This was the annual holiday card for 2023, and hopefully everyone has received theirs by now! Lots of lessons learned on this one, and the screen and ink just didn’t cooperate with me, so this was frustrating, but the results are pretty great and hopefully don’t show how I very nearly scrapped this and didn’t even do a card this year. There were four screen printing passes on this card – two for the front, one for the message inside, and one for the information on the back. My husband had spent two years in Portsmouth, UK as an exchange officer with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, and I got to visit a few times and see exactly this gorgeous view out of his apartment window. The structure on the right is the Spinnaker Tower (wikipedia link) and the colorful sky in the background is the sunset that can be seen when it’s not raining (England, you know..). I found out after printing that square cards require extra postage since the machines can’t tell which way is up – rectangles sort perfectly in their machines but squares get bumped out for hand stamping, so it was an extra 20 cents of postage. Lesson learned folks, don’t send square cards. The back is printed with a little info about the tower and husband’s work overseas, and my name and the date. These went out REALLY late, so I put a more New Year’s style greeting inside. I may play with this design later and do a linocut since I do love how it came out and I think it might lend itself better to a linocut, honestly!