This is my printing table, with a large (8’ by 4’ I think) piece of MDF on top to make it big enough to screen pieces of fabric without having to keep moving them along.  It is comparatively uncluttered in this photo, believe it or not – you should see it at the moment!  The MDF is actually resting on two tables at right angles to each other and my sewing machine is on the other half of the second.  There are quite a few things stored underneath the tables too! 

I keep lots of stuff on these shelves and in the ‘column’ which my husband acquired from his office when they changed their filing system.  It holds lots of sewing and knitting equipment – knitting needles, patterns, thread, needles, zips, ribbon… those shallow drawers are quite useful for small items.  I have printing and stamping stuff on the open shelves and an assortment of stuff in the filing cabinet – electrical things like heat gun and soldering iron in one drawer, skeins of yarn in another.

These wooden shelves run the length of the room – my books are at one end, brushes and mark making equipment at the other and fabric in the middle… 

Here is some of the fabric (a small part) all rolled up so I can see it end on. 

My design wall is in front of these shelves and it is on wheels so I can move it to get to them.

All my paper and gocco accessories are in these stacking baskets in the corner of the room.  And by the window, more stacking baskets with paint and stuff like that – of course, they always overflow on to the floor as well!

DH recently painted the kitchen.  I decided on the colour for the walls and woodwork – he liked yellow; I wasn’t sure, but we needed something warm and light because it is north facing and rather damp.  So I took my inspiration from an autumn leaf on the cherry tree and this is the result:

I love the way the yellow shines through the hall…  It’s lighter than this in reality.

I gave the Victorian floor tiles a treat and polished them!  And promptly went down with a nasty bug… note to self… cut down on polishing floor tiles….

This is my original image:

I decided to stick with my reeds imagery.  The lighter, thicker marks were made with a Koh-i-noor Gioconda charcoal pencil and the thinner darker lines with a Phano china marker no 77 black.  I flashed it on to some unframed mesh and attached it to Guenther’s frame:

This is the frame – you’ll see that it is the same shape as the Riso hi-mesh screens so it fits in the machine well.  It is thin and flexible and went into the slots easily.

When attaching the screen, it is best to have a hi-mesh screen alongside to make sure you attach it the same way round!  I didn’t do this the first time so had a bit of reattaching to do!

I placed double sided tape all round the edges of the plastic frame and then stuck the mesh to it.  I then stuck sellotape along the two long sides and a small amount on the straight bits of the short sides.   For the plastic sheet which encloses the ink, I cut a rectangle off a cellophane bag and stuck it on to the relevant edge with double sided tape.  All this worked perfectly while I was printing.

I inked it up and put it into the machine:

Here are some of the results:

I think this last one was just after I had reinked it…

I plan to overprint these with various images, but you can see the amount of detail compared with the original image.  I was using 70 mesh thermofax screen – you can get 100 which is finer, but i don’t have any.   Sometime I will give it a go with a more detailed image to see how the 70 mesh holds up.

I also overprinted a few other prints:

And I printed a few reeds two or even three times on top of each other:

I could see these working well as a background.

And overprinted some decorated papers…
One thing to remember is to use ink blocking to keep the ink within the frame – this is a good idea always because it keeps the ink inside the printing area and saves ink, but especially with the plastic frames which are non absorbent – you don’t want ink in the slots of your Print Gocco!

If you want to order the plastic screens, go to www.patchworkshop.de and click on the top dropdown box in the left sidebar.  Scroll down nearly to the bottom and you will see it says Print Gocco. Click ‘go’ and it will take you there.    The site is in German but if you click the contact box you can email Guenther in English.

Guenther has also got a webpage with lots of hints for using his thermofax machines, a lot of which is relevant to Print Gocco users.  And he says that “the new Gocco-successor called A5 internally is (slowly but surely) developing”.

Actually this one is even more unclear because I used white ink and gold embossing powder!   But I did do some with white ink on black which wasn’t much better.

Anyway, they’re not like that anymore!  This afternoon I got the watercolour paints out and highlighted a few of the features, I hope more successfully:

Here’s a close up of that last picture:

I also tried a different sort of highlighting on the black one:

I did this one with a silver pen.

I stamped this one with my angel stamp as I think she looks pretty medieval too!   

These are all for sale in my shop on Etsy, by the way.  What do you think? Does my colouring improve them or spoil them?

First of all, why use Facebook and Twitter anyway? Well, I love Facebook’s ability to find people I’ve lost touch with over the years, and also to get to know people better from email discussion groups, etc. It is easy to post photos and link up to blog posts so your friends know when you have updated your blog. And you can link Twitter to your Facebook status (the little news feed which tells your ‘friends’ what you are doing) so you can post little snippets throughout the day: it is less intimidating than writing a whole blog post.

I use Firefox as my browser, so in this post I’ll be referring to my set up on it. I stopped using Internet Explorer a few years ago when I had problems getting online on it due to an ISP glitch, and never went back. The good thing about Firefox is that it is open source software: anyone can write plugins or addons for it. I installed the Facebook Toolbar but I found that, as I use a laptop, a whole new toolbar took up too much of the screen, so I worked out that if I just had the little ‘Facebook home’ icon on there that would be enough to remind me to visit the site regularly. So to get to Facebook I just click on that (it is a little blue house icon).

To customize the Firefox toolbars you click on View > Toolbars > customize, and a box pops up with lots of icons, separators, etc. You can then just click and drag stuff off the toolbars on to the box, and vice versa. It’s a good way of cleaning up your browser screen!

Another good Firefox addon which incorporates Twitter into my daily surfing is Twitterfox. When it is installed, it looks like a little blue ‘t’ on the bottom right taskbar. When I click on that ‘t’, a box pops up with all the recent Tweets of the people I follow and there is a box in which I can type my own tweets. It also automatically converts long urls into shortened versions. The point of Twitter, I think, is that you don’t keep up with the news exhaustively, but that you can dip in and out and see who has posted a snippet. You can download a Twitter client called Tweetdeck, which I tried once, but I found I just didn’t turn it on, whereas I have Firefox open all the time anyway! It is useful in that you can sort your followers into groups, but I have now decided to only follow as many people as I can keep up with, and Twitterfox is fine for that purpose.

I have linked Twitter to my Facebook updates so that whenever I tweet, it automatically updates my Facebook status. There is also a Facebook application called Networked Blogs, which will link your blog feed to Facebook so that whenever you publish a blog post, a brief excerpt shows up on your Facebook news feed. (The news feed is the page that you read when you go to Facebook – all the updates and ’stories’ from your friends). There are other ways to link a blog but this is the one I like best. Here is this blog on Networked Blogs if you’d like to see it in action.

Another way I use Facebook is an important one for me, because, belonging to a couple of busy email groups and having this blog, lots of people add me as their ‘friend’. Facebook has an ability to sort your friends into groups. So I have groups of university friends, groups of bloggers, groups of people from the various discussion groups I’m on, groups of family members, etc. Then if I just want to read the updates from one particular group, I can click on that group on the left hand side of the Facebook home page and it takes me to them. That way I’m not overwhelmed with updates from people I don’t know or miss updates from people I know well.

To sort friends into groups on Facebook, click on ‘Friends’ at the top of the page, and click on ‘Create New List’. This will bring up a box with all your friends in it, and you just select the ones you want to be in that group. Then just click on ‘create list’. To remove people from the list, you just click on their icons again. You can choose which groups show up in the left hand sidebar of the homepage by clicking and dragging them to rearrange them.

Another thing I like about Facebook is the ability to leave a comment on someone’s update: some quite amusing conversations have been struck up that way! It’s a nice way to have a bit of social contact during the daytime, which I often miss out on, working from home. There is also a chat facility which I’ve been known to use to call teenage sons from their bedrooms two floors up, to tell them that lunch is ready!)

Lastly, a lot of people complain about all those pesky ‘apps’ – quizzes, games and suchlike – that clog up their newsfeeds. Well, did you know you can hide them? If you hover to the right of one of them on the newsfeed, a little box pops up giving you options to hide them … and you can hide either all apps of that sort or the person posting them altogether…. And if you want to avoid apps altogether, try Facebook Lite – a new, pared down, Facebook designed for those with slow bandwidth. It is still in beta but I quite like it. The only issue I have with it is that you can’t have your friend groups in there.

Do leave a comment and tell me how YOU use Facebook and Twitter – it will be nice to have a conversation on the various possibilities!