Village Scene and Breakdown Printing

I am going a little stir crazy as it does not seem to have stopped raining for months now- yes we did have a couple of good days this week, but I did a lot of catch up washing as we have no dryer at our present house and there is no point buying one now seeing we pack everything away late November. I also can't do any dyeing as I do it outside, or much printing either as I also do that outside.

I have been doing a lot of hand stitching- but progress is slow so very little to show for what takes up a fair bit of time. The other day whilst crusing blogs I saw mention of using water colour pencils and breakdown printing. I think I simply read about it on Gloria Hansen's blogpost about the wet studio at Festival of Quilts at Birmingham- but immediately a little light went on. When we were in New Zealand earlier this year I bought some Derwent Inktense pencils and fabric medium to play around with on fabric whilst we were travelling around. Then I remembered I had bought some water colour crayons ages ago- not sure why, I think they may have beckoned to me, although I also remember going through a coloured stage in my journal a couple of years ago. So I thought if I can do a rubbing with transfer crayons then I must be able to use the same process to transfer with water colour crayons.

I found an old silk screen I had in the shed ( which isn't terribly useful for breakdown printing as it has holes in the bottom- I need to buy some new mesh)I put my village linocut underneath the screen mesh and rubbed it with a black water colour crayon. I then coloured in the bits that weren't black with the other crayons. I have to say the space where I printed was far from ideal- there were bumps in the surface ( which you can see on the resulting print) and I only had a tiny amount of Extender print base ( the emulsion that printing ink pigments are suspended in). I was really blown away by the resulting colour and neatness of the print- and even the greyed second print has a certain amount of charm- I couldn't do any more prints because I ran out of the extender base (will have to buy some more now that Kraftkolour is up and running again). The greying of the print could have been avoided by using fresh extender base with each pass of the squeegy ( and I seem to have lost my larger squeegy- so much of my stuff is all over the place because I have no set base to work)

Anyway i can see myself doing more of these!- and needing some more water colour crayons.