Friday, September 3, 2010

Linocut ruru owl

Again inspired by Lena Corwin´s wonderful book Printing by Hand, I´ve tried some test samples of another linocut stamp I´ve designed and cut. Its about 8cm tall.
This is a Ruru, a native New Zealand owl. The Māori legends have the ruru often as a watchful guardian, associated with the spirit world. Its high call can mean bad news, but its more common ‘ruru’ call means good news. We can hear them from our house at night saying ¨morepork!¨ (that´s what it sounds like to me).
The left-most owl in the row of 3 is the final one, with the stamp edges progressively cut off (as I realised they were showing - I hadn´t cut quite deeply enough) and was pressed on the fabric the longest. I´ve been using a mixture of Pebeo and Fas Fastex fabric inks, which both seem fine, although these particular owls were purely done in Fastex black ink with a brayer. I like how this has turned out and I´ll print these on some bags.
The row of 3 owls looks quite nice, I think. I might cut another owl in reverse so I can print them in pairs. [I´ve since used the stamp on some feet wheat packs as a gift].

The Seaward Kaikoura Mountains, South Island, New Zealand

3 comments:

Bette Norcross Wappner -- said...

I really like this! Great work. I've been wanting to experiment with block printing on fabric. I like the name of your blog :)

SewChicken said...

Thank you! Yes, the printing has been lots of fun. I love your gallery.

Anonymous said...

Those owls are great!