nice olive oil, a little honey and the lemon and lime juice and mix into the courgette ribbons.

Yummy! I'm afraid it didn't last long enough to take a photo of it, but it looked very pretty. The recipe is from Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook, which we use a lot!

We're also over-run with chard, both pretty and delicious!

Not much printmaking news I'm afraid - it's been too hot and busy this week to have a chance to do more than think about it, although we are both hoping to start something new over the weekend - so watch this space!

In the meantime, have a look at these lovely little birds by Emily Sutton. They'll be in the new exhibition at St Jude's gallery in Aylsham later this month. We like having the occasional mooch around Aylsham - Humphry Repton is buried in the churchyard, and there is a good second-hand bookshop which usually has some good Penguin finds.

Peas and artichokes

We have been out in the garden enjoying the sunshine this week, plotting new ideas for various prints and keeping a close eye on all our little vegetables. Today we harvested our first pea pod! Hooray! It was a Hurst Green Shaft, and it was delicious - why bother cooking fresh peas when you can just eat them straight out of the pod? Like green smarties, only better.

Inspired by all this vegetable growing I did a quick watercolour sketch of some artichokes yesterday (not grown by us, but bought from the local farm shop instead). We've been trying to decide what kind of print we could turn my little painting into - Jon thinks it would make a good wood engraving on one of our tiny little 2 inch blocks, and I think it would make a nice woodcut.

I think we might end up doing both!

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...