View from Cotehele

Cotehele is a lovely, rambling old house in Cornwall owned by the National Trust. We've been there several times when we've been down in Devon and Cornwall - it has a great 18th century triangular prospect tower (there is another one tucked away on a side street in nearby Plympton too).

Jon's new print is the view from the top of the Prospect Towers - a five colour reduction woodcut.Here is the blue ink being rolled out for the first layer of sky.

The sky was followed by a creamy yellow for the arable fields, followed by three layers of green for the pasture fields and the trees and hedgerows.

In our Etsy and Folksy shops now.

Handm@de Cambridge

Well, we are home from a lovely day out at Handm@de Cambridge. Here is our little stall!

We had a fun day, the sun shone, and lots of people stopped by to say hello including Celia (we love her work, and her blog Purple Podded Peas), one of my students from UEA, our little nephew Gabriel (along with his Mum and Dad), and some of our lovely blog readers (hello!).

It was hard not to resist spending all our taking on other stalls (I am still coveting this necklace by Claire Howison), but I got some lovely earrings from corryvreckan, and we got some sweet Gocco bicycle cards from Paperleaf. Too lovely to send!

It was nice to meet so many lovely fellow Etsy and Folksy sellers for the first time too :)

Now we've tidied everything away back into our little studio store and we're having a gin and contemplating Open Studios....

Price labels

Preparations for H@ndmade Cambridge are in full swing here - there still seems to be lots to do!

This morning I made new price labels to have on our stall - we put individual price labels on things like handmade books and prints, but we find it always helps to have big price labels standing on the table too.


These ones have little Lapwings standing up from the top of the fold - a happy morning with a sharp cutting knife awaits...

New stuff

A short post this evening - we've had a busy few days, and a tad too much ginger wine... But I think it's safe to say that we'll have plenty of handmade goodies on our stalls at Clutter City tomorrow, and H@ndmade Cambridge next weekend!

New hand bound books -
New letterpressed cards -
And some new prints too. Hooray!

Busy, busy!

We have had a busy old week - engraving, printing and organising mostly. And a spot of letterpress too. Remember the Pemberley notecards we printed ages ago? I always meant to make them into a series, so here is the next one - a nice quote from Northanger Abbey with a vintage block.

'A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing
anything at all, should conceal it as well as she can.'

We're hoping to perhaps print these tonight so the ink will have plenty of time to dry before the weekend, then tomorrow we have Jon's new engraving to print.

Otherwise, we have been busy working! Here I am attempting to teach some students something useful at Wimpole Hall yesterday - they all seemed to enjoy themselves despite the downpours.

More books (and some bookplates too)

This weekend we are busy getting ready for the next Clutter City and H@ndmade Cambridge - Jon is working on a new engraving, and I've been letterpressing plenty of cards and notelets.


We've printed a batch of Penguin bookplates, and letterpressed 'Ex Libris' in black oil ink on the Adana.

We popped out into Norwich yesterday to buy some leather offcuts from Norwich Art Supplies and Anglian Fashion Fabrics to make some more hand stitched books... We picked up lots of lovely brown leather, and a really gorgeous piece of soft grey suede.

We've got plenty more to keep us busy over the next couple of weeks, including new prints!

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.