Craft Foam Wins

In an earlier post, I said the fine lines in this Galbraith & Paul block design must have been made with something other than craft foam. This closeup, unpainted view shows I was wrong. It's also two layers of craft foam, making me doubly wrong. 

So I started wondering why two layers? Even though one layer results in a deeper stamp than any we use at Museware Pottery, there's probably a good reason to use two. First, the fluffy nap of this roller will hold much more paint than the dense foam of our rollers. And more paint means more of an opportunity for excess transfer. If you're printing a single yard, the loss is manageable. But if you're printing a 10 yard order, one 1/2" smudge would ruin the entire run.

So, I'm back to the cutting mat, learning to perfect a clean, straight sided cut through two layers of craft foam, which is really just another technique to master. That will be the easy part.

The hard part? Pattern repeat. After 5 days in bed with the flu, I spent the first half of my work day sorting through 100s of emails. The rest was spent trying to understand fabric repeat. I have a lot of learning to do. Photoshop makes creating pattern repeats relatively easy. Translating that understanding into a workable block print - that's another thing entirely. This blog could well go on forever.