Lino prints

I really need to finish packing for my trip. But I also had to help Miriam finish some preparations for the ward Christmas party on Friday. I went through...many emotions...when they moved the date to the one weekend I would not be here, but Andrew assures me that he can help Miriam pull it off. 

I will have to rely on pictures to tell me how the evening went.

One of the stations at the party will be a card making/letter writing station. The Young Women (after much insistence on Miriam's part) had a stamp carving activity, so those will be available with blank cards and ink pads for people to stamp their own cards. People are encouraged to write a nice thank you to someone in the ward, and then the Young Women will deliver the cards on a Sunday down the road (after making sure people who need cards got one...). Or people can write to one of the missionaries from our ward. Or to a neighbour. Or grandparent. Or whoever. 

Deep down inside, Miriam wanted the Young Women to make linocut prints...but that activity didn't ever pan out. And it's easier to carve rubber than linoleum, anyway (or wood). So she'll have to live with the stamps. 

But she decided to make a sunstone linocut and it turned out beautifully. 

This card she decided she's keeping for herself (but people will be open to use one of these premade cards if they want to)—started as a mistake because she simply didn't put enough black on the card, so she redid it in blue and it made a stereoscopic/grunge/overprint effect:

Mostly we tried to keep things simple—just one colour, straight from the jar:

Aside from the sunstone, we pulled from our archive of Christmas linocuts and made...about 100 more prints...

I know I for sure did the stained glass nativity and the fa-la-la-la-la cuts. I think Rachel did the Christmas ornament, the snowflake, and the geometric nativity. Benjamin did the Christmas tree.

It's probably about time for us to renew our collection of Christmas linocuts since these designs have been seen before a few times, but...that will probably have to wait until next year given how the lead-up to this Christmas season has gone. It was fun to break out these old cuts, though, to give them some new life!