Another crafternoon for me yesterday with our little group of arty friends.

The last one you might remember is the sip and paint, which was basically painting together with copious amounts of wine. Could art get any more fun!?

This time around it was gelli plate printing which is something that is completely new to me. But I have seen some of the work created this way and it looks amazing.

The outcome is perfect for all kind of creative work, making greeting cards, printing on canvas, paper for scrap booking and collages… and there is no end to what you can use to create these prints. You can create so many interesting pieces and when you think you’re going to end up with just a few pieces of art you are seriously underestimated.

We all ended up with loads of beautiful pieces of paper!

Sandra, who has been going hard with the gelli plate printing herself showed us how it was done, an excellent teacher and also showed us how to book bind.

We made our printed paper, and made little sketch pads using board for the covers, gluing our printed paper on in a collage style, then made the inside pages of the book with sketch pad paper, making individual signatures. Once we had the covers and the signatures made we then used string to bind the book together. The result was a beautiful handmade book.

The gelli plate printing itself is easy to do and as long as you let your mind be free you can try whatever you fancy. My son Elvis loves to get crafty and this is something that even he would love.

I plan to make some gelli plates, which are super easy using just gelatine, glycerine and water, using a baking tray as a mould and you can make it into whatever size you like.

Once you have the gelli plate made all you need is paint, a roller to spread the paint, some paper and whatever you can find to print with. This really can be anything with texture, from leaves and flowers from the garden, a comb, buttons, doilies, stencils, bits of paper or card cut into shapes, fabric… so much potential.

Even down to wiping off the roller you can do this on extra pieces of paper and create some colourful pages, you can print on these or leave them as they are and use them for something else.

This is one of the cheapest but versatile art projects I think I’ve ever tried. We all went home so inspired and ready to make our own gelli plates and create more works of art at home.

We’re trying to think of what to do for the next crafternoon…one suggestion was prosecco and paint, which would include a naked male model… let’s see if we can find a willing study piece. Ha!