Getting started with Gelli Plate printing

If like me you’d not heard of this before, it’s a fun way of printing using a brayer roller and a flexible (gelli) plate to create prints with layers of colour and texture. You can buy gelli plates online, and while they’re not cheap (an A4 size plate is currently about £30) it should last many years. And if you’re wondering why gelli, then it refers to the gelatine used to create the printing plates.

I’ve only recently discovered this fun craft after being intrigued by a local Adult Learning class, which I’ve since signed up for. My course has four two hour sessions and cost me £18 - I wasn’t sure what to expect, but reasoned that I had nothing to lose. Attending one two hour session for that price is good value, four sessions is exceptional. As it turned out, it’s good fun and I’m definitely heading back next week to find out - and create - more.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a ‘printing’ workshop and this one looks to have more immediate results than lino printing, which I’ve tried before and have done a couple of times since learning.

Equipment for Gelli Printing

Apart from the gelli plate and brayer - I don’t have my own yet, and these are provided in the class I’m taking - the other things you’ll need to get started are paper (and lots of it), acrylic paints and some wet wipes. You might also want to wear an apron as removing acrylic paints from clothes can be tricky, not something I’ve tried yet, and hopefully I won’t need to either!

I had five basic colours - white, black, yellow, pink and blue - and this was enough to get started, though after a few prints I knew that I was keen to add more variety to my paint range. After the class I stopped off at The Works and picked up a set of 20 colourful paints to add to my newly growing paint stash. I’ll be looking out for the perfect tin to store them in soon too no doubt! I also picked up another pad of paper - the £2 bumper pad for kids’ drawing sort, as I think that will also be handy.

My first print

Like everyone else in the class I was keen to get on and do some printing. The advice was to start with our lightest colour, so for me that was yellow as white paint on white paper was unlikely to be that exciting! I wish I’d got a picture of the gelli plate, but it is weird - quite tactile, definitely flexible and well, squidgy in a solid sort of way.

After dabbing on a couple of pea sized blobs of paint it was time to use the brayer (or roller) to spread this across the surface. Here a light touch is everything, and you have to work quickly - especially in a warm room. Then your paper goes on top of the paint, and using your hands you smooth the paper over the gelli plate. This transfers the paint to the paper, and voila once the paper is lifted you have your print.

This is mine:

After an hour or so of chat, this was quite exciting - though I take your point, that it’s not really that exciting. But the point of this was to practice how much paint to use, and for that it was effective as my next print was barely there yellow, which I quickly printed over with pink.

As you can see there’s some texture and some missing parts, but that’s ok and is part of the beauty of this kind of printing. It isn’t perfect, and you’re never really sure how it’ll turn out. If that’s an issue for you, then gelli plate printing might not be for you!

Using two colours

This is where I felt restricted by my paint colours, and why I added to my repertoire so quickly. There’s many combinations you can do with the basic colours, but with more colours the combinations is almost endless, though the challenge will be to work out the balance on what looks good, and what’s too much, and to avoid over rolling and ending up with ‘sludge’ no matter what colours you start with.

The gelli plate is still the same size, so with two (or more) colours you need to reduce the size of the paint blobs you add to the plate so it’s not awash with paint. I tried with yellow and pink, then some blue and finally some black - with mixed results.

Because of how the gelli printing works you don’t need to clean your gelli plate in between prints, but it’s definitely worthwhile rollering off the excess paints in between applications. That’s not onerous at all as you can use a single sheet of paper for that, and it can result in some textured and very usable prints too.

Cleaning up afterwards

No special equipment is needed for this either - soap and water to wash the brayer roller, and we used a wet wipe to remove any paint residue that remained on the gelli plate. That’s my sort of cleaning up!

Using my gelli print artwork

Clearly these gelli prints aren’t masterpieces! But even these will have plenty of uses for my other crafts, the obvious ones are card making and collaging. I can see that once I’ve learnt more about adding texture these will be even more useful, and it’s likely that a single gelli printing session will generate prints for a good while, as well as providing the opportunity for a mindful afternoon.

I’m interested to learn more about this craft, and how texture can be added with items such as bubble wrap, packing tape (I have a fair bit of that leftover from our house move!) and especially leaves and more, I’m sure I’ll have one or two items in my craft room to try out too. I’ve another three weeks remaining in the class, so I’ll share more as I learn new skills.

But it’s definitely a promising start introducing me to a brand new craft, and I can’t wait to see where this takes me.

Bagels, cream cheese & jam

Back in the day when MOH and I got together, and when we were ‘commuting’ between our respective houses one of MOH’s specialities was a bagel, cream cheese and blueberry jam. Something I’d not had before, but it was quite a hit. Initially this became a staple weekend breakfast, but over the years somehow it’s fallen off our radar, and I’m not really sure why.

Sometimes though life reminds you of these things, and circumstances even align. That’s exactly happened last week and resulted in a throwback breakfast, and very tasty it was too.

MOH had a planned trip to London, and as he would when we lived in Greenwich he stopped off at Brick Lane for some bagels. They really are the best, and I’ve an inkling that it was when we tasted these bagels (or beigels) that the shop bought bagels fell out of favour - there really is no comparison, trust me.

While MOH was in town I tested out my new preserving pan with the blackberries we picked from the local hedgerow following a recipe I’d tried before. I’m quite partial to a blackberry jam it seems, and had written about two on here before. This time I opted for the blackberry and lime jam, which simply adds lime zest to the jam mixture.

We picked about half a kilo of blackberries and that turned into two jars of jam - as you can see one’s a little larger than a usual sized jam jar, and there was also enough to fill a ramekin which we’d keep in the fridge and use immediately.

MY HOMEMADE BLACKBERRY & LIME JAM PICTURED ON ONE OF MY NEWEST SUSTAINABLE ‘KITCHEN TOWELS’ MADE FROM MY WONKIEST PATCHWORK BLOCKS AND OLD TOWELS SEWN TOGETHER. PRETTY AND PRETTY USEFUL TOO!

So with MOH bringing home the bagels, and my afternoon jam making - all I needed was some cream cheese, which fortuitously I had in the fridge. (It’s a great fridge standby and as well as on bagels, it’s also good for pasta and to make a quick cheese sauce for cauliflower cheese or lasagne - and it usually has a long ‘use by’ date too).

So Brick Lane bagels, cream cheese and homemade blackberry and lime jam (not the blueberry jam we used to have, but close enough) and what a breakfast it was. The jam even solicited unprompted praise from MOH, so a result!

Isn’t it great when circumstances align?

Falling for Tula Pink's Parisville Deja Vu

It’s been a while since I’ve started on a brand new craft project, I’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to finish some of the ones I already have on the go. And then I packed up all my craft stuff before my carpal tunnel surgery in June, we moved house and while I’m getting there sorting out my new craft room, I haven’t really done anything new, until now.

I was really taken with the English Paper Piecing (EPP) patchwork I saw at the Stitch Festival back in Spring, but the thing that stopped me buying a kit then was the concern that my hands would misbehave and go numb while I was sewing, which had happened a fair bit with my cross stitch - and was probably the thing that tipped me into going to the doctors to get them seen to.

I remember making, or attempting to make a hexie patchwork throw when I was a teenager, shortly after we moved house, for my new bedroom. The colours were pale pinks and greys to match my newly decorated room. You’ll not be surprised to learn that it took me a while, and I’m not sure it ever got finished, or what happened to it - I wish I’d kept it now though!

But anyway many years later, another house move and after successful carpal tunnel surgery, I found myself browsing through the Tula Pink materials and kits. I’ve been influenced by my SIL on the Tula Pink front, which I’m thankful for, and I love the bright colours. No surprises there.

So that’s how I found myself the proud owner of a couple of the Tula Pink Parisville Deja Vu Hexy kits. Two because I had no plan, and so I wanted to make sure I had enough, for my no plans, and to avoid another set of shipping costs if I needed more at any point in the future.

AREN’T THEY GORGEOUS?

I was hoping a plan would present itself. And it did.

As I was sorting through and getting straighter in my craft room I realised my sewing box and the pigeon shelves could do with a bit of a revamp. Back in 2016 they were both painted a grey-green colour which was great for our last house, but not so much for our new one.

Our new house has much less colour in it - all the walls are white, which surprisingly I really like, and the other dominant colours are charcoal grey and oak. That means there’s plenty of scope to add colour in our furnishings, which is where my plan started to develop.

I plan to paint both the sewing box and shelves a dark grey - I’ve not found one I like enough yet, but I’m still looking (loosely) and I know it’s out there. As before, I want the insides of my sewing box to contrast with the outside, and I’ve got bright yellow and bright pink in my mind.

I’ll need to recover the top too, and a pop of colour is just what is needed. And one that I’ve put together myself from my new hexy kits, will be just the thing, especially if I actually get it finished!

To paraphrase the A Team, I love it when my no plans come together!

Maximising my shipping costs

While I was browsing, and to make the USA shipping costs truly efficient I also ordered a couple of project bags - in truth I could have ordered a whole lot more and they are just as gorgeous. Yes I know there are Tula Pink resellers in the UK, but they didn’t have the items I wanted, so it made sense to maximise those costs. Let’s be clear though, I’m under no illusion that there won’t be future purchases.

The project bags will be really handy - I’m already using the spotty racoon A4 sized one for an embroidery project which is to repair and upcycle a t-shirt of mine. I’ll share more on that soon as it’s nearly done - I finished my original plan, and liked it so much I’ve carried on!

I’m pretty sure it won’t be long before I find the perfect use for the larger of the project bags either - I couldn’t choose between the two designs, proving once again choice is a dangerous thing!