Tired of the tourist trail? Signing up for an arts and crafts workshop is a great way to immerse yourself in the cultural life of a city – and the souvenirs are better, too

My hands are submerged in a bowl of water filled with tiny fabric scraps of blue, green and purple that have turned to mush. The water becomes cloudy as I agitate it then scoop the pulp fibres between two wire-lined frames, or deckles. I’m making craft paper, guided by Ello Varjas, acting director at Typa Printing and Paper Art Centre in Tartu, Estonia: this pulp will become a piece of A5.

As Ello explains: ‘Fibres used in paper, even the earliest paper made in China thousands of years ago, contain cellulose to keep it together. You can make paper from all sorts of materials – fishing nets, plants, bark, denim...’

While my paper is pressed and dried, Ello shows me different printing presses, typefaces and a huge Linotype machine that’s like something out of a sci-fi B-movie. Tartu, a Unesco City of Literature and home to Estonia’s oldest art museum, is a natural destination to try out printmaking. Beside us, volunteer Shabnam Singla shares ink colours with a German visitor, and I sneak a glance to check on their progress. For my own project, customising a tote bag, I pick three printing blocks from a selection.

‘These are called clichés, which is where the word comes from,’ says Ello. ‘Everyone else uses “cliché” to mean a bad thing, but printers want designs to repeat and look identical.’

My clichés feature Tartu’s iconic Tigutorn or ‘snail tower’, a pirate-esque ship and a dancing skeleton, referencing Bernt Notke’s 15th-century Danse Macabre, the most famous of the nation’s many medieval art treasures. Once I’ve inked my clichés evenly with a roller and laid them on the bag, the printing press demands a surprising amount of strength, but I’m thrilled with the results: crisp red-and-black prints on canvas.