Drawing and printing plants

I have spent a few weeks drawing plants, all those amazing leaf and flower shapes, foliage shadows and criss-crossing stems and branches.  It's been fun.  Now I am trying to make some of the doodles and drawings into prints that show off the plant forms...

I do like taking a plant out of context so that you can really see its shapes (like this one above) as well as drawing/printing the whole tangled mass that exists in a garden.  We will see what happens...

summer flowers

Busy squeezing the last few bits of summer out of the year at the moment and now that there has been some real sun (did you notice it yesterday?) the flowers have really got going - nothing fancy this year as there hasn't been much chance to potter and plant but a couple of sunflowers made it and all the self-seeders are going for it now...

Finally a few bunches of sweet peas have been picked and the Borage has seeded everywhere (really everywhere - it is officially a weed) and is now covered with bees.

nature prints

I've been really enjoying the outside world again recently and so all the new lino blocks I've carved lately are heavily influenced by this...no change there you may say and that would probably be true, but I think this year all my prints are showing neatly ordered gardens and flowers, delightfully organised potting sheds and immaculate rows of veggies to balance with the wild, weedy abundance of our allotment..

garden day

I spent this morning printing cards and after reaching 100 I decided that really being outside would be better than being inside.

Sitting outside I am very busy, absorbing all the bright colours and the huge amount of green after all the rain, basking in the warmth from the sun, listening to the buzzing, beetleing and chirping that is going on, watching a tiny spider trying to build a web around my camera cable (is it cruel to let it carry on?) and chomping through a plateful of things from the fridge...this is going to take all afternoon!

Thanks to Folksy too, for putting my A-Z animals teatowel on todays newsletter!  It has been lurking on their 'Gift Ideas under £25' for a week or too now as well, hurrah.

bloomin' bloomin'

The flowers at the allotment are looking many times better than those in the garden, probably due to being just left to get on with it instead of constant fussing and watching for those in the garden (well that and a lack of foraging poultry which the garden is now filled with).

This is a very good thing as I imagine that passers by will find their eyes drawn to the glorious blooms rather than the very spiky weeds that I'm too scared to tackle (this is probably wishful thinking as most seasoned vegetable growers have weed detecting radar and several of my allotment neighbours spend all day, everyday mooching about on their plots...)

We've also been making good use of our 'Cobb' oven now that the days are warmer and lighter and having a hot, filling lunch/dinner after a day of thistle menacing is proving vital.  You are meant to be able to roast a whole chicken in one, although we haven't tried that yet, but we did cook some of our christmas dinner in it last year...

cowparsley and prints

Too many holiday days and too much dry weather - I've started ignoring them all and have been printing away as May is a month of deadlines (although I could have done all the work in January if I'd been clever...).

The hedgerows have come to me though and several extravagant bunches of cowparsley have been picked.  I love it, it seems to have been in flower for most of my childhood, and what would look better in any serious flower arrangement?  Coupled with some heavyweights like roses it would add just the right amount of froth.

It does drop bits in my ink though and has now been removed to a safe distance...

I'm printing for the Affordable Art Fair in Bristol later this month and will show you the pictures that are back from the framers soon.

works in progress...

I've been working on a few new prints this month and have printed proofs of the designs.  I love how linoprints look when blown up big and my teatowels designs are turned into screenprints this way to make the most of this....

here are a couple of larger than life sections of prints...

and in gardening news, our christmas Amarylis is finally about too open, having done nothing for ages and then grown two feet tall in the past month...I love them!

being outside instead of in...

Inside was very dreary today having got used to light and sunshine, 

so as soon as it brightened up I went outside with tea and not very nice biscuits that noone else will eat, (possibly because I adapted the recipe to fit what I actually had in the cupboard) - even the quails say 'no' and they think woodlice are tasty...

we had a quick chat and then they went back to sandbathing and quailing in the brief sunshine - here are Golden Eagle, Speckle and Megan resisting the camera as always.

but look what the plum tree is doing, and the bees love it - hurrah!

eggs aplenty

The girls are stepping into their springtime stride now, with Rosie well into the lead, and we suddenly have enough quails eggs for a pretty yummy feast...and yes, we do store them in the pansy pot outside the back door - fridges are sooo old fashioned.