Miniature printing

Finally, I own a printer. I have asked for a printer, for my birthday and christmas for the past few years, and had yet to receive one, so I forked out for one myself.  I bought the HP deskjet 3520 from Currys. It was £50 and includes a scanner and inks. I was a bit worried that being so cheap, the printing wouldn't be that great, but I was desperate, and as it turns out, for the price, it really has surpassed my expectations. I had a look at a few miniature printing techniques, and the advice I followed was as follows.

• Never print from any image, with a DPI (dots per inch) less than 300. The image will be fuzzy otherwise.
• Set the printer on highest quality when printing.
• Use microsoft word to scale your images to the correct size.
• I used hairspray to seal the ink. When you spray it onto the paper, it looks disastrous but eventually dries, though it does warp the paper, very slightly. It was the cheap way of sealing charcoal drawings when I was in Art college. Best to do a test first though. You can read about the pros and cons of this method online. I didn't have art fixative lying around, or I would have used it instead.

I don't have microsoft word, but I do have the trial version, which is so good and easy to use for miniaturising, I may have to buy it once the trial is up, as I plan on doing a lot of printing in future. 

Finally, I have some things to fill up my little brass box (from A Miniature Marvel). Seed packets!  And for a brief moment the sun came out and created a shadow!

The images of these seed packets are from the website olddesignshop.com. The website owner regularly posts scans of her own vintage stock, she even included the reverse of these seed packets. The Sweet pea packet is from sweetmagnoliasfarm.blogspot.

The reverse of the seed packets, although not very readable, I am very happy with the effect.  I made these up like real sachets, and put some tiny glass beads in, then sealed the packet, so when you lift them up, you can hear "seeds" rolling about inside. 

Little idea I had for the conservatory, originally I was going to use newspaper to block the light out, but decided to make it into a garden inspired feature instead, using public domain illustrated botanical plates. These ones are mostly french, I think. They are from the website vintageprintable.com. After building the conservatory I had an afterthought, that I should have made that end a solid wall, as the only thing you would see beyond it was, well, a wall, a big black wall, to be precise. So this creates a nice backdrop to that end of the conservatory. The other 3 "glass" panels will be filled eventually. Work in progress.

And a giant black cat appeared, out of nowhere, and had to be shooed away. Yes, those windows are dirty, that is why we are covering them up, so we don't have to clean them!  P.s. The cat is from Cats Protection League, not available online, but instore. 

So far my favourite print job. These are miniature versions of my mums drawings. We only have three in our ownership, these ones. There was a lovely donkey one which is now living in Hungary, given to a Hungarian guest that stayed with us years ago. Made quite a few of these prints, to test the quality, and these ones came out best. They were printed from 600 DPI scans and the printer was set with the highest print quality with Greyscale on.  One of the main reasons I wanted a printer, was for food packaging and personal touches like this. At some point I will frame these, but I think they look great as they are too. The photograph isn't showing how lovely these are in real life, I think it might be slightly blurry actually :D

NEARLY FINISHED!! When I say nearly............I mean, nearly in needlepoint time. There are a good few hours to go yet.  But I am getting there :D