Today I'm getting ready for an art show I'm in next Saturday (February 6th.) I've been stretching some canvas Giclee prints of my flowers in bottles series that I'm taking with me to the show. It's a gardening symposium for the Greenville Master Gardeners Association, so I'm only bringing prints and paintings of flowers with me to sell at this show. Hopefully these Master Gardeners will love my prints and buy out my inventory!

My prints are shipped to me from Prime Digital Media, a Fine-art Printer located in Milwaukee, WI that I've been happily using since 2007.

Here they are on my floor uncurling.

These are the wooden bars that I will stretch the prints onto. They come in separate pieces that I assemble into the finished size of my printed piece.

Let's get started with the HYDRANGEA. First I fold the edges over to there's a nice sharp edge.

I get the print centered on the bars, the use a staple gun to attach it.

Before doing any more staples, I turn it over to make sure it's centered correctly.

I use my canvas stretcher pliers tool to pull the canvas nice and tight so it's doesn't sag.

Between every staple I rotate the canvas first 180 degrees, then 90 degrees so that it's stretched tightly on all 4 sides.

The corners are the trickiest part. The canvas fabric is hard to fold, but after doing 100 or so of these little flowers I've gotten to be pretty quick. I can stretch about five prints per hour. When I first started, it took 45 for one. Imagine my distress at this after having spent over a thousand dollars in having ten paintings photographed for this purpose. Luckily I got faster at the stretching.

Here's the finished back. This was the first one I've done in a few months, so it's not quite as perfect as I like them to be. The little notebook in the upper right corner is my high-tech inventory system. There are ten different flowers in this series that I have to keep tracking of numbering. (The notebook actually works just fine for this!)

This one looks much better! (I'm sure I'm the only one who cares what the back looks like.) Stretching these prints is not my favorite thing to do, however it does make me happy that so many people enjoy having these flower prints hanging in their homes. I love having them in mine!