Block Printing with Exaireo
10th August 2015
The Exaireo Trust is an amazing charity, formed to help homeless people in Loughborough and surrounding towns to rehabilitate themselves by providing accommodation, education, skills training, advice, support and practical work experience.
After meeting the lovely Dettie who started Exaireo I really wanted to do something to get involved and help out, I said would clean toilets if that would help! After having a chat Dettie said what they really needed was activities for residents to get involved with to give them something to do, to build community and give them hope. I leapt at this chance, and was secretly quite relieved as I thought this would be a lot more fun than cleaning toilets!
I thought that block printing would be a fun and easy activity to get started with and I rounded up some every day materials like bits of string, fabric, bottle tops and bought a sheet or two of foam that could be easily cut with scissors to make interesting patterns. I already had l some paper and also went out to buy some white t-shirts from some of Loughborough’s plentiful charity shops. The only thing I was missing were the blocks themselves to stick the materials to…
In winter deVOL uses off cuts of wood left over from making kitchens to fire up a number of Esse Log burners that help to keep us warm in our offices and workshops. As its summer and it is not being used to make heat I managed to pinch a few left over blocks in all different sizes which were perfect for the activity!
At Exaireo I met Louise, Dean and Raymond, none of whom thought they were very good at art and had certainly never done block printing before! They were really up for giving it a go, particularly as there wasn’t much else for them to do that day.
Louise had a really clear idea of what she wanted to create and got set making a horse shoe out of foam and the words ‘good luck’ to print on a t-shirt. In the first session Dean made T-shirt and in the second was experimenting with making an music composition print, complete with bassline printed with plastic milk bottle tops and frequency represented by a print made from string!
Having done two workshops now, I chuckled to myself when I saw a post about wood block printing on the Remodelista blog the other day. I love how simple it is to do and can allow you to make really nice patterns and repetitions. I would love it if my new friends at Exaireo could make some lovely pieces like cards or tea towels to sell at Cotes Mill one day, I know it would give them such a boost and could be really cool!
