Show your works

Lino-cutting is not improv.
I am slow to accept this.
It could be imrovisational, but mostly it pays to get the drawing right before you carve it into the lino.

I'm pleased with this Get Well card now:
I re-carved the S, rightway-round, and hand-painted a white square on the Band-aid to make it recognizeable. It had looked more like. . . a rainstick, Marz said.

(I loved her interpretation––
"Great depiction of a historically significant event when dolls gave music to bearkind"––but it didn't match the words I'd carved.)

I printed ten cards. Please feel unwell--but just slightly!--or suffer a small nick (minor!) so I can send you one.

I made this one because my sister has Covid (for the third time) and requested a girlette card. On the same day, an old friend fell and hurt her head.
I don't usually send get-well cards, do you? By the time I would think to go buy one, the person is better.

What I could really use is a good sympathy card. You can send them anytime because people stay dead. Alas.

In the interview with musician Labri Siffre (posted yesterday), he worded how he felt after his husbands died with wonderful honesty. (He'd lived with two for years, in Wales, and they died within a couple years of each other.)
He was searching how to say what he still felt after the losses, and the interviewer suggested he was "processing".

No, Siffre said, "suffering".

Thank you.
___________________________
Show Sympathy...

I wouldn't use a girlette for a sympathy card. They don't die, and they aren't very sympathetic to human emotions--mine aren't, anyway.

"You just turn back to juice," they say about death, looking up from hand-polishing their rocks (their school project).
Refreshing, but maybe not what everyone wants to hear in their sadness.

The sympathy card I'd liked best after my mother's suicide--the only one whose image I remember, in fact--was a woodblock print of the full moon. It was calming, comforting in its remote, cool beauty.
Funny, that card was from the sister of an old friend, someone I barely knew, who lived far away. I love that she sent it.

Don't second-guess yourself when it comes to doing love, I'd say. ______________

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (2010), by Matthew B. Crawford.

I got this book for $1.99 at the Goodwill in Two Harbors, MN, when I was visiting Marz last weekend––and Penny Cooper and Low were visiting Marz's girlette, Carrie Miller Morton, samurai. They're in the chair Marz bought at a garage sale:

I read the book's first page in the store, and I bought it because Crawford starts out by talking about how you can buy all sorts of used tools online---from the dismantling of high school shop classes (this was fourteen+ years ago).

"The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit. And, in fact, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to 'hide the works'...."

I'd been shocked that there was no shop at the high school where I worked---the only students who learn to use tools are those who build theater sets or those on the robotics team. Awfully specialized. (No sewing classes either.--aside from theater costuming--and no cooking or metal- or leather work at all.)

I've said before--one thing I like about printmaking is, your work shows. Maybe not if you're incredibly accomplished and it's your aim to hide your hand, but that is never going to be me.
I do want to get better, but I'm in no danger of getting that good.