Newton Community Centre was transformed into a vibrant print studio for a Heritage Tea Towel Lino Cut Printing Workshop, bringing together a group of local residents to celebrate recipes, memories, and creativity. As part of the Home Truths project, this session combined hands-on making with storytelling, co-creating artwork rooted in personal and shared heritage.
The inspiration for the workshop came from the Heritage Recipe collection, a growing archive of community-sourced cookbooks, handwritten recipes, and food memories. These documents, lovingly gathered in advance, provided the foundation for our print designs. But it was the conversations around the table that truly brought the project to life.
After a warm welcome and a cup of tea, we dove into the process of lino printing. Some participants were trying it for the first time, while others had dabbled before. I’d sourced all the materials; lino blocks, inks, rollers, and some beautiful cotton tea towels during the planning stage, ensuring everything was ready for a smooth and enjoyable session.
We explored how to create and transfer designs and prepare inks for printing onto paper and fabric. We began with a safety briefing and a step-by-step demonstration of lino carving techniques.
Participants transferred their recipe-inspired imagery to lino and began carving; some sketching directly from my sample ideas while other used the resource images and objects as inspiration. The room buzzed with concentration and chatter, and it was a pleasure to support everyone in finding their own rhythm with the tools. It was great to see the participants grow in confidence as they persevered with the lino cutters.
Conversations centred around the groups favourite recipes, there was a lot of laughter about the ‘advice’ for women in the recipe books some of which were over 70 years old. The group reminisced about toppings for Yorkshire puddings, enjoying fruit cocktail and ice cream and how families fed themselves on a limited budget.
Once the carving was complete, we moved on to the process of inking and printing first onto paper, to test their designs and then onto their tea towels. As each print was peeled back, there were delighted gasps and proud smiles. The results were beautiful, bold, unique, and personal. One participant told me, “I did a bit of lino printing at school for my Textile GSCE, but it’s been nice to have another go at the technique”
Considering it was a new and challenging skill, I thought everyone did really well completing a design, a cut lino block and both paper and fabric prints within the three-hour session. All the finished tea towels looked fantastic, and it was lovely for everyone to share their work at the end. Everyone went away feeling proud of what they had created and many said they would like to try something similar again. It would be great to explore lino printing again or develop a recipe zine combining the designs and stories behind them with more people.
