Silkscreen & Scribble the inner workings of a hand printed textile studio

Lots of new things in the works but nothing finished and ready to share yet I’m afraid. This week’s been an interesting mix of working on new things - printing the fuchsia samples, finishing another new cushion design (more on that soon) and working on designs for a rather exciting project which I can’t wait to be able to write about!

However, the realities of running a business means that a fair amount of time is also devoted to printing and making existing designs for orders (not to mention sales, marketing, admin and lots of other important tasks) so I’ve also been printing up some bluebird baby t-shirts and making some purses.

Whilst it would be nice to spend my days making one of kind items there is something very pleasing about lots of little baby t-shirts lined up drying on the print table!

Of course one of the little perks of batch production are the offcuts…

I have a nice little pile of offcuts growing and seeing them together like this I think some one of a kind patchwork cushions may just have to be made soon.

Posted: March 20th, 2010 in hand-printing, inside the studio, making things.
Comments: 1

Ingredients for a pleasant surprise…

1. Go out for a drive in the snow (bring camera and sensible footwear)
2. Take lots of photographs of snowy winter wonderland
3. Get too cold and go home for hot soup
4. Quickly transfer photos to computer (while soup is heating up)
5. Promptly forget all about photos
6. A couple of months later - find “100 CANON” folder on desktop and think what’s in here?

These photos are from over the Christmas holidays and I don’t think it’s ever been so cold for so long before. Although we didn’t actually get that much snow up here because it was so cold it didn’t thaw out for over 3 weeks. Not so good for getting about but it was so pretty!

I went out to take some winter landscape photos but in the end it was the beautiful ice crystals all over the vegetation that caught my eye. I’ve never seen anything like it, every plant was absolutely covered in delicate little shards of ice twinkling in the winter sunlight.

As lovely as it looked I’m glad it’s finally starting to warm up here now though, I’m definitely ready for spring!

Posted: March 12th, 2010 in photography.
Comments: 2

No silly, I’m not talking actual ladies dancing but instead lovely fuchsia flowers with their long leggy stamens and flouncy petticoat petals. Some designs just seem to spring out of my head fully formed and getting them onto paper/computer is super easy, but sometimes (like this) they need gently coaxed out and manipulated to get the right shape, composition etc.

I’m excited to finally get this exposed onto a screen since it’s taken a lot of tweaking to get to this stage. Now comes the fun part of choosing what colour to print!

For added realism I photographed the plain back of one of my cushions so that I can use it to mock up designs on Photoshop to see them on the cushion and decide on colours. I’m liking the teal but also fuchsia pink (very appropriate), violet, red, spring green, burnt orange… I could go on. So it’s time to go and make some decisions and print up some samples, make the cushions, photograph etc and then eventually get them into the shop.

Posted: March 10th, 2010 in design, hand-printing.
Comments: 1

Like many others I know I am all too guilty of being seduced by cookery books that are full of gorgeous beautifully styled images of the food. So I’m generally not a fan of books with no pictures but the “Can’t Go Wrong Cookbook” by Orlando Murrin may look like an unassuming little paperback from the outside but it’s full of hidden gems (sadly it’s out of print!).

Last weekend I discovered one of those gems in the form of a very tasty recipe for ginger cake. Basically just take a regular sponge recipe but use light brown sugar instead of white sugar and add a teaspoon of ground ginger to the mixture. Then ice with butter icing with a teaspoon of ground ginger in it too. It’s got just the right balance of sweet goodness and the warming winter spice.

In other baking news - I tried out a recipe for brownies from Inside a Black Apple and I can confirm that it is indeed the perfect brownie recipe (perfect but evil due to serious sugar over-indulgance).

Posted: March 2nd, 2010 in food glorious food.
Comments: none