Time Share

Now that I am retired most folks would think a post about Time Share might be something about traveling to an exotic place. Nope... it is just me - splitting my time between caregiving, checking on little seeds of hope and PRINTING! I know there are plenty of other things I should be doing like weeding, mowing, laundry, spring cleaning and on and on but instead I carved out some time this past week for the sole (soul qualifies too) purpose of studying multiple color, reduction linoleum/speedy cut printing. OMG! Who knew it took so much thinking! No wonder they call it suicide printing!! There are sooooo many variables. It has taken 3 blocks, but I now feel slightly confident about registration. I built myself a jig and it works well for small prints. I possibly may, finally, understand the reverse image thing if I stick to color coded tracing paper, but the rest - I don't think it will come until I have in the TIME. How many blocks will that be? 5? 10, maybe even 20? Or horrors, do you have to have a gene for thinking in reverse backwards order?

lettuce be thankful 

 Scottish Coastline 

Learned about using transparency sheets to protect the non-printed parts of the block.

The nest is just not that thrilling I am sorry to say.

Maybe I should have taken it farther - and made the border blue?

The crow print below is much better so far.  

 

But there is something about the prints hanging in the window that just give me a thrill.

 I tried a different kind of paper in addition to the kozo paper.

That was interesting and made for totally different results.

 

Then there's the end of the day. All that ink on the plate. Time for mono-print play!

Hopefully tomorrow I will be back at it cutting and printing the next color.

 

The Pendulum Swung

Yes, that's right, the pendulum swung so far into the happy zone it shouldn't be surprising that it has taken 2 weeks to recover from the greatest month we have had in YEARS! Oh, my gosh. We can hardly express how wonderful our trip to Scotland and Ireland was because we are smiling so hard, laughing over the funny escapades and then ahhhing and grabbing our waist (or where it used to be) over the food we experienced. Only took 10,000 photos. No, I am not joking. I am a bit overwhelmed thinking about how to make them into something meaningful. I don't need to worry about the kids coming over to see a slide show of them as they refused to do that after seeing photos from our last trip. Hurrump. I would like to create something with them for memory sake tho... so I am cogitating.

In the meantime, sitting by my new little stove (heater with the fake flames) I made a linoleum block from one of the Ireland photos. I thought I would print a mono print background and then print the linoleum block. Ha! Will I ever "get it" - that flipping the image thing? Well, it's good that I have a wry sense of humor otherwise I could have be in tears as I was already upset that I accidentally cut a part out that I wanted. I tried to watercolor some, color pencil on others. Oh, well, it's all play, right? Who knows, maybe I will do something more to them to cover up my humanness. Or not. Or maybe I will just sit by the fake fire and look out at the changing autumn scene, or build myself a crannog (a Gaelic round house built on stilts above the water) just in case mother nature thinks that the foot of rain we have gotten isn't enough.