New Year cards

 And so after faffing about as much as I did in trying to work out how to set some simple numbers, I managed to print the New Year cards.

I had also hoped to do a bit of a blended ink print and so that meant I inked and printed each card individually. It was no drama really, and good practice for me re inking.

I went with a gorgeous green and a deep blue - and they melded nicely. The colours were a bit hard to photograph, but in real life they worked.

The first proof showed that it wan't as simple as I had hoped using 36pt Empire and 72pt Empire. The smaller numbers on the outside were not lining up evenly and so I needed to adjust some spacing.

And then I needed to work out where to position the print on the card. I was using the proofing press which is much more about using your eye for placement that the Adana, where the card slips into a position held by a couple of bars. With the proofing press you line it up by hand and place it down - and there can be ever so many tiny movements...

In the end, they worked out well and have dried well in this heat we have had.

And as ever, before I cleaned up I just wanted to play around with some moving and over printing. I like how this approach makes them look like ripples in water...

They have begun to make their way out into the world, with all best wishes for 2025.

Thursday Thoughts...

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act”. 

Rebecca Solnit

It feels apt to start the new year with a Thursday Thoughts about hope. As I rotate through Art, Life and Books as the themes for the quotes I ponder, the new year began with Life. 

Rebecca Solnit is a fierce proponent of hope. In amongst everything that goes on, and everything we fear and everything we worry about, I often find her words make sense to me. The approach here I think emboldens me to hope, or somehow allows me to not be frozen by inaction.

Hope finds room for realisation exactly where you might think it wouldn't. 

In uncertainty, in not knowing and in opacity.

Her thinking, which allows for this opacity and uncertainty to actually be defined as spaciousness, is a simple step, yet a breathtaking one.

She almost seems to say that not knowing how things will pan out is almost a prerequisite for hope; a precondition of sorts; some form of requirement.

Which is mighty relieving.

Perhaps the opposite of hope is that sense of feeling like you KNOW, you just KNOW, that things are going to end badly...

Within uncertainty lies hope, and the room to act, so without knowing where they might lead I shall keep doing small things, in small ways to help folk where and when I can, and to nudge the world (or at least my corner of the world) towards the sort of future I dream of (and hope for).

Hope, Macauley House, 2016.

New Year

As a new year opens it's doors, may we move gently through them and find ways to connect and care throughout the year; to hope and to work for peace; and to be kind wherever we can, and whenever we can.

Wishing you all a creative and peaceful new year.