My First Print

My first woodblock print was my own wedding invitations.  They were actually originally my husband's idea.  He is from Gloucester originally and was aware of an artist in the area, Isabel Natti, who had a shop in the area.  We picked up some supplies and I began to experiment: the sunflower print was my first.  After much thought and planning, I decided to do a booklet for my invitations that involved the sunflower print and TWO other prints.  I created original prints for all three pages of the wedding booklets my guests received, and I had about 70 invitations to send to them. That means that I did approximately 210 prints!  It was a lot of work but I achieved the rustic look and feel for our wedding, which was on a farm near Hudson, New York.  The beauty of woodblock printing is that you can make infinite copies of the image that you carve.  Check out one of the final products:

The booklet (4 pages):

The sunflower print:

The invitation page (All of the letters need to carved backwards!):

 

The third page, the day-after brunch invitation.  We had our brunch in the barn on the farm.

 Notice the family dog, Targhee, to the right of the barn.  

There are so many other purposes for woodblock prints.  Invitations are only the beginning!  Stay tuned for more...