On the Press

A few photos taken while running the printing press...

Around the Studio

With my first holiday show just three weeks away, I'm in full holiday prep mode. The press is fully up and running now (although I'm definitely still learning), and I've been printing hundreds and hundreds of Christmas cards to get ready. I'm also working on a long list of custom projects, which always seem to pick up around the holidays too.

Whenever I hear people talk about how commercial or materialistic Christmas is, I say bring it on. It is hands-down the best time of year to be in business, as people start shopping and thinking of personalized gifts to give. Plus, anyone who has seen me struggle to wait till Christmas morning knows how much I love giving and receiving presents. So bring on the holiday season!

Old Plates

 

This weekend we hit one of the best yard sales I have ever been to: for $12, I bought three big boxes of old printing plates with the theme "stamps and travel" that were used in the printing of an old stamp collecting catalog. There are little plates from every country, and it looks like they were part of an advertising campaign for stamp collecting from the 1960s.

I tried out a few on the press with really good results. Some have a little dirt caked on them after years of sitting in storage, so a few of the prints didn't come out perfectly. But with a little cleaning and some more printing practice, they'll be ready to go. I've been contemplating working on some travel themed cards, since these blocks are too pretty to stay in storage.

2013 Calendars Now in the Shop!

There may be six months left of 2012, but I just added the new 2013 Letterpress calendar to the shop! It was a big seller at the Stationery Show this year, so I wanted to share it with all of you online.

The calendar is a deep turquoise color, with a hand-painted design inspired by the intricate wall paintings we saw in Jaipur this spring. The old palaces we visited would be covered with these tiny floral and geometric designs on every wall, painted by the same families for hundreds of years. I used the same layout of borders and flowers to paint the design, then transferred it to a plate for letterpress printing.

You can find next year's calendar right here in the shop!

Two New Additions

This weekend Joe and I drove four hours south to pick up a new addition to the studio that I found on Craigslist: a Chandler and Price letterpress. It was quite an adventure; we borrowed a trailer and drove the GPS's "most direct route" which went through winding back roads and unmarked paths (I think it's time for a new GPS). When we got there, the door needed to come off the studio it was in, and it took us two hours to roll it out and onto the trailer. Then we hauled the one-ton press back over the winding roads, to it's new home in the garage.

With all the orders coming in, it has been impossible to keep up while printing everything by hand. So in order to speed up the process, some of the prints will now be done on a letterpress. First it needs to be cleaned and oiled and it needs new rollers, but once we get it going I can start printing blocks on the press!

And the second new addition: our puppy Luka who we adopted a week before the Stationery Show and likes to sleep in random places:

There's a lot going on here, and I can't wait to get the press all cleaned up and ready to go! I can't even imagine how nice it will be to print 500 cards in a run rather than 50. If you want to see how it works, Elizabeth from Sugarcube Press has a great video here.

60% Off 2012 Calendars!

I launched the 2013 letterpress calendar at the National Stationery Show, and before I add those to the shop, I'd like to clear out the rest of the 2012 calendars. It was a limited edition print so there are only eleven pieces left, and I just marked them down to 60% off. Get one now for only $9.00! You can find them in the shop right here.

Back from Bust with a Platter of BBQ

After one of the most exhausting weekends I've had in my whole life, we are back from the Bust Craftacular in NYC. The rain put a damper on things and the show wasn't quite as packed as I had hoped, but we got to go to possibly the best restaurant on the planet. I had been looking forward to it for months. If you live within a 1000 mile radius of New York, get in a car right now and drive to Fette Sau, order the pork belly and allow the food coma to sink in. Amazing. I would move my apartment into the restaurant if I could.

The pork was definitely the highlight of the trip, but I also loved seeing the prints from YeeHaw Industries which I have had my eye on for a while. Their musician prints are my favorite, and I love the way they use text in images. Text is something I always shy away from in linoleum prints because it can come out looking like a five-year-old wrote it, but they pull it off so well and it really goes with the folk-y look of the faces. 

I was excited to see them there because of the new book that I was just flipping through, the Little Book of Letterpress. The book has a page on each of the big names in letterpress, and the YeeHaw team wrote the introduction. It's a really nice book, and now I just need to write to Chronicle Books and ask to be the author of the Little Book of Block Printing. So Chronicle Books, if you're reading this, I'll do it!