ready to go...

A happy day spent up to my elbows in bubblewrap and packing tape.  I'm sending out lots of work to galleries in the next couple of weeks, topping up my fantastic regular stockists and also (fingers crossed) trying three new galleries this Autumn which is very exciting.  I'll let you know who they are once the work is on the way...

Todays parcel is for the gallery at Snape Maltings, who have shown my work for quite a few years now.  If you are in the right part of the country Snape Maltings is well worth a visit, there is always something going on - farmers markets, boat trips, brilliant childrens activities - as well as the concert hall (and gallery!)

I'm sending a few framed and also a big batch of unframed prints - here a couple of my current favourites (are you allowed to have favourites of your own work?) "Malodorous animals" and...

..."Cat on Stilts"...

I can feel an early autumn giveaway coming soon too...

aren't people clever?

I taught a beginners lino printing course last weekend and thought I should show you some of the results.  Everyone was a true beginner and they really went for it, with only a few moments of 'blank page' nerves!

Above is a sheet printed with the test pieces of lino, for trying out tools and getting a feel for cutting before tackling the 'real' thing, but don't they all look great printed together.

Then everyone got stuck in and we all managed to have something printed by the end.  Hurrah.  No blood and no tears.

(In case you think I was being incredibly mean and giving the poor students super bumpy paper to print on, these photos are of the prints they made on the walls of the shop.  Yep, they'd printed all the paper, card and tissue and moved onto the walls....it was that kind of workshop)

I'll be running another of these courses at Paper Village in Bristol on 27th November if you are around. Might be useful for those moved to make their own cards etc for that looming day of the year!

free food

This year a lot of plants have appeared in our garden and allotment that have self seeded.  Once I recognize what the seedling is trying to be I tend to just leave them to get on with it unless they are really in the way.  It's also really interesting to see when they naturally germinate, especially when compared with the ones I am trying to force to grow in little pots way out of season.

This year there was so much self seeding going on that I can only put it down to a complete lack of weeding meaning that everything was pretty well established before I got there.  We had five or six sunflowers in the garden, which had much bigger flowers than the ones we lovingly grew on a windowsill.  We now have five well established alpine strawberry plants which have fruited solidly for the whole summer and are still going now (the one in the swede patch is a little hard to get to, what with all the netting, but worth it for that taste).

And we have tomatoes.  Literally hundreds of cherry tomatoes, mainly yellow and mostly growing in what was the pea patch.  They are sweet and delicious and out performing everything in pots in the garden.  Now we are on a full tomato diet as they will end as soon as the weather turns and people are starting to complain about tomatoes with tomato sauce for dinner again...I love it because they taste great and are all free...

...so I have 'sun-dried' several trays full in the oven, put pints of yellow pasta sauce in the freezer and tonight we have made yellow tomato ketchup.

lino printing workshop

 
This weekend I will be running a lino printing workshop at Paper Village in Bristol as part of their HUGE printing project.


It is running this Autumn with workshops in nearly everything printwise.  I'll be there this Saturday though, helping people get to grips with the tools and hopefully not wiping up too much blood...

printing and vegetables

We've picked a lot of things from the allotment and garden because, quite frankly, the weather is rubbish.  A busy week or so ahead and pretty uninspiring weather forecasts have led us to believe that the veg would be better off at home, in the warm and dry, despite needing a little burst of sunshine to finish off ripening...

That means I have to share my printing space with hundreds of green tomatoes.

I feel a print coming on...

as happy as a quail...

Quails like the small things in life (woodlice, worms, seeds etc) and are often to be heard chiruping away to themselves with delight when presented with a new bowl of sand to bathe in or a bowl of leftover rice from last nights tea.

Nothing gets them more worked up than a bunch of burstingly ripe elderberries though.

I'm sure they can feel the Autumn goodness giving them a little boost to keep their lovely eggs coming for a bit longer before they start to moult and settle down for a winter snuggled on top of their hot water bottles.

Watch out to the right though Speckeldy because Eagle has just spotted what you have got...