Lino printing on a rusted ground

I thought some time ago of printing with my fish lino block onto the fabric I rusted here 

Finally I managed it but as usual a work in progress. It's about a foot wide by about 3 or so feet long. I've got some work to do with the stitching to 'blend in, shall we say, where the block moved when I flipped the piece over so that I could roller over the cloth onto the block but I was too impatient to lay the cloth down over the block in the first place - how do you work out where you are going? can't use a registration sheet here & cloth is a little more floppy than paper ;)

  I've been drooling over some wonderful pics here on Pinterest   & came across the lovely piece I own by underatopazsky!

I wanted to add some mono printed fabric in smokey blues so I got out my favorite Indanthrene blue & mixed it with a little white or a little black. Hmmm, a bit pale on the cloth laid out over my sketchbook above & the pieces below are a little pale too. The dark print left is using the clean up cloth from the water based lino ink

 Worked well on paper tho. The tree like feature is from the cling film that I put at the bottom of the pan before I poured my gelatin - helps you to get the 'plate' out of the pan, lovely but fragile, hence the hole - I'll never make perfect prints!

Even tho I already had delicious texture marks I made a couple of stamps to use with the printing. In Gwen Hedley's book Drawn to Stitch she uses glass in her section on printing but I do love the give of a gelatin plate. She uses string as a resist, makes marks on the plate using fingers & a stick or draws from the back of the paper. Then she gives suggestions for printing line using card adding string or softsculpt shapes or card ends, including corrugated card also carving into a rubber eraser. One day i will make samples of these ;) I made my little blocks, above left, using cut card. The first one is loosely taken fro my drawing of a rock fissure a couple of weeks ago & the 3 circles, (cut from card - could I find any washers?) inspired by the 3 circles in the fish print. the blocks look better than the prints!

 So, above the hanging has some small chopped up pieces of the printed cloth added, well, they're just clinging on but it doesn't really 'speak' to me, looks too contrasty, like I've just 'plonked' them on....which I have, for now, but still...It doesn't seem to tie in. I'll take them off & do a bit more machine stitch & lots more hand stitch, well, whatever I can manage over the next 3 weeks!

 I put this smaller 'hanging' together seeing if that would work & it seems simpler to me, works better - maybe the fish are the problem! I'll add hand stitch here too. I'll have to go back here to Jennifer C Q for some more wonderful inspiration

 OK, a silly question. How do you store your spools of cotton? Clearly the basket above is getting ridiculous, the tray below too small (very kindly donated to me by a neighbor) maybe one has lots of trays? I know, I've come to the 'sorting' lark rather late in the day, too many spools to throw into one basket now.

 I leave you with Willow doing her Yoga on my chair, I think I'll join her.