Handmade checkers game printed

I finished the printing for the checkers game ages ago, and finished the sides. So that´s done. The board is all straight, I´ve just taken the photo on an angle to avoid the flash. It took me two hours to handprint it, with a handcarved linocut stamp which I made of a wave design. Each square is about 8cm x 8cm (approx 2.5 inches square). I didn´t use the previous ocean design stamp I carved because I was running out of fabric and it would have been too big, and possibly too complicated. Over such a large board, the background squares need to be quite simple or the eye finds it too hard to spot the checkers pieces on it.

All the beanbag checker pieces are printed now too, with handcarved linocut stamps I made, and I just have to cut them out, sew and fill them...
[Here it is finished.]

Handstamped t-shirt

After one unremovable spill too many on my tshirt, I decided to try covering the stains with a stamp. I used the daisy stamp I made last year. The stamp didn´t quite cover up the stain; it is still sort of visible through the paint. Darn. So this is still an ¨around the house¨ tshirt. Still, I think it turned out OK in general.

Scorching Bay, near our old flat, Wellington, North Island, New Zealand

String crocheted bowl

A friend lent me the book Simple Crochet by Erika Knight. It has lots of modern patterns for crocheting things for around the house. Some of them are from different materials like string or leather and look quite edgy. The textures look really interesting. There are boxes, bags, rugs, cushions, etc.

I had a go at a large, round bowl using reasonably thick string and a 4.5 mm crochet hook. But it is quite hard to pull string through, as it doesn´t slide like wool. It started to aggravate my sore wrists, so I finished the whole thing off as a small bowl instead...

More printing on stones

I´ve had a go at printing one of my larger hand-carved stamps on larger stones. It seems to get progressively harder to find smooth stones in a larger size. I suppose that makes sense. This was the only print that remotely turned out OK, and even then I had to retouch it with a black marker to fill in bits that didn´t print completely. For larger, less even stones, simpler prints might work better.

Square for the Quilt for Christchurch

This is my square for the Quilt for Christchurch. The Breeze radio station is asking for squares, with a message for Christchurch on it, and then a quilting group is going to join them all together into one enormous quilt and it will be hung in Christchurch Council (I think). Red and black are the colours of the local rugby team. Everyone from our Monday night sewing group is doing one, and we´ll send them in together. The instructions of what squares they wanted were a bit vague, so I hope that what I´ve done is somewhere in the parameters. The message is a Māori proverb, which means:

Nā tō rourou, nā taku rourou, ka ora ai te iwi

With your food basket and my food basket,the people will thrive.

The white things underneath are stylised fern fronds. Ferns are native to New Zealand and are everywhere here.

View from Mt Taranaki summit, North Island, New Zealand

Printing on driftwood

We had a great time at the beach around Kapiti on a sunny autumn day and I got the chance to collect some driftwood to try some prints on. Its quite hard to find larger, very flat pieces to try larger stamps on. These were quite small pieces.

For printing on wood, I think I used about the same amount of ink on the stamp as for stones (more than for paper, less than for fabric). The stamp had to be pressed on hard for about 10 seconds. Driftwood is never completely flat, so some bits of the stamp, which didn´t print properly, had to be touched up with a marker. I´m not sure its as useful as printing on stones though, as stones make good paperweights, fabric weights etc.

Kapiti Island, North Island, New Zealand