the squirrels are coming...

I've had a great run of commissions recently, this one was fun and I really want to visit now.  It's on the Isle of Wight so in this glorious sunshine it would be a fantastic little outing for me.  I had to include squirrels as the lucky owners of this house have red squirrels as frequent visitors to their garden - I hope you can spot them lurking in the trees...

If anyone else living in a beautiful/exotic/beach facing location would like to commission a lino print just let me know before the weather turns and I will be straight over!

Fabric printing - happy fish

Printing on fabric and then filling it with stuffing is very satisfying and also very distracting.  Other work I should be doing is struggling to compete with the thrill of stuffed animals.

I'm sure this fish is very friendly and to me he looks like a happy fish, but several people have commented on his very sharp teeth - it's not his fault and he promises not to use them on your fingers, he really is happy, you see.

I made him in one of those blurry moments of activity when you suddenly think "I'm going to print a bright green fish NOW, even though I should be helping my children with their spellings, and nothing will stop me, even a house with not one inch of clear space to work or the fact that there is nowhere to dry them...it will be done".

Because these are prints I can never stop at one, or even two and now I'm going to spend the rest of the summer sewing up the other members of the shoal (and all his hedgehog friends, we have a LOT of hoglets in our house at the moment - more on that later, because you can have one too...)

But for now I'm going to have to stop printing animals and get on with some REAL work, because the summer holidays are coming, (hooray, hooray) and I have two commissions to finish first. Maybe I'll just sew another fish first, because I have got some really nice watery fabric that will make a great back...

Angry hedgehog!

At the moment we are busy working away on an exciting print project that we want lots of people to join in with and this funny fellow is one of the first hedgehogs to emerge ready....I think he looks a bit angry, but he's very friendly really!

I really love printing on fabric, it is such a satisfying surface and gives a really great quality to the image because of the texture of the image.  I also like the smell of the ink, so maybe that is part of the reason too!  In the next couple of weeks I am planning to print the first 100 hedgehogs ready for our project and I've already enlisted a Brownie pack to help me (they love hedgehogs so were really keen to join in - yipee).

If you like hedgehogs/sewing/painting/crafting/joint projects then you'll have to pop back here at the end of the month to find out what we are up to and how to join in and also see more great hedgehog images...

recent commission

Here's the just inked lino block from a commission I completed a couple of weeks ago - you'll have to look at it in a mirror if you want to see what it looks like printed (no, don't use your computer, use a mirror, it will be much more fun)...

A little slice of Bristol, showing especially requested landmarks and features and really good fun to carve out, with all the little houses up on the hill above the docks.

I love the moment (usually) when you first roll ink onto a lino block and the image really reveals itself in such a bold way - no hiding any little bits you weren't sure about now, especially if you are using the blackest of black ink, which I usually am.

last months art trail

That was a long time ago!!

Our local art trail has faded into a distant memory, but it was a lovely sunny weekend and so many friends and neighbours and people I'd never met before came and visited my little stall and chatted and nattered and told me what they thought of my work (with their body language if not their words!).

I loved it and spent a very happy two days sampling cakes and trying not to buy art (that 'trying not' failed, as I did buy art, but hey, it was an arts trail...)

Here's a photo of part of my display, and it's not a black and white photo, it really was very monochrome with a lovely shade of greeny-grey on the wall behind me setting everything off so well.

bird art on Etsy

Yipee - Etsy are using my Animated Birds as the example of lino prints on their 'Art' browse front page this week.

Each art form is represented with a bird picture this week, because really, you can't have too many feathered friends can you?

https://www.etsy.com/uk/browse/art?ref=fp_ln_new_art

I promise in my next post to bring you lots of much, much older news (rather than this current up-to-the-minute stuff.  Lino cutting is meant to be about going slow and things taking as long as they take or even slightly longer than that, rather than keeping up with the internet and letting people know about things as they happen).

latest lino printing news

I've been really busy - sorry blog.  (I imagine a blog to be similar to a goblin or some other creature from fairy tales, maybe something from Labyrinth, that's why I am addressing it directly.)

Art trails, new prints, lovely commission, cushion printing, new stockists -  but the very, very small lead that feeds the computer from the camera has been missing for a while and so none of these things have been able to be transmitted to blog...

...and it has also been sunny for more than two days in a row, so I'm afraid I spent zero time looking for the very, very small lead and a lot of time 'checking' things in the garden and wandering up the road on errands.

The very, very small lead has now been found, so I'm afraid that there may be some 'old' news coming up in the next few days as blog posts that I had in mind a couple of weeks ago may resurface.