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I feel like my feet haven’t touched the ground since my last blog post, I have been a very busy bunny. Marathon training, another tradeshow, pot throwing, lots of visual merchandising in the stores, training a new team member, lino cutting and of course the dreaded admin (I really couldn’t ignore the pile on my desk any longer, I’m hoping to see the wood again by the end of next week!)
The days don’t seem to have enough hours to get everything done, I have noticed that day light appears to be lasting longer at last, I think it was nearly 6pm when darkness over took last night, Yippee, I for one am so much happier with more daylight in my life. Things are so much easier when we have longer days; it seems there is more time to do all those things we need to do on top of work.
Last week I returned to my lino cutting classes, something I am particularly enjoying. I love the way lino print challenges the way in which I tackle an image; you have to think in terms of colour blocks rather than gradients. I had been working on a drawing of my local town over the Christmas period. This image is going to form my first reduction lino print (I’ve heard this method appropriately called suicide lino, if you make a mistake there is no going back). I’ll try to explain further, Lino printing is a form of printmaking, where the printing plate is cut into lino. Yes your right, lino as in linoleum, the stuff that also is used for floor covering. Once cut, a piece of paper is placed over it, and then run through a printing press or pressure applied by hand to transfer the ink to the paper. The result is a linocut print. For a reduction print run, used when working with more than one colour, after the first colour print, normally the lightest colour the lino is then cut into again, re-inked, first print paper re-applied and then ran through the press again, are you still with me? I hope so. Anyway at my first session I managed to get 20 prints of my first colour done, I was literally running to complete the job. Here’s a picture of my first colour, I’m hoping to complete the rest of the cutting before returning next week, so my next blog may well include images of the final piece. Fingers crossed it works.
The weekend was spent in Birmingham at Spring Fair a massive tradeshow which uses up all 20 halls at the NEC; I had an exhausting two days walking all the halls, in search of new product lines for the stores. I love seeing the ways in which the exhibitors put their stands together, trying to entice us buyers to part with our budgets, this year I can safely say the cactus is a big thing, the bigger the better!
Somehow I did manage my long training run on Tuesday morning. I had to persuade Paul my hubby to drop me 11 miles from the house, I didn’t want to have the option of shortening my run and this way I had to get home. It was literally the middle of nowhere, the end of a road somewhere in Dartmoor. The run was a pretty pleasant one, crisp with bright sunshine. As I neared my home the heavens opened and throw what felt like heavy pins down on me, hail, my god its evil stuff and when clad in lycra it hurts that little bit more. The end result was a good one though I did manage to run the last mile in just over 8 minutes and 30 seconds quite an improvement on my 10 to 11 minute miles; motivation really does come in lots of different ways!
I had a lovely surprise sponsor this week too; the chairman of Back Care has sponsored me which has really touched my heart. It wasn’t something I thought they would do so a big thank you to Back Care and the rest of you lovely lot that have done the same, if you haven’t and would like to support me here’s the link. Please don’t forget to let me know you’ve read the blog, a comment or like would be great. More rambling soon, bye for now.
