Good ideas and terrible puns. Tuesday, December 2, 2008

So I know I've been pretty mute about my craftings for several months now, but let it be known that I haven't been just... not crafting.

I have gotten myself into this arty/crafty subculture known as 'linocutting' or 'linoblock printing'. Pictures are drawn on a block of linoleum (or Staedler plastic, which is softer and easier to carve, but less forgiving when you make mistakes). The negative space is carved out with sharp tools, and then the stamp is used with ink to make copies on paper or other substances. Right now just paper. This craft has led me to two sideprojects:

The Good Idea
Myself, with Rob, Micheal and Sam, have been carving cute wintry things and making winter season cards. These are for sale over the internet here, at our etsy site. Please at least go look! I'm very proud of this!

7printciples (get it? get it?)
I am better at designing chalices than pretty much... anything else. I counted up the years my designs have been on PNWD youth and young adult shirts, etc, and realized it was something like five years. FIVE YEARS. That's some experience, right there. Anyways, when I started practicing lino-cutting, I started with designs of my own - chalice designs. And then last week I started experimenting with printing techniques (mostly because the tray and roller are at Micheal and Sam's)

This is the most recent of my chalice designs, done in honor of my dad and Judy's 61st birthdays. The carving medium was Staedler plastic, and the ink was Mr. Sketch smelly markers because that's what I had.

This was my second chalice design, carved on a linoleum block and printed with black ink.

This is the first carving I did. It was carved into Staedler plastic. I printed this the same night as the hand chalice, with the same method.

I just set up the etsy site for this project last night. Rob came up with the name, which I absolutely adore. Hopefully I will have some prints for sale there by the end of the week. Hopefully.

I am going to put links to both etsy sites on the sidebar, so you can track their progress there.