Olansa Cuttings

This weekend was fruitful. On Saturday morning I drove down to Oxford Wood Recycling, which isn’t in Oxford at all, but nearby Abingdon. They don’t keep much that’s good for printmaking, unless you’re into carving pier timbers or 8′x4′ ply sheets, but they have a little tub of hardwood offcuts. I’m not sure what wood my choices are but for a couple of pounds they were worth a shot.

Just before I left I joked about how handy the nice metal table would be — just right for propping up my press! “Yours for a tenner,” said the woman in charge. “Done,” said I. Without anything to secure the table in the back of the car, I drove home very slowly and carefully — the A34 isn’t the safest road at the best of times, and I didn’t fancy braking sharply and having to extract steel furniture from the back of my head. But as you can see, the table looks just fine under the nipping press.

From there it was on to the Oxford Orinoco Scrapstore in sunny Headington, on the east side of the city. This place is another small, green triumph. Local companies donate things they might otherwise dump — disks, books, materials, old tools, and so on — and we get the chance to buy them for peanuts. For a princely two pounds I bought an old brace-type drill and bit, two seriously battered chisels, an awl, some foam and neoprene mousemats, some leather scraps and a book on the Aenid. All but the drill and book are handy for printing.

The chisels responded to a couple of hours on sharpening stones — tips like fjord-heavy coastlines gradually smoothed out into flattish sharp edges. Great for clearing the ‘big white bits’ on blocks! I used a Dremel to polish off most of the old paint and rusty bits until they looked like real chisels again. The hand drill will take a lot more work: perhaps it’s time to play with electrolytic rust conversion. The leather scraps are perfect for homemade strops: just add rubbing compound. The foam and neoprene are to try out a Baren guru’s suggestion about flexible registration blocks for relief presses.

On Sunday we forgot all about printmaking and went for a walk along the Ridgeway. The stretch near West Isley was wet, cold and windy, and as beautiful as you could wish for. We saw the huge donut-shape of the new Diamond synchotron in the valley below. The sky changed every few minutes, from tatty black clouds to rainbows to pristine blue. Roll on Spring.