Soft Rubber Grey Carving Blocks - Stamp Making, Block Printing, Print Making Lino Carve - 8" x 6" Inches - Pack of 2

These are firm, much firmer than I anticipated after using pink blocks. Make sure your tools are sharp!

I was pleased with this pack. I needed some standard, battle-ship grey, hessian backed lino for linocut printing. ( It is harder to carve than the pink or beige softcut stuff but I feel it takes fine detail better.) I was a bit worried that it might be old stock - old lino is a nightmare to carve being very hard and prone to crumble and snap - but this was fresh being nicely flexible and smelling strongly of linseed oil. (Its made from cork, linseed oil and jute so is natural and plastic free.)I find the dimensions of this rather strange, 305mm x 203mm is 8mm longer than A4 but 7mm narrower and is very slightly longer and wider than 8" x 12". But as I intend to use up my stash of 11"x14" Strathmore 300 Printmaking paper this is an acceptable size for me. Printmaking is a marvellous project to explore for lockdown for everybody I think.This is the same stuff that Essdee supplies in their excellent lino cutting and printing kit so if you are needing to replenish that with bigger pieces this is a good pack to get.

Traditional Lino, which comes up in search results when you search for softcut.Expensive mistake. I hate traditional lino, harder to cut and falls apart. I wasted hours on my last piece trying to use this stuff and it ultimately went in the bin. So I’m very unhappy with my purchase but it’s too expensive to send it back especially as I bought two packets at different sizes and I’d be charged £4 for both even though I’d send them together :(

I searched for soft cut lino specifically and this was high up on the search results - it was the cheapest so I picked it - but it was only cheaper because it’s the very inferior traditional Lino. They charge £3.99 to send this back if you make a mistake. I bought 2 separate sized packets so the lovely amazon would charge me twice. I’ll struggle on but I expect I’ll cut myself on this evil stuff. Buy softcut instead. I hate Amazon.

This is exactly what I was I looking for. It's the same Lino as the one that comes in the starter pack. It's quite strong and takes quite a lot of force to cut it, but the cutter doesn't slip easily so you do less damage to your fingers. Ink and water colours work really well on it too. Great value for money, too, a lot cheaper than similar products. 5* product, I'm very happy

This cuts like butter so, as will any craft like this, the key is in making sure your tools are sharp enough - this is why it's not really for beginners, solo - I wouldn't do lino cutting with anyone under, say, 12.