i love a week that...

...involves spending time working on a new product...

and finding out it works.

i love a week that includes some sewing time for others (hope you like your bee a brit stingy block Collette)

i love a week that includes lots of printing time...

loving the colours that this week's customers have ordered...

just right for our current sunshine ;-)

and most of all i love a week that includes time to try something that's been in my head for a while...

and i particularly love a week where that experiment worked!

and what's more...it's still only thursday...a lot can still happen.

hope you are having a love filled week x

friday workshop take 2

 friday came around mightily speedily this week. 

it seems only 2 minutes ago that lizzie came over for a one-one workshop and here i was this week with jess, her mum wendy, vicky and chrissy round for their workshop.

 in my former life i used to be a teacher and doing these workshops has made me realise that it's not the teaching i grew to dislike, but the being in a classroom teaching unmotivated kids.

 teaching screen printing on the other hand has given me my passion back. 

when you have keen, star students in front of you and you get to pass on the wisdom of something you are passionate about, well quite frankly life doesn't get much better.

it is a privilege to have such lovely people come and want to learn something new and to show as much passion as i have.

 it was quite an intense day, in the best possible way. everyone was full of ideas and creative juices were running high.

i never saw such looks of concentration in the classroom.

 when all stencils had been cut we headed down to the print room (the basement) and after a quick session on how to actually pull a screen everyone set to work on their own screens.

 

i don't know about them but i was beyond excited at this point! i couldn't wait to see how their designs were going to turn out.

seriously, i needed to give myself a pep talk at this point.

and what star students they turned out to be...

after the printing and the cleaning up came the magic...

 seeing their designs transformed...

how cool are all of these?

i just love how different each and everyone's work is...

vicky brought her fab bird and birdhouses design printed out and ready to cut...

chrissy punched holes a crazy to make her striking design...

wendy did 2 - she used cat post-it-notes as silhouettes to cut out - and also took inspiration from melissa bombardiere's wonderful belbird design (i love melissa's work)...

and jess produced a wonderful piece that looks  tribal.

 the next workshop isn't until march 15..i'm not quite sure how i'll get my fix until then, but it's certainly something to look forward to.

if you fancy joining me for a fun passion  filled friday (does that sound wrong?) there are still a couple of places left for march 15. 

please do join us (mother's day is march 10 so put in your request for a great gift)...you can book a place here.

announcing workshops...

Having talked about it for a while I am excited to announce that I am now offering Screen Printing Workshops at my home here in North Leeds.

Those of you who are regular readers will know how passionate I am about screen printing. It is such a wonderful skill to learn and has so many possibilities. I'm just itching to spread the love and make you all converts too!

I am holding 3 workshops early next year - same topic, different dates - where you will learn all there is to know about screen printing your own stencil cut designs onto fabric. I am keeping the groups to a maximum of 4 to allow plenty of help/space/time with all that there is to learn.

The workshops will be extremely relaxing and no experience is necessary. Just bring yourself, your creativity, some ideas, oh and an apron to keep you clean!

Go here to find out more or to book or do contact me on info@blueberry-park.co.uk if you have any other questions.

The first date has one space left, but at the time of writing the other 2 have all 4 spaces available. Maybe you want to get a group of friends together and come and have fun together either on one of these dates or ask me about setting up a mutually convenient time.

So go treat yourself to a fun day, or better still, put it on your Xmas Wishlist and get someone else to treat you!

POSTSCRIPT: 
January Workshop sold out! Feb Workshop now Friday 8 February...2 places available! March workshop remains the same and available!

 Another new design that has been sitting waiting patiently in the file named "new designs" had an opportunity to come to life today.

I've decided that Mondays are for just that...

 ...y'know, when you've had all weekend with work being pushed into a corner for the sake of family time, but your brain doesn't switch off and by the end of the weekend it's bursting at the seams to get going on some of those ideas?

 So it seems only right that Mondays should be honoured with time for creating...time for releasing those ideas that have been cooped up and time for putting into practice some restrained creativity.  

Well that's my excuse for getting on with trialling a new design today (not all day obviously...I did some proper work too...promise, stockists...) and finally my Doily design is here.

The Doily design is a stencil screen print taken from an actual doily with the added twist of paper cutting added detail.

Whilst honouring Making Monday, I was fairly restrained and stuck to one colour, one item...

but...

...tomorrow is another day...

a day for more colours and more products...

...can't wait for Tuesday!

I've built up quite a collection of screens now and it's fab to have my designs on them to make printing to order nice and speedy.

I have however kept one blank.

 I've done this so that I can still try out new designs and ideas at home, without the time and expense of transferring them more permanently to screens if the designs don't work.

Working with stencils means it is relatively easy to do just that.

So today, in a spare 5 minutes - literally - I started working on refining a previous design and started cutting out a stencil from newsprint paper. 

I'm always amazed how much detail the paper gives you when you print. It's such flimsy paper, but with a flood of paint over the screen, it sticks like magic and works as well as a photo exposed screen.

The only drawback really is the temporary-ness of a stencil, but the flexibility that it gives far outweighs this and is definitely a worthy method in it's own right and one I'll be repeating I'm sure.

In the meantime I think I'll be getting this design up onto a screen some time very soon.

Screen Printing Course Lesson 3...

For the first time since starting the course, I initially came away from today's session feeling despondent. Fortunately I quickly put the nail on the head as to why this was. Each lesson is just 2 hours but we pack so much into it. In the previous 2 weeks we focussed on learning and using one skill and for the first time today, we had to use what we had learnt in those sessions whilst learning a new skill.

I'm really pleased that (yet again) I have quickly learnt that it is such early days (impatient? moi?) and it is going to take so much time to master and be able to perform all these skills naturally.

Since last week's lesson I knew I wanted to experiment with photographs and also text, so I have spent most of the week photographing flowers and then cutting around them. I had no idea what the effects of these were going to be, but hey, it's all about the process isn't it? (I learnt that last week). Again, with the text, it didn't matter too much what was written, more seeing the effects when turned into a screen-print. (Go to the top of the class, Karen.) I used a couple of the different font stamps that I have, as I wanted to see the effects of these and found a quote from my favourite children's book...I'm sure you know where it's from...

When we got to class, the focus of the lesson was Paper Stencils. As well as producing a screen with photo emulsion, you can produce a crude screen from cutting shapes from paper and fixing this to the screen. This method is great for block colours as a base for printing something else over.

As usual I was astounded by the effects of something so simple. Here's Gina's example below. A simple rectangle was cut out and then with the use of 2 or 3 colours an amazing background to use in a design has been produced.

I forgot to take a photo of my paper stencil print, but from the screen above, you can see what I set out to do. I cut a large rectangle for the flowers to sit on and then cut 2 smaller 'windows' to highlight the larger text. First print was of the yellow (the one I forgot to take) and then when that had dried I printed over with my screen with the text and photos.

I should at this point tell you that whilst all this was going on we had to prepare our screen, the photo emulsion way, to use for the second layer. And this is where I started to take my eye off the boil. This process is one that we have done for the past 2 weeks, but in isolation, focussing on just that. This week it was a by-product within the lessons objectives. I didn't have any problems with the actual screen, but where I did fall into difficulties and realise was an area I need to focus on, was the actual printing motion. I'm quite relieved to know that this is all very natural and next week, whilst learning yet another new technique, we are going to put emphasis on the actual printing. Hurrah!

Whilst I'm not overly happy with how the flowers have turned out (the bottom left didn't take at all) I love the effects of using this idea and particularly love the use of stamped text. And even more so with the paper stencil block printing highlighting areas. This is definitely something that I will be pursuing.

Lots done already and still HEAPS to learn and do...