Dreaming Spirals

There is a brilliant website devoted to pictures of French manhole covers. This is wonderful inspiration for designs and ideas for block prints. Unlikely but wonderful!

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Here is another lino stamp I made last week, with some prints made.

This is some cloth I printed with it. I did a lot of other things too! I printed on it first in green but it didn’t come out very well so I put a dilute wash of paint over that and when it was dry I stamped with the orange. I also made a resist with ripped masking tape and put another wash over and did some more stamping. I may have done other things … I just kept adding to it!

I thought this fabric which I painted last year went quite well with it so I might do some sort of collage with it.

I obviously go for these sorts of colours!!

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A few of the other herbs I planted last year are also still alive.

This is the angelica:

And some mullein:

Here is the only woad plant which escaped the slugs’ depredations. The other two which germinated were in the garden but I kept this in a pot. It has begun to shoot up in the last week or so. Last year it stayed in a low crown shape. Too accessible to slugs obviously. I must try and collect seeds from it this year or hope it self seeds or this will be the end of my attempt to grow woad!

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On my foray into the garden yesterday, I noticed a few other things were poking their heads above ground.

These chives will come in handy in the kitchen. I have to use them before the slugs beat me to it!

The mint is also starting to come up.

And so is the fennel I planted last year. Good! It is perennial.

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Spring has sprung, and the weather is encouraging it! Well, it is warmer, though it is blowing a gale and has rained for the last four days (admittedly today wasn’t too bad till teatime). The dinnerladies and ancillary staff were on strike in the schools today - Zachary’s was closed though the other two’s secondary school struggled on and managed with packed lunches and the head teacher manning the phones!

I went out in the garden looking for some signs of spring. I found a few:

There were a clump of these primroses.

The forsythia is out in bloom! Spring must be on the way!

And the rosemary is flowering.

When I remember to take my camera out with me, I will take a photo of the tiny daffodils by the Civic Centre. There are loads of them. Wordsworth would be proud.

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I made another stamping block yesterday out of a speedy stamp and lino cutters. Here is a page of prints made from it, along with some of a lightning stamp I made out of an eraser. Apart from the sore thumb it generated, I’m fairly pleased with it and will be trying it out on fabric soon.

We also had to draw some little blocks to cut - this is the page of mine. I haven’t got any more erasers so I can’t actually make any, but I’ve drawn another design on a piece of lino and will cut it as soon as I feel reckless enough/my thumbnail has healed:(

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Well, the Symbols course has officially finished but I am only in the middle of Lesson 4! This is to make various stamps of the symbols. Here are a few of my sketches for this. I might use one or two of these to make a stamp.

Here is another page of sketches, with a stamp I actually made out of lino.

The actual stamp is here, with four prints of it:

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Those little piles of squares are no more! Here they are, all bonded to pieces of background fabric. I tried to keep vaguely to one or two colours. Vaguely.

Here is a reddish-orange one:

And here is a blueish one:

And here a greenish one:

I’ve got about 7 of these altogether. Here is one which was made up of all the bits left!

I will stamp over these with various motifs and cut some of them up to make postcards, maybe keep some of them whole as wallhangings or cut them down to make smaller pictures. Stitch all over them, all sorts of fun things, but I’ll do it as each one speaks to me.

Here are my stamps waiting to be pounced upon! I will try and incorporate some of the symbols from the symbols course into this.

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