My friend Penelope and I put our clay aside last week and went to town making lino prints. This was all Penelope’s idea: she gave me a few empty lino blocks and her tools and I simply transferred the drawings I had already done for my ceramics onto them and carved away.
A few things to say about lino blocks: they are harder to carve than clay! And while I did like the stiff lino that is glued onto a wooden tile, I was overjoyed to discover some gray rubber blocks at a local art store. The rubber blocks were a joy to carve, and I simply used my pottery tools to do it. The only drawback to the rubber blocks, in my humble opinion, is that they break down more easily and don’t give as crisp a line.
Still, we had a fabulous time in Penelope’s studio—drinking tea, eating chocolate, and printing.
Using both my designs and some Penelope had from when she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, we even made some wonderful wrapping paper.
Penelope showed me a coat she had gotten for ten cents years ago and had stamped her “eye” pattern on it using fabric ink.
One of my beloved designs—the wren with the crown? the robin? the owl? the quail? The hedgehog?—is going to end up as my Christmas/Happy New Year card. Okay, well I usually send just Happy New Year cards because I can never get my act together by Christmas.
Hey, at least it’s not a valentine. (Although I have seen some of the homemade valentine cards Julia Child and her husband made. They reasoned they were too busy at Christmas too. And wouldn’t it be nice to actually get a valentine in February, even if you were a grownup?)
Comments