Printed Thank You Cards

In my last post I mentioned that I was going to print some thank you cards to go with any etsy orders that I send out. Before I would just write a quick hand written note on a piece of paper but I decided that I wanted to put some more effort into the packaging of my orders.

So far I have only printed them in two colours, blue and orange, I am going to print some more of these in a few more colours so that they all don't look the same. The cards them selves are A6 in size and are printed onto a standard card stock. I'm not 100% sure what I am going to put onto the back of the cards I don't know whether to print a message or stick to hand writing each thank you message, I may try out a few different options before deciding.

Lovespoon silhouettes

As you may have guessed my new printing obsession is lovespoons! Here are a few silhouettes that I have printed.

(this print is now available on my etsy shop)

This was a bit of an after thought for an up coming craft fair that I attended on the 8th Dec at Dean Forest Railway, I have been thinking about printing onto notepads for a while and I thought that the craft fayre would be the perfect time to print some and see how they do. On the day I sold 2 of the notebooks out of about 20 (but then again the craft fair was a bit on the quiet side). As time was not on my side I bought some cheap A6 note books from ebay to print my design onto.

Lovespoon Pattern

It's no secret that I am a lover of patterns so when I started to draw out the lovespoons in illustrator the intention was to create a pattern using the spoons.

I just kept to the same 5 love-spoon design and just repeated and reflected the design underneath, I then printed the pattern using a metallic copper ink.

I think that this design could work quite well in a canvas/cotton tote bag, think I may give it a go........

New Project + New Prints

I have made a decision to take a break from plants, trees and nature in my work... as much as I loved printing the flowers and trees I decided to move on to a new project with a different theme.

My new project consists of Lovespoons.

Sounds a bit of a strange thing to print? well I have a lovespoon hanging on my wall that my Grancher started to make (he was a carpenter by trade and always playing around making different things) it's just one of those things that I have always seen on the shelf in my Granchers shed. unfortunately my Grancher never got round to finishing the lovespoon and it now hangs on my bedroom wall and I often wonder what it would have looked like if it was ever finished. This got my to thinking about the different styles and patterns of lovespoons, so I thought why not have a go at creating a pattern with some lovespoons and creating some silhouettes to see what I come up with.

Print Experiment #3

Ok so you are all probably getting sick of seeing flowers on this blog now, but I have a couple more posts on them to come and then I think I will put them to rest.... at the end of the day I can't go on printing flowers forever right? even I'll get sick of them after a time.

These are the last few prints that I have created for The Boutique Market Christmas Fayre on Sunday 1st Dec, as it's my first Christmas and craft fayre I wanted to make sure that I had a variety of prints to take with me. I know it's all going to be flowers, trees, owls (and maybe a robin or 2) but in the time that I have had to produce the prints I haven't really been able to explore other 'themes' or 'subjects' (please remember that I do work full time as a designer so that only leaves me an hour or so in the evenings and a sunday to do any printwork). However I do have some new ideas that I want to explore in the coming weeks (and they don't involve trees, flowers or birds!) so make sure you keep an eye out.

You'll probably notice that I have used pretty much the same colours in all of my prints, the idea behind this was to use colours that related to actually colour of the flowers that I used for each of the prints. Just thought I'd add that in.

New screen Prints

I have been busy recently doing a lot of printing done in preparation for my first craft fayre in a weeks time and to also put some new item into my Esty Shop (this will probably be updated in early december).

After a couple failed attempts I have finally set up another screen to do some different prints from the ones in earlier post, as you can see the trees have made a comeback for the craft fayre (though just like the owl this will be the last run of trees that I print)

Print experiments

I have been a one woman printing machine lately (quite literally) every spare I have had has been spent in my little garden shed studio printing as many prints as I can in preparation for The Boutique Market in Monmouth that I will be selling my prints at and also for new stock on my Etsy store.

A lot of the prints in the post are of the same flower that I have posted previously but I have tried out layering a couple of colours over on another.

Printing on notebooks

I've been wanting to do something different for a while in terms of printing, all I seem to do is produce prints that can be framed or stuck to the wall I thought it was time for something different and maybe produce something that can be used instead of or as well as just being put on display. 

I've had a few ideas such as printing onto note cards (that will be a separate post) and venturing into printing on to cotton shopping bags but that was it, until a few days when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and she suggested some really good ideas for things to try printing on and one of them was notebooks. So I picked up a couple of plain covered notebooks from Paperchase to give it a go.

Below is the final result.... I really like how well the black works on the brown (sandy brown maybe) cover of the book. 

I know it may not be that interesting for some but for me it has given me some new ideas to expand my printmaking venture and maybe one day in the future these will be part of my etsy shop (which I have plans to expand over the next few months).

Screen Printed Flower

On the weekend I decided to take a full day to do some printing (something that I haven't been able to do in while), it was also a chance for me to try out my new silk screen and my new (small) studio space at home. A couple of weeks ago I scanned all my flower monoprints so I could make them bigger and print them out to put onto a screen.

To start I decided to use one of my fuchsia prints and a leaf print, however alot of the detail from the leaf didn't transfer well onto the screen but the flower came out fine. The original print of the fuchsia fits onto an A6 card so for these prints I made the flower bigger so it would fit onto A5.

I decided to experiment a bit and start printing different colours on top of one another, I think the end result will look quite good (though I think the black is a bit too harsh in this image so I will probably keep to neutral colours)

Screen printed MDF Panels - work in progress 2

(I decided to start again on the robin panel)

(first attempt at colle)

Trees

Kind of looks like they've been drawn with crayons

Above are some prints of trees and leaves that I have been experimenting with over that past couple of days in the print-room  The prints above are to accompany 2 poems by W H Davies called The Wind and In The Wood.

The trees were drawn by hand using a biro pen through mono-printing and the leaves were created by using Alpen sprinkled across a piece of paper.

The prints are still a working progress and are not the final versions.