Drying the dishes in style

This week we have spent our hard earned pennies on some lovely printed tea towels - you can never have too many (not even when they take up two whole drawers in our tiny kitchen). I couldn't resist the pink spotted one with old fashioned jelly moulds, printed by Fran Squires. I have one of her gorgeous aprons too, but I can only wear it when I'm not cooking anything too messy...
We also bought a 'one lump or two?' tea towel from MrPS in Big Blue Sky, a gallery in Wells-next-the-Sea which sells many wonderful things, all made in Norfolk. The postman brought us these three tea towels, which came all the way from the US, from Patapri, one of my favourite textile shops on Etsy. The two alphabet tea towels were designed by Linzie Hunter, and we love them too much to put them away in a drawer, even if it is the drawer for tea towels that only come out on high days and holidays.

This week I finally managed to finish off my little landscape print that has been patiently waiting on the dining room table for a couple of weeks! In our last post I mentioned that the sky had gone a bit wrong the first time round - it has now been (hopefully!) rescued with a thin layer of grey ink, and a cloud.

The end result is a 15 layer reduction print, measuring 5.5 x 5.5 inches. The photographs and the scan don't really bring out all the colours and texture of the overlapping layers of ink very well, but I'm pleased with how it looks in real life, and its given me plenty of ideas for future prints! Now available in our shop.

This weekend has been lovely and sunny, so we've been out in the garden filling up spare pots with summery bedding, and planting rows of marigolds inbetween our rows of veg. The mini greenhouse is full to bursting with lettuce and tomato seedlings, so in a few weeks we can start feasting on our own produce - unless the army of slugs beat us to it...

The Periodic Table of Printmaking

The sun has been shining on Norwich almost continuously since our last post, and we have been out in the garden enjoying it - planting potatoes, radishes, tomatoes, chillis, herbs and much more!

We have been working hard on our ideas for the Periodic Table printmaking project - I am doing Neodymium and Jon chose Selenium. We are both doing woodcuts, and started cutting the blocks today! Neodymium is used used to colour enamels and glass, so I based my design on Art Nouveau enamel jewellry and glass designs - the final colour scheme hasn't quite been decided yet, but I'm looking forward to using my new gold printing ink in some way, shape or form! Selenium was used in the honeycomb-style lightmeters of old cameras, hence the vintage camera in Jon's print.


Hopefully they should be printed by the end of the week - the other completed prints are appearing on this web page as they are finished.

Currently listening to: Camera Obscura

Springtime

Spring is well and truly sprung in Norwich now, it was so warm last Wednesday that we had our lunch out in the garden to enjoy the sunshine (before the conker tree comes into full leaf and blocks it out). The first of the purple sprouting brocolli is ready to eat, the lawn's been reseeded and last year's compost looks like being a fine vintage! All this has inspired a suitably Spring-y print, a woodcut of two daffodils (see below). It started out as being four flower heads, but got reduced down to 2 as that seemed to work better, even if it makes it look like they've had a fight and are no longer talking to eachother! Japanese plywood is great to work with, easy to cut but still strong enough to hold sharp lines and fine details. Our tools are a bit of a mixed bag at them moment. The fine lines are done with a dedicated woodcut tool that looks like its escaped from a backstreet surgeon's bag c.1750, while the clearing work is done with some super-cheap chisels from the bargain bin of Norwich's premier alladin's cave of hardware, Thornes. Still, they seem to work nicely together!


Current listening: Adam Green, Jacket Full of Danger

Reeds and Waves

Another weekend, another tiny woodblock engraved. This time a slightly less fiddly design than the Edgefield print, loosely based on many bracing walks by the sea in various parts of Norfolk, Devon and Cornwall. Its nowhere in particular, but there are elements of Cromer, Wells, St Ives, Penzance and even Plymouth in there somewhere! Again only 5 x 3cm. Will need to invest in a good magnifier if this keeps up...


Also finished is Fen Reeds, inspired by our post Christmas walk on Wicken Fen (or at least near Wicken Fen, what with us forgetting our NT cards and not being able to get in to the posh bit).


Our main website is due an overhaul to add all the new prints and generally tart things up a little, so do keep your eyes peeled for that over the coming weeks!

Currently listening to: The Shins - Wincing the Night Away

Hello and welcome

We've started this blog mainly as a way of recording our printmaking experiments, and probably anything else that happens to be in our heads when we get round to writing posts! We started playing around with linocuts last year ago after buying 2 big H.J. Jackson prints to go on the wall in our then new house, and thinking it might be fun to have a go (on a much less ambitious scale). You can see some of our earlier prints on our website. Hottest off the press is the "Squash" print, our first multi-coloured one-block reduction print:


The above picture shows the four stages of printing building up to the final image. Its based on a sketch of a 'harlequin' squash that was 90p from the grocer but never got eaten...

More recently we've branched out into woodcuts and wood engravings. Woodcuts are done on Japanese plywood, which is amazingly easy to cut and gives much crisper edges than lino. Look out for prints coming soon. At the moment the "wood" engraving is being done on engraver's plastic and resingrave, cheap alternatives to the frighteningly expensive real wood end-grain blocks, which will have to wait until we're a bit more technically proficient!

Having hand-sewn a nice brown leather sandbag (filled with lentils rather than sand...) to rest the block on, and thrown caution to the wind by investing in some lovely EC Lyons tools, the first engraving will end up on the front of our christmas cards. (Sneak peak below).



Lovely and sunny here in Norwich today so we'll be off to frolic, take photos and eye up future print material.

J and S.