A Matter of Momentum

I attended an art workshop yesterday at the local arts council, called "Mixed Media Printmaking." I'd taken classes at their print shop before and thoroughly enjoyed it, so when the opportunity came up, I jumped for it. At first, I wasn't sure if it was going to be a repeat of a past class I had taken, but I was hungry enough for the experience to not really care too much if it was.

I felt immediately happy as soon as I entered. I was greeted heartily by the instructor and was pleased to see that it was a small class of five in the room. I was glad about that because we all had to share the same printing press, and it can be a lot of waiting around if there are too many people.

The class included drypoint engraving into plexiglass sheets. I didn't realize how much I would enjoy that, but I'm learning that I really like the opportunity to draw whenever I get it. I used a reference image to do this etching:

I worked on it until well into the lunch break, but I just wasn't getting the result I wanted. I noticed that I was working faster and faster, and that is usually a sign that I need to stop and take a break. It's like the momentum builds behind me and my brain goes into a panic and I try to fix everything at once. It happens all the time with my knitting projects and I could feel it happening here.

I stopped, left the room, ate my sandwich, and chatted with the others for a while. And when I came back, I pulled a test print with some black ink on the press and was pleased with the results:

And then I went off and played with some of the other colours. I painted some of the ink directly onto the plate and then rolled some ink onto some leaves and placed them on the plate as well. I was amazed at how nicely that work:

I even pulled a "ghost print" right after that - a print where you just put another piece of paper on and see how much of the remaining ink will make a print. It sort of looked like light pencil crayon:

I didn't have a great deal of time after that, but I messed around with a few other colours just to see what I would get:

I was glad I attended. It was a good way to spend a Saturday, especially since I've spent a lot of my weekends procrastinating and lying around recently. It felt much better to be exploring and learning. I think I needed to feel that momentum, even if it was a bit out of control for a while.

Today, I had grand intentions of doing some knitting, but I was distracted by this recent purchase for Seymour which arrived way too big for him. It says "Security" on the back, but he did not look all that imposing in it:

Good thing he's got his own personal tailor. I laid one of his existing sweaters over it and marked off the length:

Cut off the excess:

And used a seam ripper to take off the ribbing:

My client became impatient:

I pinned everything together:

Used an overlocking stitch on the machine:

And just look at that boss:

He immediately went back to work. No rest for him:

 I am going to see if I can build some momentum up and do some actual knitting this evening. I hope you have a good week!