printing

Look what Peter pulled out of an old hessian sack this week! Leaving aside the fact that hessian sacks in themselves are Very Exciting, never mind what's inside them, this one really did bring about a fair bit of happy-skippy excitement.

Can you tell what they are? Old wooden printing blocks, literally hundreds of them, all different sizes and shapes and letters, all with decades-old ink still on them.

Peter's dad has been a printer all his life, and Peter worked with him for a while, and at some point rescued these blocks from being thrown away. His dad, so I'm told (and I can believe it), said "what do you want those for?? They're rubbish, we used to burn those in the stove to keep warm when we were apprentices!"

But Peter, with an eye for things-that-future-girlfriends-will-find-interesting-in-twenty-years, rescued them anyway, intending to cover an entire wall with them, but never quite getting round to it because our house is 110 years old and there isn't a straight wall in the place.

So. Here we are with an entire sack of the things, and now I have no idea what to do with them either. Apparently they're too worn out for printing professionally, but that wouldn't stop me printing on card with ink I wouldn't have thought. But I'd only want one of each, so there's still plenty left for a Project.

Did I tell you we're busy turning our house into a Palace?? Well, we are. Which mostly seems to involve Taking Things Apart, building shelves, and sawing things in the middle of the kitchen, but which is also unearthing some lovely forgotten treasures, and setting us off on all kinds of bizarre decorative adventures.

So, any suggestions for what we can do with all these?