Water colour underglazes and thinking about new packaging.....

 These I am quite excited about using. Usually my glazes are made from my own mixtures from raw ingredients or they are bought ones, alternatively I tend to use oxides to decorate my work, however, I have discovered these. little watercolour underglaze tablets in a paint box. I was a bit sceptical about this as it seems such a tiny amount of glaze for the cost and its not how I usually decorate my work. They are semi-moist and should give the impression of watercolour on the clay then you have to coat them with a clear on-glaze and fire them. I am going to use them mainly on my smaller porcelain pieces of work due to their tiny size.

On scouring the internet for new packaging I stumbled across a shop on Etsy selling these parcel stickers. I tend to use alot of Espo supply boxes from school which I recycle to ship out my own ceramics. It makes sense to recycle these strong boxes which have only been used once to send paper and art supplies to the school then they tend to get broken up and destroyed unless I get to them first. The inner parts of my packaging like bubble wrap and tissue paper obviously have to be bought new but just to re-use a bit helps with recycling and keep down shipping costs to my customers.

These are the parcel stickers which now get used on my parcels
"We recycle shipping materials!"
Wish I had thought of it myself

These little Glassine bags are to be used as favour bags to hold little ceramic hearts for a  new stockist. I will post details about this when they are made.

Not too sure how I am going to use this. It was one of those internet buys that arrives and it isnt quite what you expected. For some reason I thought it had an adhesive backing so that I could use it to stick down tissue paper and seal the above bags.
Not quite. It is just a real of brown paper ribbon, not too many uses for it really. That will teach me to read descriptions properly!!

Indian block printing

I've been meaning to use these blocks for ages for something other than printing into clay (which I love) so I had a go at using them for what they were originally intended, printing onto indian paper & fabrics. I started out using them to print onto brown parcel paper & the backs of old wallpaper rolls to see how they came out.

Here is the selection of indian printing blocks all different sizes and designs.

I've mixed some water based paints and used some old fabric to press the blocks onto to absorb the paint.

Heres some of the results printed onto the brown packing paper

Here they are drying out on an inspiration board. I'm going to use some of them to pack up my ceramics next time I do a stall and some to wrap gifts, next time I will try using them with fabric, (next time I indulge)