Yesterday i spent a gorgeous afternoon with gorgeous friends Amanda and Rosie, and their friend Steve, with a lunch al fresco, a gorgeous walk through chestnut woods of the Amiata, pondering, wondering, wandering and a bit of flower photography thrown in…

and afterward, Rosie and i got down to business with some lino.

What sticky, messy, preschoolerish fun!

When I packed my three-only boxes bound for Italy, I forewent shoes and clothes so that I could take as many jewellery making tools and art materials from the old Kittykatmandoo studio as possible. I carted around 5kg of lino alone, along with ink, rollers, paper, cutters – to name a few items – and aside from a couple of Christmas cards in December, I hadn’t really put them to good use. Till yesterday.

We were unstoppable; a creative machine!

I found a half finished lino block [the cats at the bottom of this post] that i had begun in may 2012, a week or so before i left for Italy on holiday. Yesterday I finished it off quickly, if not more so just to get myself back into the swing of things and to demonstrate to Rosie the how-to, although, as you can see by her first ever owl prints, she didn’t need much demonstration. Like a duck to water [or, perhaps, more fitting, like an owl to the night sky].