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Lino printing is the latest craft craze sweeping across Instagram, according to Hobbycraft.
This form of fine art printmaking involves cutting into blocks of lino before covering them in ink and pressing them onto paper or fabric. The result is a print which can be used once to create a standalone work or used multiple times to print a patterned sequence, suitable for personalised wrapping paper, cards or fabric.
The retailer said lino printing is now becoming popular with millennial crafters since videos depicting the art form started appearing social media. Hashtags such as #LinoCut have over 803,000 posts on the photo-sharing platform, with some videos reaching nearly a million views.
Hobbycraft said: ‘Millennials use social media as a research tool to find new and engaging crafting activities, then switch off to recreate the therapeutic past time. Printing in total is up 10% on last year and our ‘Get Started in Lino Printing’ video saw over 44,000 views on Facebook in one week, making it our second largest post for reach of all posts added to our Facebook page (for the week commencing March 11) – a testament to the number of people looking to take up the craft.’
Hobbycraft has also seen its lino cutting and printing kit feature in its top 10 selling art products for the first time, with sales up 138% on this time last year.
Katherine Paterson, customer director at Hobbycraft, commented: “We are delighted to see so many of our customers take up lino printing. It is a really simple and traditional technique but it creates such fantastic pieces of art. The Hobbycraft blog has lots of great advice and inspiration for anyone wanting to give it a try.”
Founded in 1995, Hobbycraft bills itself as is the UK’s largest arts and crafts retailer with over 90 stores across the UK. It sells more than 35,000 arts and crafts products for hundreds of creative activities, from baking, home craft, art, jewellery making, knitting, sewing, kids’ crafts and model-making to accessories for weddings, celebrations and more.
