Tag: Heath Way Prints

More meeples than you can shake a stick at
Following on from a previous post about meeple and designs featuring these things, I’ve made more meeple-related stuff for my RedBubble shop.

RedBubble shop

As well as the da Vinci inspired designs (plain and with text), there’s a multiple meeple and a meeple of meeples.

What’s a meeple when it’s at home?

The meeple is an iconic figure within the board gaming community. They are a humanoid (or other-oid) playing piece that originated in the game Carcassone, but they escaped the confines of the game and now appear everywhere that board games appear.

Wooden meeple. This is what they normally look like, used in many board games as a substitute for more decorative pieces.

After the da Vinci ‘Vitruvian Meeple‘ design, I made a meeple of meeples and what started as just a load of meeples but ended up with a Parklife-inspired slogan.

Meeple of Meeples

A Meeple of Meeples. A simple-looking design that took a bit of thinking through to get right.

I turned to Blender to make both designs. With the meeple original as a .svg (Scalable vector graphic) I imported this to Blender. After some faffing around, I created a solid meeple, ready for manipulation.

I used a geometry nodes set-up. The original curve that I imported became the framework for the design. The solid meeple that I made is then distributed around the curve. A bit of jiggery-pokery and the meeple point outwards¹. I learned how to randomise colour when I made the wizard’s workshop. I applied this technique to the 42 meeple, and the design was ready.

The Meeple of meeples, outline of a meeple made of meeples.

Meeple black outline

Meeple white outline

Parklife!

There are a lot of meeple in the Parklife design. 232, to be exact.

For a few years in the 90s, Blur’s song Parklife was everywhere. With narration by Phil Daniels, it is an ode to the joys of easy access to a public park and the importance of regular exercise. But not jogging.

Black outline and white outline versions of the ‘Parklife’ meeple design.

As a side note, the white outline version of this is the 100th design on the shop. Go me!

The basic Meeple that I used for the Meeple of Meeples was used again. This time, a function called Array was used to make about 200 Meeples in an offset pattern. The same setup for random colours was the same shader node setup as for the Meeple of Meeples.

All the meeple black outline

all the meeple white outline

We the Meeple

With the 250th birthday of the USA coming up, what better way to celebrate than with a Meeple flag? Go on, name one better way!

The Array function was my friend here, again. It’s a 9 x 7 array of Meeples with colours added to make a sort-of stars and stripes pattern.

This flag isn’t on the Redbubble shop. Redbubble don’t do flags, so I’ve expanded to using Printify as an additional supplier and I’ve set up another shop on the WordPress site. I’ll be adding designs there over the next few weeks.

We the Meeple flag

The plan is to keep the RedBubble shop as my main site for designs, with the shop here on Grim Up North Heath for special items such as flags, bandanas and embroidered items.

And the Village Meeple are also on the shop, but that’s another post.
1. I will do a video to explain how all this was done. ↩︎
19/06/2026
What’s new in the shop?
Recently, I updated the Facebook site and the Wix site. I designed a new banner for the shops to showcase recent designs. What I haven’t done for a while is make a new advert. But I fixed that.

Previous adverts only had a few designs on them. This time I think I put twelve designs on, because I decided to re-use some of the videos I made a while ago and I have learned a few more tricks in CapCut.

Heath Way Prints shop

New banner

This features four recent designs: One disc golf, the Vitruvian Meeple, “Stupid Euclid, stop pickin’ on me”, and “Sit on a Cake“.

It’s only now that I’m doing this post that I realise I’ve not blogged about disc golf¹. That will have to change². I also know I’ve not written about the ‘Stupid Euclid’ design; that’s because I only completed it yesterday.

Stupid Euclid

The inspiration for this is pretty obvious – there’s a song from 1958 sung by Connie Francis called Stupid Cupid. Cupid and Euclid sort of rhyme. But where does an ancient Greek Philosopher, the father of geometry, come into it?

I’m not unique in having done maths at school; it’s a compulsory subject. I took it further than most, I studied it for A level. I did OK, but I realised early on that I don’t have a maths brain. For those who do, maths lessons are an exercise in being shown the obvious. For me, I could do calculus and learned how to use the chain rule, differentiation by parts, I got the hang of surds quickly enough. But it was never a natural thing, as it is for my brother³ and oldest child⁴. It was more like following a recipe than knowing how to cook something.

So Euclid, the man whose “Elements” is the oldest textbook that is still useful, personifies the trials of maths and gets to be the target for this design (white printing – black printing also available).

Designs in the video

Old and new designs – Game over, Outpaced by snails, Caffeine!, Blue neon meeple, “I will not be shushed” and “How did that get there?” sticker.

Further designs – small disc golf, Quinoa and fist, ‘Sit on a cake’, Thinking about disc golf, Vitruvian Meeple and ‘Stupid Euclid’.

I’ve blogged about some of these designs, and will write about others that I’ve missed. The Game Over design is one of my favourites; the How did that get there is popular, as is the Sit on a cake – both part of the growing Taskmaster collection.

Heath Way Prints shop
1. It’s like ball golf, but you throw frisbees at a basket instead of hitting a ball into a hole with a stick. ↩︎
2. Although I’ve done a pretty full summary of the sport in the previous footnote. ↩︎
3. Who’s a maths lecturer. ↩︎
4. Who is about to start a Masters in Mathematics. ↩︎
19/04/2026

Easy boiled fruit cake recipe

A boiled fruit loaf, perfect with tea or to fill up the corners¹ after dinner.

Eat the cake, buy the apron!

Ingredients

225 g self-raising flour

175 g soft brown sugar

500 g mixed dried fruit and peel

125 g unsalted buter

225 ml tea (or water)

2 teaspoons mixed spice

½ teaspoon bicarb

2 eggs (beaten)

Method

Line a loaf tin with parchment paper

Melt the butter and the sugar with the tea² in a large saucepan. Add the dried fruit and peel, then boil gently³ for about ten minutes to let the fruit rehydrate.

Fruit, sugar, butter and tea boiling gently. This rehydrates the fruit and lets it absorb the flavour of the tea.

Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

Preheat the oven: 140 °C (fan), gas mark 3.

Tip the flour, mixed spice and bicarb into a bowl. Add a pinch of salt and the cooled fruit mixture. Stir well.

Flour, bicarbonate of soda, mixed spice and a little salt.

Add the eggs and mix in.

Finished batter and the prepared loaf tin. I used premade loaf tin liners because cutting and folding parchment to fit is a right faff.

Pour the batter into the prepared loaf tin and bake for about 50 minutes. It’s done when a skewer comes out clean.

Leave in the tin for ten minutes to cool a bit before turning it out to cool properly on a baking rack.

Serve sliced by itself, spread with butter, or with some strong cheese.

Have it on an apron!

This might be unusual, but you can also have the recipe on a apron, from the Heath Way Prints shop.

Fruit cake recipe on an apron. Can you spot the spelling mistake? I didn’t!

I did the design work in Canva. The cartoon of the cake is the photo above rendered by AI. I don’t normally use AI for design work, but this saved some time and it’s my original photo so no copyright issues.

Heath Way Prints

Apron

You can also get the recipe on a t-shirt or art prints, if you like! Just click on the buttons to go to the shop.

Nutritional advice

Serving size: Slice
Servings: 8
Amount per serving
Calories	520
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 15.7g	20%
Saturated Fat 8.9g	44%
Cholesterol 127mg	42%
Sodium 223mg	10%
Total Carbohydrate 92.6g	34%
Dietary Fiber 3.1g	11%
Total Sugars 58.5g
Protein 8.1g
Vitamin D 18mcg	88%
Calcium 155mg	12%
Iron 3mg	17%
Potassium 593mg	13%

From The Lord of the Rings after the main feast for Bilbo’s 111st birthday party, guests were “at that delightful stage which they called ‘filling up the corners’. They were sipping their favourite drinks and nibbling at their favourite dainties.” ↩︎
Choose whatever tea you like. I used PG Tips since that is what we drink. Earl Grey would add its own particular flavour to the cake. If you’re daring, go for something smoky like lapsang souchong or perhaps a green tea for variety. ↩︎
Hence the description of the recipe as a ‘boiled fruit cake’. You don’t boil the cake. Only an idiot would think that. ↩︎

03/04/2026

If that was love…
.. turns out I’ve not been in love before.

This design pulls together three icons of art and humour: Taskmaster, Monty Python and Andy Warhol.

The ‘Sit on a cake’ design on a t-shirt!

Sit on a cake designs

Heath Way Prints shop

He was a different man

I’ve written about Taskmaster before. It’s my favourite programme at the moment, the last two series (19 and 20) rank among the best. It’s got astonishing longevity; Alex Horne has hit upon a winning formula and he carefully selects groups of comedians who make a concerted effort to make the whole thing as much fun as possible.

Back in the distant past of Series 6 (broadcast in 2018), the final task of the series asked the contestants:

Tell the Taskmaster you love him in the most meaningful way.

As is typical, the contestants found wildly different ways to do complete the task. Tim Vine dressed as Greg’s mum and told Greg that he is her favourite child. Russell Howard didn’t have sex with Greg’s mum. Alice Levine got a toy aeroplane to fly a meaningful message for Greg. Asim Choudhry performed a rap declaring that he wanted to have Greg’s babies.

Three of the five attempt at the ‘show your love’ task. Alice sent a heavily caveated declaration of love, Asim said he wanted to have Greg’s babies and Tim dressed as Greg’s mum. Not shown: Russell not having sex with Mrs Davies (not very interesting) and Lisa’s go, because that’s what this section is going on to talk about.

Lisa Tarbuck, the series champion, hit the ball out of the park with her demonstration. She asked for a large cake topped with confectioner’s custard. Then she said to Alex:

Take yourself somewhere private and put your bare arse into it.

And so it was that Alex took himself to the shed, pulled down his pants and, with carefully positioned cameras recording the event, sat bare-arsed on a cake.

His expression of horror/ delight has stayed with me for years. He had an experience unlike anything he had known before and changed him. “He was a different man¹,” Lisa declared.

Alex Horne’s life changes forever. He now knows what love is and also managed to absorb a profiterole. Don’t ask how.

An equal part of the joy of this was Lisa’s reaction. She ran away, giggling when Alex came out of the shed, dripping cake from under a strategically placed towel.

Andy Warhol’s Shot Marilyns

With such an image in my head, I had to do something with it. One iconic image deserves another, and there are few more iconic faces than that of Marilyn Monroe.

Andy Warhol certainly thought so. The silkscreen collection Shot Marilyns is one of his best-known works. This isn’t the name he gave the works – he called them Marilyns and made five in total. Each had a different background colour and slightly different colouring to the face. The “Shot” addition came about when the performance artist Dorothy Podber fired a single shot through a stack of four of the paintings. Her actions – a piece of performance art that Warhol did not appreciate – earned her a lifetime ban from The Factory.

Four of the five Marilyn paintings that Andy Warhol made in 1964.

Whether you’re a fan of pop art and the world of Andy Warhol, the colourful images of one of the greatest film starts of the 1950s, you can’t deny the paintings are memorable.

I tribute to this, I found a way to make images in a similar manner to the Marilyns. Using this method, I made my own set of images of Little Alex Horne’s face.

A triptych of Little Alex Horne – “Shocked Alex” – as he experiences love for the first time.

I quite like the triptych as it is. For the final design that uses the ‘four images’ presentation that is often used for these paintings, I wanted some words to go with the image.

Monty Python’s very rude song

In one of my first blog posts² I talked about what makes me laugh. Monty Python is firmly in that camp, especially when they get silly.

The title of this section is a bit misleading. Python did a number of rude songs – the Not Noël Coward song from Meaning of Life springs to mind – but Sit on my Face is probably the rudest of all.

If you’re easily offended, don’t go looking for it.

However, the sentiment from the Python’s song and the sentiment from Lisa Tarbuck’s demonstration of love can find middle ground. A middle ground that, with a little tweaking, can enhance the four images of shocked Alex.

The ‘Sit on a cake’ design on a t-shirt!
1. This was also the episode title. ↩︎
2. There’s an updated version with a few examples of stuff I think is funny. ↩︎
30/03/2026
If Leonardo da Vinci played board games

Meet the Meeple

The meeple is an iconic object within the board gaming community. They are a stylised humanoid figures, used as a playing piece in board games. Slightly fancier than the pieces we used in Cludeo all those years ago, but not much.

I’ve taken the outline of the Meeple and made a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man‘, and called it ‘Vitruvian Meeple’. It’s available as a t-shirt and printed on other things (click the button to go to the shop).

White print Vitruvian meeple on black t-shirt.

Black print Vitruvian meeple on white t-shirt.

Vitruvian Meeple white print

Vitruvian Meeple black print

Meeple differ wildly from the pieces used in role playing games, which are detailed metal sculptures and often carefully painted by players.

Painted figures, as used in table top role playing games. You wouldn’t normally see such models used in board games. No reason you couldn’t, though.

The design came to me after I’d spent a day at a board games convention in Worthing. My main reason for going was to get inspiration and to see if there were any other people selling printed goods to board game enthusiasts. I’d seen the meeple design before, and it has been used on t-shirts. I don’t want to do things that someone else has already done, so I know what to avoid.

Design process

The idea of the Vitruvian Meeple came to me while I was sketching out another idea – The Village Meeple – so I sketched the idea (see below).

Original sketch for the Vitruvian Meeple.

I used Inkscape to do the design after I tried to get the design made in Canva and Blender. With Inkscape I could control and edit curves a bit more easily than in either of the other two apps. Colour changes are easy, too, so I could do the design in black, white, or any other colour for a good contrast if I want to specify a t-shirt colour.

Adding a circle (actually an ellipse, the meeple dimensions aren’t perfect) and a square was easy enough, then all I had to do was export it and do the keywords and description in RedBubble. I still find these bits difficult to do, I don’t like relying on AI to do this.

I may do another version with reverse script above and below to make it look more like the da Vinci original. This will be the deluxe version.

And as for The Village Meeple? Watch this space…

Coming soon – The Village Meeple!

03/03/2026
Love is in the air…

…in every sight and every online shop.

Why would Heath Way Prints be any different?

Throw pillow

Main shop

The “Je t’aime” design on a throw pillow.

French is supposedly the language of love. Certainly to the ears of someone who grew up only hearing English and the occasional Scots Gaelic, the words “Je t’aime” sound more pleasing than “Ich liebe dich”. But to German ears, what does “I love you” sound like? Do they prefer “Te Amo” or would the Dutch “Ik houd van je” sound exotic?

Background text for the design. Fourteen languages, mainly European because I couldn’t work out how to get other alphabets.

This design was done in Canva. I only made it a week ago and I have forgotten which languages I used. I think there’s German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Swahili and Polish. Oh, and English (thanks to Mrs S for reminding me about that one!).

To make the final design I repeated the background text at random angles and set the opacity down. Then a nice pink gradient as background and it was ready for the main image.

The main text was done in TC Milo, black with a light pink outline. The massive kiss is one of the graphics that Canva supplies.

Summary of fonts used for this design.

This design looked better on some items than on others. I only did one item of clothing, the black sleeved t-shirt. And the apron, if that counts as clothing. Buttons below link to the products.

The “je t’aime” design on tote bag, t shirt, clock and apron.

Tote bag

T shirt

Clock

Apron

15/01/2026
Vintage Patent T-Shirts for Cycling Fans
New t-shirt design!

This is the latest in the series of Patent-inspired t-shirts.

Blue print on white

White print on black

I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride my bike

I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride it where I like

I’ve not ridden a bike for over 30 years (last one was stolen in 1993) so I’ve missed out on a lot of the developments in bicycle technology. I do enjoy watching the Tour de France, though, and one thing I was well aware of is the use of derailleur gears – they’ve been around since before I was born.

I was maybe 13 when I got my first multi-gear (10 speed, as I recall) bike after I’d outgrown the 3-speed one I got when I was 8¹. We’d moved to England by then, and where we lived wasn’t very hilly but also not so busy that I was in danger when out on the roads.

The rear wheel of a bike is probably not considered much by non-riders. It’s the wheel that turns when you turn the pedals. But the mechanism that controls the gears is the subject of much debate and engineering over the years.

Rear gear bit of a bike. The derailleur is the black Z-shaped thing which controls the chain as it hops between the spoke wheels on the axle and also maintains chain tension as the gear size changes.

Back in the old days (very old days) bikes didn’t have gears. The penny-farthing had a huge wheel and, if you found the hill was too steep, you hopped off and pushed.

Variable gearing initially involved having two gear spokes on either side of the back wheel and then getting off and turning your wheel around to go uphill (or downhill). I don’t know if there’s any footage of Tour de France competitors doing this, but your skills in fixing a bike were at least as important as your riding ability².

The derailleur is a remarkably old invention, with the first rod-based systems being invented in the late 19th century. There is a book on this called ‘The Dancing Chain’ by Frank Berto, but it’s at least £75 and I’m not that into cycling.

Never an organisation to rush into making things easy for competitors, the Tour de France resisted such new-fangled innovations for many decades. Finally, in 1937, competitors in the Tour were allowed to use derailleur gearing. The effect this had on the average speed of the cyclists was minimal – an increase from 31.1 kph to 31.8 kph was about average for the speed year-on-year speed increase at the time (BikeRaceInfo.com).

Shimano gears

Founded in 1921 by Shozaburo Shimano, Shimano is one of the watch-words in the bike community. Their gears and groupsets (gears, gear changers, etc) are regarded as the best by many riders.

Pro teams currently using Shimano gears include fourteen of the eighteen UCI men’s World Tour (the top ranking pro teams) and four of the fifteen UCI Women’s World Tour teams.

So in honour of this, I researched the early stages of derailleur gears and found the 1970 patent co-authored by Shozaburo’s son, Keizo Shimano. I think this was the basis of the Dura-Ace gear set that remained popular for a couple of decades.

Shimano derailleur gearing patent, blue on a white t-shirt.

The patent design is now available as blue on white or white on blue or black in my RedBubble³ shop.

Blue printing

White printing

Disraeli Gears

As I said at the top derailleurs have been around since before I was born. Indeed, Cream’s 1967 album Disraeli Gears was so called when one of the group’s roadies dropped this malapropism when he heard that Eric Clapton was buying a racing bike.

Let’s listen to one of their songs from that album.
1. This had hub gears, which I never worked out the mechanism for, there’s just a chain that disappears into the axle. It’s probably magic. ↩︎
2. The spirit of the individual cyclist riding the Tour is typified by the story of Eugène Christophe from the 1913 Tour. He was leading by 18 minutes and descending the Tourmalet when his front forks broke. It took him two hours to reach the village at the foot of the mountain. He found a blacksmith who would let him use his forge – the rules stated he had to make repairs alone – and, after three more hours he set off with a mended bike. Race officials gave him a 10 minute penalty because a local boy pumped the bellows of the forge for him.
  He eventually finished seventh overall. ↩︎
3. I gave up on Etsy, the shop is too fiddly for the type of goods I want to sell and having to front up 20p per item for three months on the shop started to get a bit too much. I’ll keep it open though, since I may want to sell individually made items in the future. ↩︎
17/05/2025