Printing with the old printing set

I have very fond childhood memories of having fun stamping with my Dad's old printing set. It's a lovely wooden set of blocks with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and lots of symbols and other decorations. A few years ago I rather cheekily asked him if I could have it (sorry siblings!), and I've been keeping it safely ever since until I felt that the children were old enough to use it and respect it.

The time came the other week! I sorted out some of my coloured ink pads, a big stack of paper, did a quick demo, and then let the children loose to see what they would come up with.

Harry took it all very seriously. He was quite fascinated as I explained to him how this was the way that books were once printed, and showed him that although it was quite time consuming to print each letter individually, at a printers you could set up a rack with all the letters in place and then print multiple copies one after the other. He tried it himself by holding a few stamps together and pressing them down at the same time!

He was very interested in using the letters for writing. He also drew pictures of things and used the £ sign stamp and numbers to put down prices for them. Mia was a bit more haphazard in her approach, she liked the symbols and patterns and stamped them over and over in a range of different colours.

We had a lot of fun playing with these old stamps and I know they'll be coming out regularly now that the children know they exist!