thrifted tins

Some of my recent thrift store scores include a twelve-sided polygon tin in a sweet robin's egg blue colour, a vintage cookie tin (which will be gifted to Jaime of Send More Mail to hold some of her pretty stamps) , and some spools of vintage thread.

Happy Days, everyone!

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mama's boy

I finally caved and cut his hair. It was getting mighty long and unruly at the sides. I held off because I was attached to the silly notion that he'd be losing his 'babyness' if I cut his baby hair. I was wrong. He's still very much a babe and dare I say, even cuter? :)

I'm incredibly lucky to be this boy's mom.

Happy Mother's Day!

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simple cookies

The other day I bought a packet of Snackimals for Marcus as a change from his rice cracker snacks. It was his first foray into cookie-land and he liked it very much. I almost bought him some more but decided it would be easier, less expensive and healthier for him if I just made something similar myself. This isn't to say that the ingredients in Snackimals is terrible, quite the opposite. I'm finding it a pleasure to bake and cook for the babe whenever I can and figured that making cookies couldn't be too difficult.  I came across this recipe and didn't hesitate to start on it right away. Simple and with just a few ingredients. Yes, they are supposed to be animal cookies but I didn't have any cutters so I used an olive oil bottle cap to make the circles. M was none the wiser :) The cookies turned out great, not too crumbly and a little bit soft because of the yogurt ingredient. I did make a few substitutions to the recipe - I used organic unsweetened coconut, steel cut oats (instead of plain oats), brown rice flour (instead of whole wheat flour) and lemon yogurt (instead of plain yogurt) and added a touch of cinnamon. The recipe yielded approximately 40 cookies (1.5" in diameter). These are super snacks for on-the-go!

*Oh, and I didn't have a rolling pin so I just used a stainless steel water bottle, filled it with cold water and wrapped it in saran wrap before rolling the dough out. My kitchen lacks in some basic baking tools. I think I may need to change that!

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mama!

 Just the other day, Marcus called me "mama" for the first time and I just about died.  

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linoleum block on the lino-o-scribe

Over the last couple of weeks I was able to try out my first linoleum carving with the lino-o-scribe. Before I started I was so afraid that it wasn't going to work for some reason. But I gathered up my materials anyway and hoped for the best. I got some really helpful hints from Kinga, who also owns a Morgan Line-O-Scribe, on which type of linoleum she uses and how to set it up in the bed so that it's about type-high.

My first step was to decide on the size of linoleum I wanted. That was the easy part. Because the press bed is 14x22", I wanted to go as big as I could. The largest block I could find at my local art supplies store was 12x18" which was perfect because I sourced some cardstock at the same size. 

Next was trying to figure out what design I wanted to see printed. But I also had to think about 1.) what I could easily carve out and 2.) something that wouldn't take me too long do. I decided on hand-drawing a series of narrow hexagon shapes with various widths of lines on the inside of each. This was a good first-time design because there was just enough carving that I didn't get tired of doing it and that I got to use a couple of the carving blades. All of the straight lines made the carving go nice and smoothly too! Also, there's a nice balance between the negative and positive space. I wanted to carve as little of the lino off to make the best use of it's size. By keeping the design large, I was also able to see if there were any problematic, low or weak spots with the press and ink rollers.

After finally getting the lino to the height that the ink rollers could make contact with it, I was ready to test the block out. I was happily surprised with the result but as expected, I had some more carving to do at the top and bottom edges of the negative space to have it completely free of an impression.

As you can see in the photos of the prints, there is some variation with the ink coverage. I actually don't mind that. This design would look very different if the colour was completely solid throughout.

All in all, I am very happy with my first experiment with the line-o-scribe and a lino block. The press is in fantastic condition as are the rollers. I see myself doing many more of these lino carvings!

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