Lindsey Gallacher

Much has been written and spoken about recently on the rising cost of silver in the media; the political landscape coupled with the new industrial demands for the material has created a perfect storm.  The leap in cost crept up slowly until the middle of 2025 and then pounced on jewellers right before Christmas.  Especially those, like me who have varying requirements of silver purchases which makes it more difficult to notice the rise as each purchase is slightly different in weight.  On top of that, I personally haven’t reassessed my prices since I initially calculated the costs for me to sell wholesale, when I attended Scotland’s Trade Fair at the SECC in 2024.  To work out the costs, I had carefully timed myself making various items in the workshop, then made the assumption that I could probably make more than one item in an hour, and priced accordingly.  The mistake I made at that point was not taking in to consideration the extra time it may take to cut an...

I’ve been told many times that my scratchboard art looks very like a woodcut print, and that’s because I tend to work quickly and use thicker lines than what you’d normally associate with the fine detail of traditional scratchboard.  So for Christmas, I asked for woodcut tools to start a new medium, another tool in my belt. I already work from the light so I hoped there wasn’t going to be a huge learning curve as I have found with other new projects in the past, this causes me to delay exploration knowing of the long road ahead, but there’s nothing like the excitement of new tools and materials! I’d ordered a small set of very fine Flexcut palm engravers starting at 1mm-2.5mm which would replicate the fine lines similar to my scratchboard drawings.  Drawing on inspiration from my visit to the quarry on Brims hill, I decided for my first woodcut to work from a photo of the dramatic cliffs looking towards Dunnet head and Hoy. The wood I used was lemonwood which I was recommended...

 January has appeared and I’ve decided to utilise blogger as a means to properly record my experiments, investigations and development of work.  It’s nice to get some feedback from Instagram stories but I’ve discovered by posting work by this means, I’m closing the ‘dopamine hit’ loop and often then work comes to a grinding halt. This way, I can still post, and it becomes a record of my work stage and I'm not distracted by how many people notice it and appreciate it. So, I’ll start by showing my samples of Canadian smocking which I had the urge to try back in the autumn, it turned out to be incredibly satisfying and I was very excited to try more. Immediately I found myself thinking about creating larger and/or smaller scale pieces. Dying, dipping in paint or ink. Using unusual materials like leather, plastic and velour - the material I find most difficult to handle! (pausing to consider sensory issues and what I could do with this) But more than anything I wanted to make wall...