new design

Wow, I never meant to be gone so long. And I can't believe that it's already close to the middle of September. Part of the reason I've been so absent is that we took a really lovely and needed trip to California. The main reason for the trip was a dear friends' wedding, but we stayed a bit longer and got to have some adventures on our own. Ben had never been to California, and I hadn't been back since I moved back east, so we had a wonderful time discovering new things and seeing old friends. Part of the reason I haven't posted about it (even though we took about a million pictures) is some really geeky computer data management issues. I have about half a gig left on my computer and I'm too lazy and overwhelmed by it all to figure out a good (and more permanent) system for downloading and storing all those pictures. Boring. Anyway, when we do figure something out, I'll be sure to share because we saw lots of great and inspiring stuff.

In the mean time, I wanted to share my new acorn design which will soon be adorning sachets. I've been wanting to add a third design to the sachet repertoire because three's are much better than two's for a collections sake. The acorn was part of an all-over print design I made last winter that never really went anywhere, so I decided to put it into action on it's own. That, and I was reminded when our frisky squirrel neighbor started to try to bury his acorns in our window boxes again yesterday. Which reminds me that I should go and close the screen that I left open when watering the plants. We've already had an almost squirrel break in, and cats have tried too. But that's a story for another day.

(the print in the pic above is just made with a regular old pigment ink pad, which I use to test the print while I'm carving it, haven't had a chance to print it for real. I like to wait until I have a bunch of stuff to print before breaking out the brayer so I don't waste ink. I'll be sure to show you the real thing soon.)