Our Cat Scan

 Ranna the cat has appointed herself as the quality controller for Coulter and Coulter.  All furniture is cat scanned to ensure its up to standards.  When I am printing she perches on the stool and watches very closely.  When I am sewing her perch moves to the window sill in order to make sure I am doing it correctly.  Then in the evenings she spends a lot of time wandering over the keyboard of my laptop, trying to post inspirational cat messages on Facebook.

Back to Basics - Messing about with Shapes

 At the end of this month Peter and I will be involved in Makertorium, at Te Papa.  We are going to spend a whole day demo-ing what we do.  This has set me to thinking -  for the last six months or so I have been busy chasing my tail I think.  Too much focus on the sewing part and not on the printing bit.  The bit that I enjoy the most, where my creativity can really flow.    I have been so focused on end product and not on why I decided to start printing in the first place.

 So today after I finished printing orders, I had a bit of a play about with new techniques.  Ways I can produce prints with out Peter's carved blocks.  He is far to busy making furniture now (apparently) to carve anything for me and I want to keep all my fingers so no carving for me. These are not my finished fabrics, these are my note book, sketch pad, mess it up type thing.  I have been trying out using a gelli printing plate.  It is a lot of fun and produced some great results.  not sure yet how I will pull it all together but the ideas are percolating.

Almost forgot I have some great ideas for getting people involved in printing on the day with a minimum of mess, I hope.

In the best traditions of British Comedy

Oh dear, printing was going so well today.... until the cat obviously thought I was not paying her enough attention and leaped up onto the bench where I was mixing inks.  She landed with one foot in the red and one foot in the blue, then ran off all over the house with me chasing her screaming, "No".  The kids just stood around killing themselves laughing watching the show.  Thankfully there was only one small casualty, a little blue footprint right on the edge of some organic cotton that had been laid out to dry.   The rest of the footprints were easily cleaned, thankfully we have wooden floors in our house.  Though I do suspect I will be finding footprints in strange places for quite a few weeks.