Paper, peace and pastries

As ever small things progress in this direction and that; nothing quite finished, yet things are busy.

I have been talking to some folk about different commissions and thought what might really help was a more serious swatch book. And so I cut most of my favourite and popular papers into A6 postcard size and wrote their names on them and their weight and began.

Am yet to work out how best to hold them together - or even if I need to - but they will be helpful when folk start to ask if they could get cards printed on x or y or z.

Sometimes it's the ongoing maintenance, the underpinnings of an art life that one has to attend to.

These are our lighter book papers - for small chaps books and the like.

These are our heavier papers for printmaking, letterpress posters, cards and such.

And these are the only coloured papers we have in stock! All are quite heavy 280-300gsm.

Off on another tangent it is time to make and send out some tokens of peace for International Day of Peace.  IDoP isn't until 21 September; yet here we are in early August and how did that happen?  Furthermore, given the delays postal services are all facing during the time of the Virus, we figure it's better to go early than be late. Fingers crossed these make their way safely to new home.

Never shall I tire of looking at gathered threads! In this instance brown jute string.  Just fabulous.

This year, I am using recycled cutlery pouches from a local coffee shop. Our cutlery used to be delivered to us in these pouches and I gather and collected them thinking they would make good weather-grams.  They are nice and sturdy.

One thing I like about them in particular is that they do have a pouch and I think folk might find little things to pop alongside the peace message...I know I hope to!

And pastries you may ask? 

We taught our first Introduction to Letterpress workshop yesterday and had a fine time.  One person was trying to look at how to bring letterpress into a business that they were thinking of.

At one point, we played around with variegated gold leaf to see if you could blind emboss it - and in rush we got this result; but it definitely made us think that if you attached the gold leaf first, then pressed into it that might get something worth something!

Anyhow, always fun to digress in a workshop. Grin.