Block Printing with Valerie Wells

My dream has been to learn block printing in some exotic locale like India or Bali. Unfortunately, that's not in the cards for me at the moment. Next best thing was travelling just up the road a bit to the quaint town of Sisters, and taking a block printing class at the Stitchin Post with Valerie Wells. Valerie has been block printing for decades. Her easy manner and masterful knowledge of all things block printing made for a fun, informative, and successful weekend of inky play.

Valerie has her own line of fabrics created mostly from her block printing. It was convenient having all the beautifully curated fabrics in the Stitchin Post available to choose from to put together our table runners. Valerie brought her personal collection of blocks for us to use in her class.

Just look at all these yummy designs! What an inspiration they all are.

Valerie lead us from the design, sketch phase of making the blocks, through the printing. Here is the sketch for one of her blocks.

And here is that same block, all carved out and printed.

So many possibilities!

You can see how different this lighter and slightly darker ink color looks on different colored fabrics.

I love these indigo fabrics as a base for block printing.

This is my first block I carved, printed up.

You can see it here in green on my project. The table runner was a gift for my parents, so I was stitching it in the airport on my way to visit them.

If you ever have the opportunity to take a class from Valerie, I highly recommend it. I wish I could go on her trip to Bali next month! A girl can dream; right?

Designing, carving, and printing blocks is really amazing, something I've wanted to learn for quite some time now. It's a great skill to add to my hand stitching creativity.