I have to say everyone has been extremely friendly and welcoming, despite the fact it’s pretty clear I don’t have a clue what I’m doing!

I’m always on the look out for beautiful homes, workspaces and kids rooms to tour so please get in touch if you are interested or know anyone else who might be. I’ve visited a few lovely homes of local artists and designers recently so I’ll be sure to let you know when they go live!

NB I would also like to clarify that my home had never been as tidy as it was in those photographs and hasn’t been since. It’s a good day if you can see the carpet.

Her work is intricate and playful, using beautiful drawings and just the right amount of colour, she depicts scenes she loves from her favourite cities. Anyone with a connection to Glasgow or Edinburgh will recognise their favourite haunts instantly. There is something about seeing yourself – your own passions, memories, the things close to your own heart – in a piece of work, that is just wonderful, and creating special connections like that is skill that Libby has firmly under her belt.

It’s not just places either – she has some amazing works featuring cacophonies of animals that would look amazing in a children’s space and would be sure to cheer up any dull corner of your home.

‘Celebrate The View’ – Kelvinbridge, £35

Rapper’s Delight – Bristo Square , Edinburgh, £35

‘Outnumbered’, £30

She can also work by commission so if there is a place close to your heart or a special occasion coming up, drop her a line. Her work is affordable too, with good-sized prints from just £30 and cards, mugs and other bits and pieces from as little as £2.50.

Have a rummage through her website – you can shop online, or see it in the flesh at any of these retailers around Glasgow and Edinburgh:Boxwood, Nancy Smillies, Glasgow University, Welcome Home, The Red Door Gallery, The Damselfly and the Queen Bee, The Framing Workshop and Velvet Moon.

All the best, Libby!

Dotty about Vintage is an cavern of a wee place, rammed to the absolute rafters with vintage and retro nicnacs, luggage, handbags, baskets, kitchenalia, tea sets, blankets, tins, radios, ornaments, glassware, toys … I could go on. Anywhere your eyes fall, you could make a purchase. And it’s all reasonably priced so you can buy your basket and then fill it! I’m telling you, I’d be a nightmare running a place like this – I’d be wanting to keep it all for myself. It would not be a good match for my hoarding tendencies.

Check them out on facebook and if you’re visiting the area or live nearby, pop into Dotty About Vintage at 160 Church Street, Whitby. If you’re looking for something in particular then call Trudie and Ellie ahead on 07733 142475 and they are more than happy to hunt it out for you!

That was then. This is now. It’s life changing stuff.

Last week, I was invited to a sneaky look at some of their new collections and their brand new television ad – a first for Next Home – and I was very pleasantly surprised. There is some GREAT gear in there to be had. Lovely vintage and retro inspired collections, amazing lighting, fresh colours, vibrant textiles – all designed exclusively in-house by their diverse creative team and at a really reasonable price. I was impressed. Not least by my new lamp, Rover (below). I think we can all agree he is totally excellent. No chance of him licking his stitches.

From left to right (top row first)(I should probably mention that I’ve made the product names up):

Rover the lovely dog lamp, £30
Nice ol’ vintage tin jug, £12
Sunshine big pot/jolly vase, £10

Best bird house on the block, £10
Groovy retro sun lounger, £30
Porcelain dog with bow tie (essential), £24

Big green tartan chair, £275
Buzzy bee honey pot, £5
Brilliant baskets, from £10

for more check out www.next.co.uk

Just for a little inspiration, here are a few beauties I have come across on my virtual travels …

Quirky and colourful in a pretty tin jug from elfieandme.typepad.com

Simple and beautiful from dottieangel.blogspot.com

Pretty birds from rosalineandmore.blogspot.com

Lovely little eggs from lottyblue.co.uk

A french outdoor Easter extravaganza from moblog.net

 Well done bloggers! All very inspiring. I might just give it a go.

Just out of sheer admiration (and nosiness) I got in touch with Nikki to get the story behind her distinctive textiles. At 27 years old, she’s made a pretty good thing for herself. After graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2008 with a BA(Hons) in Fine Art, she cracked straight on and started her own design business in 2009, channeling her childhood passions of drawing and sewing. Her experimentation with textile sculpture as part of her degree gave her a thirst to make functional objects that have a place outside of a gallery setting and take up residence in people’s homes, and that’s just what she’s achieved.

Indeed, each of her pieces is a little work of art –  a sculpture, a talking point, a cheeky statement full of personality. I mean, it takes a sort of (excellent) soul to have a large Tunnocks Teacake sitting proudly on their sofa. Undoubtedly, the sort of soul I like. Inspired by her love of British culture, contemporary Pop-Art and the lifelong love of having a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, Nikki and I are clearly kindred spirits. She says herself, ”It is so important to be surrounded by objects in your home that make you smile. My biscuit cushions are a nostalgic, bright and fun tribute to the little things that make everyday life great!” Here here. Better still, every one of her cushions is proudly crafted by hand from the best cottons and linens and hand-printed using environmentally friendly inks in her studio in Dundee, with a care and quality that shows.

Needless to say, business is booming. Nikki has received some great press over the last 12 months and has much excitement on the horizon. This April, she’s packing up her Biscuits for a trip to the land of Milk and Cookies- North America! As part of Scottish Development International’s forthcoming North American mission, they’ll be traveling to New York for five days (right in the middle of Tartan Week!) and then on to Toronto for two days.

Nikki is excited: “We’re so pleased to have been chosen to take part in the trip and  are really excited about taking our range overseas. We’re really proud to make everything we design here in the UK and we can’t wait to share that with a wider audience in the United States and Canada.”

Nikki, I’ve no doubt you’ll go down a storm. Maybe you should do a limited edition Oreo? Just a thought.

To find out more, follow her blog and more importantly shop (there’s more than just cushions – there’s coasters, phone covers, prints and LOTS of lovely things), check out www.nikkimcwilliams.com.

A SHOUT OUT to our American readers! Nikki is currently booking appointments for the duration of her trip- so if you’re in the New York City or Toronto area (or even further) and you’re interested in stocking the range in your store- drop her a line to sales@nikkimcwilliams.com!

Images used with kind permission of nikkimcwilliams.com

Here goes.

I’ve decided to opt for a monocrome print to start with. I’m trying not to bite off more than I can chew but that’s not a rule I’m generally able to live by so we’ll see what happens.

1. First, I drew my design in heavy pencil onto tracing paper. You can draw straight onto your lino, but I did this because I was going to use lettering and so wanted it to turn out the right way round (you’ll end up with a print that is the mirror image of whatever you cut into your lino).

2. I transferred the image onto the lino by placing it face-down on top of the lino and then rubbing hard over the tracing paper.

3. I then took one of the larger tools and cut away all of the background, and a smaller tool to cut away the finer detail. You are cutting away everything that you want to leave white. The cutting bit feels GOOD. VERY therapeutic.

4. I then rolled out my printing ink on a pane of glass (between you and me, I used a shelf out of my kitchen cupboard) and then rolled the ink over my lino.

5. I carefully placed my paper over the lino, lining it up with the edge to make sure it was straight. Making a frame (as John suggests HERE) is useful and more necessary if you are going to print more than one colour, to make sure that each layer lines up exactly. I rubbed all over the back of the paper using tool that came in my kit but you can just the back of a spoon.

6. I then peeled back the paper and there he was! My little perky fox! As you can see, he could do with a bit of  a tidy up and then re-printing, but it’s not a bad start!

I think I might be catching the bug. That cupboard might be missing a shelf for a while.

To give you a little insight into John’s career, he first explored print-making as an art student in the 1960′s at the prestigious Bath Academy of Art at Corsham, an Elizabethan country home (sounds idyllic to me) to which professional artists commuted from London to teach, legends like Howard Hodgkin among them. He then moved north to Scarborough and worked as a teacher and lecturer at a number of schools and University Colleges, lecturing occasionally in Boston and Georgia in the states also. In 1990, he took early retirement from full-time teaching to work independently as a print-maker. Since then he as successfully exhibited his work countless times all over the UK and in America, and has played a key role in establishing the artist community in the surrounding area- namely, The Crescent Arts Workshop and North Yorkshire Open Studios.

John produces his work using the ‘reduction-block’ method, by successively overlaying colours from the same lino block, with the block being etched away (reduced) between each colour stage, to build up an image. He does this using an old cast-iron Albion printing press dating back to 1830 (!!)  There is something missing in my brain which makes this incredibly hard for me to understand. I find it almost impossible to look at a final print and deduce what went on at which stage, what he might have started with and what was cut out first or last. But I’m trying. Hard.

Here, thank goodness, John breaks down what we’re going to need to get started.

The kit:

Relief printing is the oldest form of printing and is accessible to everyone – you don’t need a press to give it a go. You can use all sorts of materials too – though wood and lino are the most common, it is possible to use anything from potatoes to cork. Lino is the best and easiest thing to get started with and you can pick up a small piece from your local art shop for as little as 50p to have a go with.

You’ll need some cutting tools. You can usually pick up a starter pack of tools for less than a fiver, including a range of different sizes, that should be fine for having a go, but they obviously aren’t particularly high quality. Alternatively you could spend a little more on buying a couple of tools of a higher quality and make do with less of a range of sizes to begin with.

It is worth buying proper water-based relief printing ink. Although it is more expensive than acrylic or anything similar, nothing else will work anything like as well. It is probably wise to start with a simple, monocrome image anyway, so if you are worried about the initial expense, just invest in one or two colours.

You also need a pane of glass, (the thicker the better, you could take it out of an old door or picture frame from a charity shop or the tip) and a roller (a cheap one can be picked up from any art store and is fine for getting started).

Make yourself a frame to ensure that you’re going to be able to print the image over and over in the same spot – you can do this by stapling/pinning a frame (from strips of thick card) at a right angle onto a sheet of wood/thick card board. (see pictured)

Get some good quality paper for printing onto too.

If you’re looking for a resource, John recommends, Print-Making for Beginners by Jane Stobart.

An example of the process:

(Don’t worry, even though this was the simplest thing John had on the go, what we start with next week will be MUCH more straight forward)

Start by taking an image, tracing it onto paper and then pressing it onto your lino (see right)

Cut away the background and anything you’re going to leave white (see left)

Print your first colour, in this case yellow (see right – yes it’s a different image but just to demonstrate!)

Cut away more (the bits you want to leave yellow) and print your next colour. Here (left) John has used transparent orange and blue which have mixed with the yellow.

Then he has cut away everything but the black outline and printed.

Right. It’s still mashing my brain, but we’ll give it a shot next week with something  REALLY easy. Thanks John!

I have always known he was an artist. He was always suspiciously good at Pictionary. The little studio behind his house helped give the game away too. We would often be taken back there to see the latest collection of prints he had been working on and he would have fantastic parties where his little cottage would be filled with wonderfully bohemian bodies who weren’t often seen wandering the little farming village in which we lived. As a child, I very much admired them and their statement jewlery.

Though his prints were always beautiful, I suppose because I’d been familiar with them all my life, they were fairly ordinary to me. The creativity, skill and years of practice it took to create them was lost on me to large extent and it hasn’t been until recently that I have looked again at his work with total amazement. This was further enhanced when, after getting a lino-printing kit for Christmas and making an attempt at a simple design, I realized just how terribly difficult it is. Needless to say, it turned out disastrously.

This time when I was back home, I thought I’d pop next door and get some tips and look again at some of his amazing art and see what he was working on. It was so great, I thought I’d share it with you! This week, I’m just going to share a few snaps with you from his inspiring studio space, next week, I’ll share some insight into the printing process and John’s top tips for getting started, and finally we’ll try a simple lino print of our own. Every day’s a school day, folks.

Let the image go.

I stumbled across Jane’s work recently and thought it was refreshingly beautiful and full of nostalgia. Inspired by traditional ceramics, textiles and children’s literature, her vintage style and pastel coloured functional ceramics are hand thrown and individually decorated. They are cute. When I contacted Jane to find out a little more about her, I decided for certain that I liked her a lot. It’s always nice when someone who makes nice things is nice themselves. Now her pots are even more pretty.

Jane’s story is one I’m sure many of us can relate to, but now she’s living her own fairytale just as lovely as the ones she paints on her pottery. Quite fabulous really.

Jane had always loved doing arty and crafty things but was encouraged when she was younger to get a ‘proper job’ (I know the feeling well) and after initially training as a teacher, she then changed careers and worked with computers, continuing with this part-time after having children.

About 8 years ago, Jane started doing adult education classes in Pottery and quickly became obsessed. From the start, she was attracted to the idea of making functional ceramics – designs which would be pretty but also functional for today’s lifestyles. We all love something that looks good and is also useful. For sure.

Jane found a teacher that got her started in ‘throwing’ (in a pottery way – NOT ball games) and bought her own kiln and wheel. *GO AWAY IMAGE OF PATRICK * She worked very hard at learning to throw whilst also experimenting with different design ideas and all that hard work soon paid off. She started selling her pottery about three years ago, gradually selling in more galleries and also through her website, helped along by a photo of her work being featured in Country Living Magazine.

About a year ago, Jane had so much demand for work that she decided to take the plunge and give up her part-time job to do pottery full-time. The dream. She’s enjoying it muchly, considering herself very lucky to be (finally) doing something that she absolutely loves.

Well Jane, we think it’s as much due to your hard work, talent and tenacity as it is luck, and that you’re a pretty inspiring lady!

Here are some of my favourite picks from Jane’s collection but you can view all her lovely work and purchase online at www.janeboothceramics.co.uk.

From left to right:

Pale Pink View from Attic Jug, £25
Confection Blue Green and Pink Mug, £17
Confection Pink and Yellow Medium Bowl, £17

Oooooo, I wouldn’t mind a wee brew from that lovely mug. Not. One. Bit.