Biscuits and being busy

You might think, since I've been a bit quiet on the work-related-posts front recently, that I've been slacking. Au contraire!

I've been printing like crazy – often at midnight, 1am, 2am – but all the results are things I can't show you yet.

The most Top Secret thing is my first letterpress art print for Sweet Olive Press. It has been complicated in every way, and time-consuming, and exciting. Seriously, I'm finding it hard to refrain from posting progress pictures here.

When it's finished, you'll hear all about it.

In the meantime, a little creative accomplishment that does have a picture to go with it... my lovely friend Kate in Paris sent me an amazing recipe for chocolate chip gingernut biscuits (cookies, Americans!). They were so great I had to send most of them home with my guests so they wouldn't later call me, in a fetching manner, from the kitchen...

Letterpress Business Cards

Running out of business cards is actually kind of great! It gives me a chance to revisit the look of my Sweet Olive Press card and – in this case – redesign it altogether.

I started printing these using a blind impression for the flower pattern, but I quickly switched to printing the pattern with transparent white for an "almost blind" impression. The pattern just looked better and more uniform with a little ink on the press.


The text is printed in a hand-mixed dark charcoal ink that jumps right off the card without being too harsh (black would've been a little much, really).

The press is in fine form and all ready to start printing the many (many!) custom projects and new stationery designs I've got lined up for the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more pictures as we keep rolling!

Letterpress happiness

I've had a steady stream of packages arriving this week, full of letterpress stock and new magnesium and polymer plates.

Lots of excitement! Lots of playing with the press! A little bit of frustration here and there!

At the moment I'm taking every spare minute either to print or prepare for printing, so I've been too busy to take photos – but they'll come, I promise.

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Sweet Olive Press – Sneak Peek {2}

Remember those letterpress birth announcements I said I couldn't show you yet? You can see them now in all their wonderfulness (if I do say so myself) on the Sweet Olive Press blog!
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Sneak Peek {1} | SWEET OLIVE PRESS LETTERPRESS BLOG

I have a brand-spanking-new extra-special letterpress blog and you can click through to see the two different elephant letterpress coaster designs I printed.

I'll be adding pictures of new letterpress designs and inspirations to the Sweet Olive Press blog regularly but don't worry, I won't be abandoning this one. I need to maintain a big list of waaaay too many things to do, otherwise I'll get in to mischief.

Letterpress: Red Berries

At last! The red berry letterpress cards I started printing way back in November are finished!

I based the design on this plant by our front courtyard...


...made some sketches one sunny afternoon...


...and after a lot of refining and redrawing in Illustrator, I sent the design away to have plates made.


I printed the red in early November, but I didn't get around to printing the green until mid-December, and I didn't get around to folding and photographing the cards until... well, now.


I mixed the colours myself and printed on 100% cotton Lettra stock on my Chandler & Price 8x12 Old Style. The registration was tricky at first and I had a bit of a struggle with getting the correct roller height (more tape on the rails – no, less – no, not that much less!)

In the end, everything came up roses.

Oh, bother.

It was bad enough that I smashed three gauge pins on the very first turn of the flywheel. It was worse that I was turning the wheel by hand, and should have felt the resistance... but didn't. It was much, much worse when I opened what I thought was a box of gauge pins and found only replacement tongues. No pins. No pins for me until some new ones can be shipped down from Colorado. That, of course, means no printing for me until next week. My business cards and packaging inserts will have to wait a little longer.

Silver linings to this cloud:
1) at least I discovered I've run out of pins now, and not in the middle of an important print run
2) instead of these spring tongue pins, I'll be getting the very snazzy Kort Adjustable Quad Guides... the Rolls Royce of gauge pins.

There will be No More Smashing.

(You're saying to yourself, is the time stamp on this post correct? Why would she be awake at 3.50am? Indeed, Kickbaby... why are we awake at 3.50am? And why were we awake at 2.50, 1.50, 12.50...)

Halfway there

Letterpress printing is always slow, but sometimes it's really slow. Especially when you create the design yourself, from scratch. I've been working on this project since early October, and I still only have one of the two colours printed.


These berries were pretty enough to be inspiring, so I made several sketches of them one sunny afternoon.


Berry helped by bringing out her crayons and working alongside me. "You drawing a plant, mum-mum? That pretty."

Several weeks passed while I refined the sketches, scanned them, created the final design in Illustrator, and sent the separations away to have plates made.


I needed the berries again to mix the right shade of ink. I got it, even though it looks orange on the press!


Each colour has to be printed separately on the press, with a complete cleaning in between runs. I've only printed the red berries so far, and I'm still looking for enough time to print the leaves – so I can't show you anything!


I promise when they're finished, I'll share.

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At last....

A vintage cut of a 1960 Cadillac, some blue and orange stock, a tiny bit of flame-red ink – and we're away! I was so happy to finally print my first "proper" notes on the Chandler and Price, I wanted to jump around.


Unlike last time, I made sure I actually had a good amount of baby-free time up my sleeve to do everything the right way. I even locked up the chase and oiled the press in advance. A note: you can't oil the press too far in advance or the oil will drip out before you get printing – and then you will have climb around the press to painstakingly drip oil into every one of the 30-something obscurely placed oil holes, all over again. You will call yourself bad names.


Here's what the press looks like in action, inking up the plate before the chase is inserted. Why is it a blur? Well, at this stage it was running 18 impressions per minute – too fast! Too fast! I've since fixed the speed issue ... but more on that later.


A first impression on the tympan (above), to help with alignment and placing the gauge pins. You rub that image back with solvent after this impression, otherwise it'll give you a (not-so-) nice reverse image on the back of your lovely cards. And you will cry.

I was completely precise and methodical in my placement of the gauge pins – again, unlike last time – and it made the world of difference. Imagine!


These first cards have gone to Nathan's Dad in Dallas and my Dad in Australia, in gratitude for the untold hours they've both spent working on the Chandler & Price (I owe them so much more, but this is symbolic!) and to Pauline, who's been cheering me on all the way from South Carolina.

Now we're rolling...

Underwear

When I got home from the gym today I did a little counting on my fingers and realised it's almost 16 months since I got my letterpress. Sixteen months, three moves, 4000 miles, endless research, oh-so-many new parts and enough father-hours to make me fairly guilty, and I still hadn't been able to print with the Chandler & Price.

So I had a bit of a rant in my head about I'll never get enough time to give it a first run. Ever ever ever.

And suddenly I realised: hey, Kickbaby is still asleep in his carseat and hey, I'm already not-particularly-clean in my gym gear. So – why not now?

I ran upstairs for the tin of black ink.


I already had the press oiled (thanks to Nathan's dad, who did a lot of work on it while he was here) and I'd locked the chase up more than a week ago – but I'd stalled, then, after packing the press. The replacement bail wasn't fitting right so I couldn't get the tympan to lie flat over the packing, and that seemed an insurmountable problem. I'd also decided it would take forever to ink the rollers evenly and figure out the whole positioning guides/setting gauge pins deal.

But in this morning's burst of optimism I thought: I'll just start. I'll start, and I'll iron out the problems as I go along. It has to be better than doing nothing.


First I went back and forth between Cleeton's General Printing and a very old copy of Graphic Arts to figure out how to ink up the press. I got ink evenly distributed on the ink disk, and the rollers, and my fingers too but not on my shirt – so I counted that as a success. Then I ruled some lines, placed the gauge pins (very haphazardly, I hardly need to point out), positioned the card and started the press.

This is what my very first impression looked like:


Right. Not enough packing. Messing around with extra sheets of the professional packing would've been a waste of precious baby-free-time, but I remembered a couple of the old hands on Briar Press mentioning that they'd used brochures, butcher's paper and even flattened cereal boxes to pack their presses, so.... Out of the newspaper stack I grabbed a Belk catalogue and pushed it under the rest of the packing to print this:


Better... but still patchy. Back to the newspaper stack. After adding a JC Penney catalogue to the mix, I got a slightly better impression. But it was the addition of the Sun-Herald sports pages that really did the trick. See:


Mr Underwear here is a vintage cut that my brother Aaron picked up for me at a swap meet back home in Australia, and I love it. This is clearly a man on a deeply noble mission – for underwear. You have to respect that.

I printed quite a few more of him, messing around with the gauge pins and realising (repeatedly) that positioning the paper for letterpress printing is a bit like backing up a boat trailer: figure out where you need to be, then do the opposite. When you haven't done the groundwork, it messes with your head.

I didn't spend any time positioning the guides properly so I never did get the image in quite the right place, and I absolutely butchered the tympan by chunking the gauge pins around so much.


It was quick-and-dirty and went against every meticulous fibre of my being. But who cares. I printed.

Now.... let's do it again.