Starting and stopping and stuff

When we last left our hero, she had a stack of unsuccessful prints, a ridiculously long new scarf, and a date to spend several hours as an admiring groupie whilst her Darling Man played gigs in another town.

Check, check and check. (With a big thanks to everyone who sympathized with posted-failure-as-public-pants-dropping.)

The DM's gigs at Adams Mountain Cafe in Manitou Springs went really well. So well, in fact, that they booked him for four more dates. Hooray! There's a gig diary over at David's blog, Optimistic Bits, if gory details are your thing. (Photo by Ted Castro.)

But now it's Monday. Time to put aside the groupie guise and get back to work. (Well, right after I take a long walk. Latest spring arrivals: black phoebe, cliff swallow, cinnamon teal, double-crested cormorant, house wren.)

I'm getting a new linocut underway, but at a glacial pace. It's not entirely my fault. (Really!) I made two trips to the lumber yard today, on a quest for two 15 x 15-inch slabs of 3/4-inch particle board. I buy unmounted linoleum and trim it to size when I want to use squares and other non-standard formats, but I like to work on a mounted block. Typically I can get my mounting boards cheap because I buy scrap lumber that the shop guru cheerfully cuts to my specs.

Except for today, when there's not a single chunk to be found that's 15 inches wide.

After much hemming and hawing I decided I could go with something 14 x 14, but we still didn't have enough for two boards. (I want two boards because I'm considering two separate reduction blocks for this next image and it would be best to have them cut at the same time so I'm sure they're identical.)

(sigh) I am SO not patient.

I took the single 14 x 14 board so I can get started, and hopefully someone else with a bigger project will create just the scrap I need in the next few days. An illustration project just popped back to the top of the priority list late this afternoon, so my impatience won't be appeased right away, anyway.

In the meantime, I'll be compulsively checking the post to see if my copy of "Printmakers Today" has arrived from Schiffer Publishing! Today I received the press release and other assorted advertising propaganda.... very exciting! I'll be sure to say more about it and put up all the details when I get a book in my hands, but in the meantime here's a shot of the cover and a link to the publisher's site. I'm not sure how many of my images they included, but there's at least one in there!

Oh, and one more thing. I am quite remiss in publicly acknowledging the "atta girl" I received from Perfect Laughter some weeks ago. They featured images from the "Underfoot" series, and although I added them to my blogroll and sent a thank you, I think I neglected to give a shout out. Which I'm doing now. Better late than never?