Sunny days

We have been enjoying some beautiful sunshine for the last few days - the garden is bursting with greenery! It's lovely to sit outside and have morning coffee, rather than staying indoors.

The lilac in the garden has bloomed, and smells wonderful. Tomorrow I'm going to pick some for the house. Well, actually Jon will pick them since it requires the use of a step ladder (I am not to be trusted...).

The postman has had some lovely things for us over the past couple of days -

Some pretty type from Devon (more to follow too - hooray!)...

And a box full of leather offcuts for bookmaking from the Midlands - lots of black, as well as dark brown, tan, cherry red, dark green and a nice foresty green, and navy blue! We're looking forward to making some new journals with it all over the next couple of weeks. Although the leather will probably be enough to keep us going for several months!

We've also been busy printing reduction lino cuts - they should be finished by tomorrow afternoon, so we'll post about them once they are finished.

In the meantime have a look at our Etsy treasury here. Jon's ordered his gown for graduation this week - he gets to wear a bonnet, no less.

Enjoy the sunshine!

Handmade Books

Last Saturday we went on a brilliant course run by a local bookbinder, Judith Ellis. We learnt a technique called 'longstitch' binding, which doesn't require any glue.

In the morning we used pink and green PVC covers to get the hang of things -

But in the afternoon we were let loose on a selection of lovely leather covers, and marbled papers....
Jon used dark brown leather with a light blue marbled paper inside, and I used red leather with a matching red marbled paper.

We're really excited about experimenting with this technique - somehow printmaking, letterpress and bookbinding seem to be happy bedfellows. Hopefully we can remember enough from the course to make another one each this coming weekend...

There are lots more examples of this type of binding on Flickr.