DIY Fantastic: Watercolour Greeting Cards

Ever find yourself caught short just before an important event, a birthday, an anniversary? No? Then maybe it's just me. Because I'm afraid I always do. But, my go-to back up in a situation like this is to whip out my card stock and some paints and rustle up a quick watercolour card.

Sometimes watercolours get a bad press, they can be difficult to manage because everything dries so fast! Plus they are very different from other mediums such as acrylics and oils that you can re-work over and over, they often have a life of their own and the dry result can look very different. But for me that's the beauty of watercolours, the speed makes it unpredictable and means you get a different result every single time. Plus it's great for a busy gal since it's so fast, free and fun! There are absolutely no barriers to entry you, all you need is watercolour paper, watercolour paints, a fine brush, water and some inspiration:

I used A6 watercolour such as this and drew a gentle line down the middle, using a ruler, where the crease would later be made to turn it into a card. I used half of the paper for my illustration. In this instance it was all about fishing vouchers for the family, so I set to it armed with a wikipedia's Brown Trout page for inspiration. :p I very roughly sketched out the shape in pencil, mostly to get the proportions right and then I cheated a little by using black ink to create an outline and add some detail.

However, to be honest there's not so much detail on a fish, so launched in with the colours pretty swiftly! I must admit to being a little free and easy with the colour interpretations of the so-called 'brown' trout. But who wants a card with a brown fish on the front??! ;) I didn't want to feel restricted by the black lines, that just makes it all a bit cautious. So I took relish in going outside the lines, quite liberating in fact!

I tried a couple of different perspectives and even got a bit adventurous and branched out from the brown trout to something a bit more exotic! 

What do you think? Why not give watercolours a whirl? Anything goes and the more interpretive the better! And if at first you don't succeed, try try and try again! (Practice really does make perfect with these bad boys!!)

DIY fantastic: hand lined envelopes

Bit surreal there, we went from high summer in Ibiza to full on winter Christmas mode. Hope that wasn't too much for the senses! Anyway, December in the real world was super busy as usual. We've been beavering away working on our save the dates for the wedding, which we wanted to double up as our Christmas cards, and hence had to be dispatched asap! I shall be sharing all the details of the cards themselves and how we made them shortly, but in the meantime here's part of the story for today - the cute kraft paper lined envelopes we made!

Quite a simple project really. Well in theory it is, until you multiply it by 60 times and then it's a whole lotta envelopes to prepare!!! :s

What we needed:
1. Kraft paper, or any other decorative paper that takes your fancy. For this one, I used kraft paper with small sparky trees on it, for a Chrismassy vibe. But you could easily pretty papers for all other times of the year.
2. Plain coloured envelopes
3. Glue stick
4. Scissors
5. Card to create a template. I used a magazine cover, hence the lovely lady sporting the sparkly dress! :)

To create a template I used a process of trial and error until it was just the right size to fit within the gummed edges of the envelope flap and then on the body of the envelope side was big enough to cover the whole visible area. This was basically the hardest bit! Once you've got a template you're happy with you're as good as done! :p

Steps 1-3 below: Take your template and place it on the face up paper aligned in accordance with the print e.g. to ensure my little fir trees were growing upwards and not down! Draw around it and repeat, aligning them in order to maximise the usage you can get from the width of the paper.

Steps 4-6 below: take an envelope and kraft paper cut out, using the stick glue, cover the back of the envelope an the flap with glue. Carefully slip the cut out into the envelope and align it carefully to leave the gummed area on the flap free. Press down the kraft paper and smooth it out to give a clean wrinkle free finish. Finally flip the envelope over and create a crease to close the envelope.

And that's it, you have your gorgeous hand lined envelopes at the ready for all your snail mail! This could be done with any combination of colours and patterned papers, matching or contrasting, just get experimenting! It'd be cute for personalised greetings cards, thank you letters for all those lovely Christmas pressies you or in preparation for a valentines day cards - to make someone feel that little bit more special!

DIY Fantastic: Letterpress Course - Part II

As promised, here we have Part II of our epic letterpress course. And in due course I'm sure we'll continue with a part III, IV, V etc as we progress with our training and projects! So far we'd shared the key steps in preparing the type and locking it up in the press ready to print. So next we shall share a bit more of the actual printing process and the fruits of our labours!

This is the studio in East London, the home and base for the London Book Arts Centre. It's a functional but funky mix of essentials, storage and antique printing presses!

The centre has a wide range of presses, you can see some of them in action below. I would love to give you a dappled history of the various presses at the centre, but I'm afraid I don't know enough of their history (yet)! You'll just have to arrange a visit yourself instead. :)

In addition to the working presses they also have a number of these beauties dotted around. I wonder if they are still in working order, but I don't care either way - they are magnificent sculptures and works of art in themselves!

Rolls and rolls of colourful bookbinding canvas...

The first go on the printing press, that look of concentration on my face. Ha, my pesky tongue is always a clear giveaway!!

And finally, below is the result of my first attempt, yeay! I rather like the effect, the textures and variations in density it created give it lots of character! :) But it needed some tweaking to perfect the quality of the printing to the highest standard, aherm!

Making progress in the right direction...

Having a little inspection...

And here's the final print. You can see that it still has a lot of texture, as a result of the age and level of use of the wooden type, but I love that! All I need now is a photo frame so I can get this bad boy up on the wall, how exciting!

And now here's Izzy finishing the locking up of her type in the press and looking very happy about it! :p

And her prints filling up the drying rack...

These girls used a slightly different printing press and used individual small rollers to apply the ink directly to the type. The results of this vibrant hot orange were awesome and the hand rolling enables a few more fancy techniques such as a gradient of colour to be applied.

Finally, the ever so slightly less glamorous (but nonetheless essential) process of cleaning up the presses at the end of the evening. I think we were using baby oil as the cleaning fluid, cheap and effective! :)

Tah-dah! Looking incredibly pleased and proud! :p

Believe it or not, we've already been back to LCBA to add another string to our bow! This time we learnt all about the art of foil embossing so we'll share a few peeks on this next time round. Anyone else developing an addiction to letterpressing?! Welcome to Letterpressers Anonymous, lets share stories!

DIY Fantastic: Letterpress Class Part I

Have you ever heard of the London Book Arts Centre? If not then you'd best check it out, and fast! It's a fab space in deepest darkest East London that's dedicated to celebrating and keeping alive the practice of traditional book art methods. These range from printing to bookbinding and everything in between. You can read more about the concept behind the centre on the Guardian here and you can check out some of their latest events, courses and photos at their tumblr site here. Plug, plug, plug! :p

Isabel and I went along for an introduction to the letterpress printing method a couple of weeks ago and had an absolute blast. So much so that we've actually already been back to learn more! Hehe. We're still a little shakey on the technical details and jargon, but we've certainly been inspired. I'm hatching a plan to print our wedding invitations for the big day next year ourselves so we went along to find out what we could and couldn't do and learn some of the basics! Here are some of the highlights from centre and the course we took:

Letters letters everywhere! (Heaven?!) Below an introduction to the printing presses with Simon and taking notes for next time!

The stores of antique typeface below, real works of beauty. Each tray holds one set of type of a particular font and size and are actually very very heavy! The trays are split into compartments for each letter and symbol to make things easier to find.

We spent some time perusing the fantastic selection of fonts and chose one each to experiment with. I went for a bold, wide sans-serif and Izzy went for an obscure, elaborate and italic one! Such polar opposites! :p Below you can see us building our quotes out of the metal type in the composing sticks (hope that's the right term!!):

We also got to play with the wooden set (my favourite!). The have such character compared to the metal type. You can see the age on them as they've been used over and over again for various print projects over the years. This really translates into the final print through the grain, texture and density of the final print and is what really makes each one so unique.

Finally, once we're happy with the composition it was all locked securely into the press to fix it in place ready for printing.

And since this is becoming a marathon post I've turned it into 'Part I' and we'll show you the fruits of our labours in 'Part II' shortly! Suffice to say we learnt heaps in just this one session, but we clearly have so much more to learn still! The team at LBCA was fantastic, helpful, informative and friendly and they have clearly built up a community around the centre which acts as a resource, studio space and refuge for the members who use it on a regular basis. If you have even so much as a passing interest in books and printing I can't recommend it highly enough!