All over this lovely land that we call home there are pockets of little creative businesses beavering away.. Independent businesses run by those creative types that Cornwall has an abundance of. One such creative is Michele and this story.

Michele was born in Penryn, Cornwall and spent her younger years here. Her father was a tin miner and worked in the local Wheal Jane mine. However, at the age of 11, Michele and her families world was turned upside down by the loss of her father’s job. Sadly, the tin and cooper mines closed in the area so Michele’s father was forced to look for work elsewhere. He struggled to find a job in Cornwall but found work in Devon, Plymouth in fact. So the family upped sticks and moved there.

It was there that Michele finished her schooling and then went off to college. There she enrolled on an art foundation course, finished that and then headed off to Uni. Her given choice for Uni was the Central School of Art in London (now Central St Martins) and the degree she decided on was in jewellery design. After completing that degree she decided that she was neither fast enough or technically good enough to pursue it as a full time career in jewellery design. Therefore, she chose another path and that was teaching…

Michele then trained and qualified as a teacher and moved to London to teach there. She lived there for a while then moved to Birmingham. As a newly qualified teacher, salaries in those days didn’t support a decent lifestyle in the home counties or London, so Birmingham was a cheaper choice & she had her sister living there too. After time in London, Birmingham & working in North Yorkshire in another field, Michele moved back to Cornwall with her family. That was 15 years ago.

“I'd always wanted to have a go at lino printing & we happened to have some basic tools that had belonged to my late mother in law”

Since moving back to Cornwall, Michele has brought up a family, taught design technology & art, has been a production manager for an electronics company and a retail lead for a charity.
It was while she was working full time for that charity, she realised that she missed doing something creative. Michele told me “I needed something that I could pick up & put down as my limited time allowed. I'd always wanted to have a go at lino printing & I happened to have some basic tools that had belonged to my late mother in law”. And so the path of a print maker came about.

Michele has been producing prints now for around 2 years or so. She has a small creative area in her home, an ex bedroom in fact, where she applies her trade. I envisaged that she might have a large press of some sort prior to visiting her but I was mistaken. It’s all done very carefully by hand with the greatest of detail and then rolled over a material of choice to give a really pleasing finish.
Michele guided me through the process of print making as this wasn’t something I’d seen before and I was interested to see the finished process.

Thank you again Michele.. RD