Founder, Gayle Parsons, sums up the Summer Print week by week.
Week 10
We are doing lots of mixing in preparation for the bigger items we’ll be printing next week, taking advantage of the great weather forecast, which is such a bonus, and quite amazing for the end of September in the UK!
We are using a mix ratio that we know will print well and adding either straw, hemp shiv or cellulose to it. And for the first time we printed some beautiful large cylinders, in 2 printed sections, pausing to allow the first 20 or so layers to dry a little before proceeding with the print. The lower part was a straw mix, the upper part was a hemp shiv mix.
We visited Burghley’s forestry barn to look at some beautiful sawn timber that they have offered us for our benches and it is truly stunning, 5 year seasoned oak. We are going to be able to make some wonderful pieces with it!
We had a visit from Burghley’s Sustainability Champions, members of staff from different departments who are responsible for making sure that sustainability is at the heart of all that they do in those departments. We managed to print some large scale half moon shapes for them which we were very proud of.
Friday was extremely stormy and very windy so we had to rig up a tarp over the large prints we had produced the previous day. Disaster struck when we tried printing the second set of layers on top of these prints resulting in the collapse of two of them. Unbowed, we reprinted them and determined to leave them over the weekend before trying to print the second set of layers again.
