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.

A quick peek...

...at a big lino block I'm cutting at the moment.


It's quite a big block - roughly A3 sized, so there's a long way to go yet...

Yesterday we had a lovely trip to Big Blue Sky, a really nice shop in Wells up on the coast, where everything is made in Norfolk. They're going to be stocking some of our work this autumn, which is very exciting.

More news soon, promise!

Wool (2)

This weekend we printed the second layer of ink on our wool ball linocut for a business card commission - a layer of light grey ink over the pink layer to pick out the details of the strands of wool.

The next stage is to letterpress the text into the empty space, which will call for some patience and careful printing on the Adana.

On Sunday evening we spotted two hot air balloons drifting over the house. We often see them in the distance floating over Norwich (they take off from up near the university), but only rarely do they come over the house. Jon grabbed a camera and took some photos before they disappeared into the distance - they go quite quickly!

One day maybe we'll go up, up, up and away!

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.

British Birds

Last week Jon finished a new linocut - British Birds!Each little bird is paired up with his colloquial name. Naturally, we had to include a hornpie.

Here's a close-up of Billy Biter -

I love the blue Jon has printed this in, very Farrow and Ball I think.

Here is the block, halfway through cutting - lots of fiddly backwards lettering for this one. Fortunately Jon has a steady hand!

There are prints of British Birds in our Etsy and Folksy shops now.

The first person to leave a comment guessing the 'real' name of each bird will win a selection of Lapwing Printworks cards and the like! EDIT: Well done Fibrespace for guessing them all correctly!

I'm going to go and eat some more ice cream now - I had my wisdom teeth out this morning - so no solids or hot things for two days. I'm desperate for a cup of tea.

A new print and exciting news!

I like making word clouds - here's one made up of some of the most used words here on the blog. I think the fact that 'Lovely' is so large shows up that I've been writing far more posts than Jon recently!Make your own at Wordle.

So last night we printed a new linocut - a little word cloud full of printmaking words like ink, paper and burnish.Here's the block in various stages of being cut - backwards lettering can be fiddly sometimes!


Now in our Etsy and Folksy shops...

Meanwhile, Jon is busy drawing birds for a new print which he's hoping to start cutting this weekend. A good excuse to break out some ink.

Our exciting news is that we're going to be in an exhibition! For the very first time! At the Perfect Pad! From 22nd May to 11th June! Hurrah! But more on that later...

Tonight we are looking forward to popping into the private view of Celia Hart's new exhibition in Verandah on Upper St Giles Street. If you're in Norwich in May then do go and see it!

Flying Ducks

At last! They are finished!
I started this trio of flying ducks 9 months ago, but for various reasons they got put on the back burner. But this week I've finally had a chance to finish cutting the blocks and print them.

I've always wanted a set of flying ducks but I thought a printed set would be just as good (if not better!)
Each duck is an individual print - a 7 colour reduction linocut. The biggest measures 18cm across, the smallest 9cm. I'm really looking forward to having a set framed, and on the wall! There is a set in our Etsy shop and our Folksy shop now.

Today I picked some of the lilac from the garden and filled up several jugs with it - the smell is slowly pervading the whole house... Lovely!

We have a friend coming to stay this weekend - tomorrow night we are going to see Pride and Prejudice at the Maddermarket Theatre for another friend's birthday treat. Hope you all have a good weekend too!

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.

New prints

This weekend we both worked on new prints - a linocut for me, and a small engraving for Jon. It felt so nice to spend all weekend printing and cutting again after so many weekends being busy doing other things.

Here's a close up of my lino block - part of a much larger reduction print, I've printed three layers so far. There is one more layer to cut and print before it's finished.

Jon worked on a small wood engraving of the landscape near Charlton in Sussex (where we stayed on our honeymoon) with lots of fields and tiny hedgerows. Here is the block in various stages of completion...

Our new Emma Bridgewater Lapwing mug is in the background in the photo above. How could we resist?

The engraving is all printed, but the ink is drying very slowly so we'll upload a photo tomorrow.

Those tulips that I bought last week opened out into huge blowsy blooms!

Finished cards

We have finally finished printing the linocut Christmas cards we started a couple of weeks ago. We printed each one in red, green and gold, and it made us feel very Christmassy...

Especially when I dug out the Christmas tree lights to take some photos! I managed to resist the temptation to dig out the Christmas mugs and tea towels - its a bit early for that yet...

We've decided to letterpress some more Christmas cards using some of our teeny tiny holly blocks - that will be this weeks project, as well as pressing on with my flying ducks (which have been sitting on a shelf feeling lonely for a couple of weeks - I'm determined to finish them this month though!). Sets of Christmas cards are available on Folksy, Etsy and Dawanda now!

This afternoon we're going to make Chelsea buns and plant some last minute bulbs in the garden - we'll have to sweep up all the leaves first though!

Joyeux Noel

Today has been wet, grey and cold - a good excuse to stay indoors and do some carving. We meant to start making Christmas cards much earlier this year, but as usual various things caught up with us and we've only just started!

This year we are having simple square cards with handcut lettering, done on lino. Here is a proof of the first one, 'Joyeux Noel' -

This one is done in gold ink - we've only ever printed tiny areas with it before, and I wanted to check how it looks over a bigger surface area, and it looks great (although better in person than on the computer screen...).

I've got two more blocks to carve before I start printing the cards - I would have like to finish the carving today but I managed to gouge my finger instead of the lino, so I shall be forced to spend the rest of the afternoon curled up with a book and a cup of tea instead. Never mind - remember, always cut away from you!

Our second ever blog post in December 2006 was about printing Christmas cards - at least we've got a bit further ahead this year!

Flowers and a new print

Last night I finished the flowers for Christine's flower project.

The rest of the flowers have been turned into pretty brooches! They were quite fiddly to attach to a brooch back, but they look great pinned on, and we'll be selling some of them on our stall at Clutter City this Saturday.

For Jon's birthday last week I gave him a little linocut of our house, which I've been beavering away on in secret since the end of July. It's hard enough not to let slip what his present is normally, but keeping a linocut a secret is hard! He kept wondering why there were ink splotches in the bathroom when he came home from work, even though I supposedly hadn't been doing any printing...

Here's the wood mounted lino block with the design all drawn and ready to go -


In progress (after being hidden in a drawer inbetween spells of working on it) -

And the finished print framed on the wall - twelve layers, about 6x4 inches, and about six weeks of skullduggery.

We will be at Clutter City again this Saturday - come and say hello if you're in Norwich!

Hello Duckie!

I've started clearing the first of the three lino blocks I mentioned in our last post. I've always wanted a set of ceramic flying ducks, but now I'm creating a set of three printed ones instead! This is the largest one - the other two smaller ones need to be cleared as well before I print the first layer. There's a long way to go yet!

I've signed up for an interesting project all about handmade flowers, thought up by Christine from Paper and Cloth. Each artist/crafty person involved makes several flowers which will then be sewn together to make one big piece of art. You can find out more about the project (and join in!) on her blog. I'm going to be making some printed paper flowers over the next few weeks - I just have to work out how they could be sewn onto fabric first. I think I might need to experiment with some prototypes!

Should Hello Duckie really be Hello Ducky? We couldn't decide...

Easter Tulips

Tulips, originally uploaded by spoonergregory.

The Easter weekend has been cold, wet and snowy so we have stayed inside and worked on some new prints.

Jon has finished a new black and white linocut of some tulips on our coffee table, surrounded by our new favourite mugs, a pile of books and our fruit bowl. Here he is quietly cutting out the tulip leaves whilst I was busy in the kitchen...

I have been working on a small multi-layered landscape print, which requires lots of slow, steady cutting and careful planning. I'm very pleased with how it is shaping up, and Jon thinks that its one of my best so far... Watch this space for the finished print!

The tulips print is now available from our Etsy shop!