Indian Block Printing

It's been quiet around the blog since I'm been on the road for work & play. One of the trips that I've been on this month is 10 days in India for my 'day job' . Feast your eyes on the method of traditional wood block printing! (More of my own home-made project next week once I've recovered from the jet lag...)

With ink on the first wooden block, he presses the block to the fabric to print.

Here is the result - the printed outline of the motif.

Inking the second block with another color (you can see in the background that he is working on a completely block printed table cloth).

Pressing a third block with another color.

The result is a 3 color pigment print.

After washing and setting the dyes the colors of the print look totally different. Ta Da!

Nana, Queen for a Year

Beau's Nana celebrated her 80th Birthday not long ago and as such, we though that she deserves to be queen for the year! So... give me a reason to embroider and of course I will...

We sent it to England by post and the latest news is that she is still deciding where to hang it... I will keep you all posted on!

Valentines Garland Galore

Beau took me to Budapest for a Valentines-Over-Nighter. It was tres romantique and very fun, despite my brush with a suspiciously FOUL Fish Stew, served "Gypsy Style" whatever that means... Other than that repulsive dish (which I promptly sent back to the Kitchen!), and the COLD (imagine Hungry in February - yes that's exactly what it was like - Blustering!) the most memorable event was giving Beau his Valentine's gift after having been working on it in secret for a little while.

I made this miniature paper garland from images I found on the internet, cropped and converted them to black and white, printed them off on Cardstock, cut around each one with pinking shears, and then ran them through the sewing machine. Each letter is a different photo of a letter from somewhere out there. For example, the "a" in Beau's name is from that famous sign reading"Welcome to Las Vegas" - can you guess where the others are from?

Happy Valentines to all of you!