Hi there! How is your summer going?
I just wanted to pop in to tell you that I have a new video tutorial for you to watch on the Gelli Arts® blog and YouTube channel!
It's a special one because I share a couple of my earliest gel prints in it. And perhaps, you're interested in hearing how this all came about.
A couple of weeks ago, my friends and colleagues Birgit Koopsen, Tania Ahmed, and I were chatting about how long we've been gel printing.
Birgit and Tania celebrated their 10-year gelliversary earlier this year, while I'm currently in my ninth year of gel printing.
It prompted us to look up the first gel prints we shared on social media.
I didn't share any crafty things on Instagram back then (only photography). Still, on my blog, the first evidence of gel printing appeared in September 2014.
But... these weren't my first gel prints.
By the end of 2013, I had already seen Birgit, Nathalie Kalbach, and Julie Fei-Fan Balzer share about gel printing online for about a year.
It looked like something I would enjoy, but I really wanted to try-before-I-buy, and I finally got a chance at Version Scrap in Paris in April 2014.
Although Birgit was teaching at the event that year, she wasn't teaching gel printing techniques (yet). Luckily, one of the other teachers did.
It was the strangest workshop experience I've ever had.
The workshop was fully booked, and the teacher (sadly, I don't remember her name) only had two gel plates and two brayers for the whole class.
All of the instructions were in French (not my forte), all of the attendees had to take turns pulling their gel prints, and we all ended up with basically identical prints because there was no room or time for any exploration.
It wasn't all bad, though (not at all!), but the most important thing was that I walked out of there, sure of one thing: I HAD to get a Gelli® plate.
And I did!
At the time, Riikka Kovasin (another dear friend that was also attending Version Scrap) and I had a collab blog series we called 'Inspired by' where each month we would choose something (a topic, an idea, a thing) to inspire us to create and then we would reveal the thing we made to each other via our blogs.
And the sole reason I know the gel prints I share in this week's Gelli Arts® blog and video tutorial are among my very first ones is that Riikka and I bought some embellishments in Paris to use for our next collab blog post.
As you can see, I clearly tried to capture these embellishments in the prints. This means I can date the prints to sometime in April or the beginning of May 2014.
I did not use them for our collab blog post. I’m guessing because I didn’t think they were any good. And as stated before, I waited months before I shared any gel prints online. However, when I finally did, I was already hooked and ready for a larger printing plate.
The next one I bought was the 12"x14", and once I got that one, there really was no turning back. I became a gel printer!
Enjoy your weekend!