Gamewell Press Blog

Laser-Cut Love

I said in my last post that I finally got to do some printing last week, but I didn't go into further detail. The reason being that Glendon and I were combining our resources and experimenting with using our powers for letterpress good, and I wanted to write it up in a separate post.

Glendon's department at school recently purchased a new laser cutter, and he’s one of the people testing it and figuring out not only how it works, but its utilities and limits. I mentioned that I had read a post on Briar Press where a printer discussed using a laser cutter to make type-high woodcuts. Serendipitously, Glendon was way ahead of me, and I was like “score! Wood type just for me!” We’ll see about that, but our first experiment was pretty promising.

Last week he finally got a chance to try it out and he chose one of the free, vectorized cuts from Briar Press and made a woodcut initial. He used 3/4” finished plywood, so that it had a very smooth face. We’re going to try cherry too, a la the Briar Press post, but plywood seems to be working fine. The laser cutter is a 75-watt Epilogue CO2 laser, which is probably overkill for this sort of engraving since Winking Cat Press seems to be doing just fine using a 40-watt.

There are still a few kinks to be worked out, number one being wood height. Like I said, Glendon only had 3/4” wood, so he had to build it up to type height with sheets of acrylic. This process took a while and in the end one corner was still a bit lower than the others. We ended up using a few sheets of regular 20 lb paper cut to size and strategically placed under the cut to even it out. That was pretty easy and not a big deal; however if anyone knows a good source for type-high wood, please share. I found one site, but those prices aren’t cheap. In the meantime, we’re going to try to work out a better system of building up the cuts. Perhaps we’ll try to find two pieces of wood that equal type high when put together. When I say we, I don’t actually mean me. But look! Isn’t that cool?

We had a couple other fixable problems: the wood either got dinged or had a knot in the middle of the A where the blank spot is. I can fix that with makeready, but it would be much easier to just avoid it in the future through better wood examination and care. And then Glendon forgot about the whole reverse printing thing and neglected to reverse the image before printing it with the laser cutter. I’m pretty sure he would have noticed this if we’d been printing pretty much any other letter besides A, but for testing purposes, who really cares?

We didn’t really try to get an impression or anything because we were printing on a hard coated paper, and just getting the block even was rather time consuming. Actually, I signed up for this letterpress swap thing but naturally left it till the last minute, so this new process is already proving pretty handy. I might try to get some impression with one of those cuts since I’m using 100% cotton paper, and we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway we had a really good time printing the cut and doing makeready and stuff. Glendon’s often around while I’m printing, but it was so great actually doing the whole thing together. For me, it was basically the best date ever. Glendon had fun too, but I don’t think letterpress printing is his new passion or anything. Hey, as long as he keeps on playing with printing cuts on the laser cutter, it still seems like a pretty good partnership.

Dueling Wedding Invitations, Part Two

Sorry for the delay in posting part two of the dueling wedding invitations (click here for Part One); it's taken me some time to want to look at these guys again. They were such an ordeal to print in many ways, and I wasn't as happy with the whole thing as I had hoped I'd be. This was the last project printed on the 5x8 Kelsey and then a week later I brought home the 6x10 press and spent two weeks messing around with it before finally printing my business cards. I think I needed to print those cards and be super happy with them before I could step back and think about all the things that either went wrong or I did wrong with these invites.

Below is the finished product, which in some moments I do like. They're probably not everyone's cup of tea since they're brighter and maybe more casual than the standard wedding invitation, but I think they fit the tone of the couple and their upcoming wedding pretty well. John and Alissa are having a casual (for a wedding), summery wedding in Louisville, Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend, and I do think the invitation conveys that. My main problems with it are that it doesn't look as polished as I would have liked - I just couldn't get certain things to print perfectly and while the design isn't elegant, I still kind of wanted it to look elegant (because I'm bonkers). It looks handmade, which actually pleased the bride and groom, but ironically upsets me. Obviously I'm still having trouble evaluating this printing job, so let's just move onto the process, shall we?

So everything in the invitation except the trellis border is handset metal type, and the trellis is a stereotype mounted on wood. I'm sure you know that it's best to place the type in the chase with the lines of text running parallel to the top and bottom of the chase so that when the platen closes, pressure is applied evenly along the entire line of text and the line prints evenly. If you set the type so that a line of text runs parallel to the sides of the chase, the pressure might not be applied at the same time or quite as evenly since a clamshell press, by necessity, closes from the bottom to the top.

Naturally I try to follow that principle while printing, and at first tried on these too. Since the chase is only 5 inches tall from top to bottom, I had to print the text in two sections and the ornaments in two other sections and finally the trellis. That made 5 print runs, yikes. I had kind of accepted that when I noticed that the lines of text were not straight in the proofs, and it took me a very long time to figure out why, mainly because I didn't want to admit it to myself. Each text section was lined up nice and straight when I printed it (I promise - I measured 40-zillion times), but they were zigging and zagging towards each other when you examined the proof sheet. Because of the chase size and paper size, I was lining up the first text section to the top of the paper and the second text section to the bottom of the paper. The paper wasn't cut straight (thanks, incompetent Staples), so using two different straight edges wasn't lining everything up. I'm used to my paper-cutting being a bit unreliable (at some point I really need to face facts and find some sort of paper cutter), but I expected a bit more from Staples, with their fancy laser cutting. But, hey look! At least I've finally got ink mixing down!

  

So I finally faced facts, threw the ruler across the apartment with a curse, and set about the business of making sure each print run lined up with one edge, THE SAME EDGE, of the paper (the trellis edge). Unfortunately for me, this required resetting or at least repositioning pretty much every line. I'd taken care of much of my layout in the composing stick, and the shift needed to reposition lines running from 8 inches to 5 inches was large enough that I couldn't just turn the chase and rearrange the furniture. (Just as an aside, it's dumb-ass mistakes like this that led me to start this blog. Sure the idea of using a common edge for alignment seems obvious now that you've read it, but really was it before? Not to me, apparently. Now it is, and just in case this lesson hasn't been seared into my brain, I now have it recorded on the Internet for future reference.)

Somewhere in that process I got confused about my print runs - or at least that's my only explanation now. My notes are unclear, and as it was probably late at night, my memory is fuzzy. As you can see, I printed half the Della Robbia text first. Why? I'm not sure. I believe (and this is reconstruction) that I meant to print that portion of the text and the couple's names (in Gallia) in one run and the remainder of the text in the 2nd run, but that may not be true. If that was my intention, I can certainly explain why that didn't happen: the Gallia printed very badly. So I think that I decided that I didn't have enough ink for the Gallia but adding ink would cause over-inking of the Della Robbia. I was wrong, but I didn't know that yet. So the question now is, if I removed the Gallia, why didn't I add the rest of the Della Robbia text, and just print that all in one run? I don't have the answer for that, except perhaps that I was extremely frustrated and tired from an already long evening of resetting everything and discovering that the Gallia wasn't printing well. Regardless, that was stupid and added a whole extra print run and alignment headache. Now we're back at 5 print runs (3 text, 2 ornament). Ah, hindsight, etc.

So I printed the first section of Della Robbia separately and it went fine - it even looked pretty, with a nice kiss impression. Since I already had the press inked up and that had gone so well, I decided to give the Gallia a shot (this is still the first night of printing, just very late that night). Hubris. (Yeah that's right, this is an epic battle). My original idea was to print all the Gallia in one go, and since it's a heavier font than Della Robbia, I added more ink and I think removed a sheet of packing. The print was splotchy and uneven. I decided that I would go to bed and that the next night I would split the two sections up into two print runs. For those of you keeping track at home, that makes six print runs now, and let's keep in mind that each separate run entails a ridiculous amount of measuring and fiddling to make sure everything is aligned and straight.

The next evening I inked up again and tried to print the names only. Still no good. I added ink, I subtracted ink, I added packing, I subtracted packing. I briefly hyperventilated. Seriously though, I messed with this for hours. I examined each piece of type and did loads of spot makeready, mostly without success. I believe I had the tympan sheet, the makeready sheet, the press board, a piece of Lettra and three piece of card stock as packing and it really was pretty much perfect. I was getting just the right impression (a kiss), which I think you can even see in the below picture, but the printing was still blotchy. With the impression taken care of, I decided that the ink must be the problem, but soon ruled that out as well. I suppose that inking the Gallia isn't completely straightforward since there is both line and (a small) solid in the font, but I'm pretty sure I had more than enough ink on the press. At some points the ink was filling in the white space between the lines (see the I and last S in the bride's name) while still printing splotchily in other places (see the K in the groom's name). I did loads of makeready and it didn't help. I cleaned and examined the type before re-inking and that didn't help. I tested this two days in a row, so the press was cleaned in between, and while I used the same ink mix, I also used that ink mix to print the Della Robbia. Why did it print so badly? I'm still not really sure. 

 

My best guess is the paper wasn't taking the ink well from the type, but I don't really see what was so different about this situation than any other printing situation where this didn't happen. I was using Crane's Lettra, mainly because it probably is the paper I'm most familiar with, so we decided to use Lettra since much of the rest of the invitation was a new experience so why invite more trouble? So still, I'm unclear what the problem was.

Finally, late that 2nd night, I decided that I would have to dampen the paper. I had been reluctant to do this because I had already printed on the paper and I still had a few more print runs to go, so dampening the entire sheet seemed really problematic. The only other time I've printed on dampened paper, it was a small, one-run print job and I put 4 sheets of paper in a Tupperware container, dipped the fifth sheet of paper in water, laid it on top of the four sheets and repeated the process with the rest of the stack. I then let the stack sit closed overnight. Obviously I had no time to do that in this case and the idea of dipping my printed on sheet into a tub of water made me nervous.

So I devised the only stop-gap measure I could think of. I got a container of water and a sponge and spot-dampened the middle of each page where I would then print. I tried to print all the Gallia at once, but it actually still worked better in two sections, so I just printed the names that night. As you might imagine, individually dampening each sheet took a while and I couldn't do them all at once or they would dry before I printed them. It also took some experimentation to figure out how much to dampen. Finally I worked out a system where I would dampen 4 sheets and print them and then do four more. After about 25 I would stack them up and put them in the book press. When I was finally finished I left them all in the book press overnight and collapsed into bed. The next evening I repeated these steps for the 2nd section of Gallia and I also printed the 2nd section of Della Robbia. Between spot-dampening and then doing two runs of about 110 sheets with a hand-cranked press, it was a long evening. Let me tell you, after those three nights of difficult printing, I would be happy to never see that shade of blue again.

Voila, the text was finally done, and it looked mostly acceptable. The Gallia wasn't perfect and though I sound like a broken record, I still don't know why exactly. I've printed with it before without problems, I examined each piece pretty closely, but who knows? I'll do further tests at some point but haven't yet had the time or energy. To be honest, I just had to look at the time I had left and accept imperfection (although being honest, it's pretty obvious that I haven't accepted imperfection). The really annoying thing was actually something else (it just never ends). Though I had spent hours on alignment, the text still looked crooked. It wasn't crooked, but it looked crooked. I measured with my pica ruler, I tested with a triangle and the text was all perfectly aligned with the trellis edge, but due to the white space left by using both 24pt and 14pt Gallia, some of the text looked crooked. Since attaching a slip of paper explaining that this was just a visual trick wasn't an option, I decided to just take comfort in my measurements and hope that no one else would pay attention.

Elisabeth will maybe be proud of me after looking at the above picture. After seeing the frog business cards I printed (in two parts) last August, she commented that I could be pushing the press further and she was right. As you can see from this lockup, I printed that same frog, but this time printed two other elements and utilized most of the chase. I think if one compares the two prints, the newest one, with the larger print area, actually printed much better. Look at me growing. Perhaps there is hope yet? With the frog and the flowers, I really didn't have to do anything special to make it print well, so that was quite a relief. After all the problems I'd had with the text section, I had left myself only one evening to print all the green elements, including the envelopes.

Lots and lots of late nights with these guys, but that last night was the worst. I literally stayed up until 9:30 in the morning and then woke up at 11:40 to go to work (paying work) from 1-9. So obviously one of my issues was time management. As you may have read in my previous post on these invitations, it took us longer than expected to finalize the design, and once we were done, I procrastinated for a couple days because it was my birthday and I was tired of these invites and then I got crawl-around-on-the-floor sick for a few days, and by that time I only had about 4 days left to print everything. That may sound like plenty of time, and if everything had gone smoothly it would have been perfect. Of course, things went wrong, and I'm no expert, so 4 days was really, really pushing it. To be honest, I don't know if it would have turned out any better if I'd had more time. Maybe if I had decided to throw the whole thing out and start over, but I don't have that kind of money or patience.

The trellis was the final challenge, and its printing badly was purely my amateur fault. The trellis is actually two different pieces that I bought on EBay ages ago. They don't really fit together all that naturally, as you can see in the invitation, but that was unavoidable and I had originally planned for the invitation to be smaller and to only use the larger trellis piece. Anyway the trellis looked a little weird at the meeting point to begin with and parts of both pieces required some pretty complicated makeready, but I mostly got the job done. If you can believe it, I even spot dampened it too, just in case. If you look at the finished invitation however, you will notice a small area right in the center (yes, of course it would be the center!) that still didn't print, even with all my ministrations. That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the block just slopes downward. SLOPES! I did everything I could, underlays and overlays, and it does look better than the first prints, but there was just no way to print something that didn't exist. Why, oh why did I not notice that before? I could have just cut off the whole edge. It was a silly mistake, but now I know the value of carefully proofing all new materials!

 

And that is the saga of those invitations. If anyone has any ideas about any of the problems I experienced, I'd be thrilled to hear them. Also has anyone printed with French Paper? If so, please describe both which you used and the results.

All right, the duel is over. But it wasn't really a duel, I guess. Both are still standing (in that they please the brides and grooms) and now again so am I.

Ready! Set! Makeready!

Hello there. Long time no see. I've been sick, the heat in my building broke (making it too cold to sleep, much less print), I've been helping people design invitations that I'll print in the next couple months, I've been buying and sorting new (to me) type, and I've been looking for a bigger press (with mixed luck - more on that later). Busy with so much that's letterpress related except blogging and printing.

I have done one project recently, which is actually part one of a large (for me) wedding suite for a friend. I'll be printing the rest of it in the coming week, but I wanted to post specially about the save the dates we sent out a couple weeks ago.

I try not to push my press or come close to exceeding its limits. One reason for this is that the printing isn't always as good, but also I've read horror stories about press parts snapping under the pressure or overloaded, over-tightened chases snapping. Stories that fill you with fear...and caution. With that said, these save the dates pretty much pushed the press to the limit (my limit - which is a perfectly safe limit) and required some fancy-ass makeready.

My friends who are getting married are artists and have designed all the components of the invitations with assistance from me on what works well for letterpress printing. We sent all the files to Owosso Graphics and had plates made and mounted type high on wood. I have been waffling on whether I can make the monetary investment to purchase either a boxcar base or a honeycomb base and which of those I would want to go with anyway, so type-high wood mounted plates that can be printed at home or another shop it is. If anyone has really strong feelings about either system, please weigh in. Right now I'm leaning towards Boxcar, but a week ago I was firmly in the honeycomb camp.

The save the date measured 4x6, so of course I had doubts about printing it on the 5x8 Kelsey, but we were sort of pressed for time and I wasn't sure what press rental options I would have. Since the happy couple wanted to send out the save the date as a postcard that wouldn't get too beat-up in the mail, they chose a hard, thin stock and bought pre-cut 4x6 cards. I could tell by touching the cards that impression would be pretty difficult to come by, so we just decided to go ahead and print it on my Kelsey, get a good print and say to hell with impression this time.

As you can see, the form was too large for me to use the gripper bars properly, so I used a rubber band stretched between them to hold the card down. I stupidly threw away most of my early test prints, but really the print was pretty good from the first. The side at the top of the chase was consistently printing lighter that the rest, and this was somehow not fixable by tightening the impression screws or changing the overall packing, so I taped some newsprint over that part of the tympan and that solved that. After doing that, there were light bits here and there, but no major problems that weren't fixable by by-the-book makeready.

Yes, that's right. I did major, proper makeready for the first time in a while and it was fantastic. I've always had trouble with the concept of accurately placing the makeready sheet under the tympan and the first packing layer so that everything lines up properly, but this time I got it down. I think my stumbling block has always been that I wanted the makeready sheet to be the same size as the packing sheets, so I wanted to pull the proof before setting the guage pins, but without the guage pins you can't really hold the sheet in place. This time I had the brilliant idea of pulling my proof on tracing paper using the guage pins for proper positioning and taping it to one of the packing sheets. Brilliance can be a relative thing. I first made sure that the packing was pretty much correct but needed a tiny bit more, so that the addition of one sheet of tracing paper would be perfect and I pulled my final couple proofs with an extra layer of tracing paper behind the paper I printed on.

To make sure that everything lined up properly I cut a slit through the tracing paper, tympan, and first couple sheets of packing while the tracing paper was positioned but before I printed onto the tracing paper. You can see the slits circled in white below.

I placed the finished makeready sheet behind the tympan and one sheet of packing and used my handy slit in the layers to properly line everything up. This was especially useful since I did have to remove the sheet and add a bit more makeready here and there after pulling more proofs. You can't really see it in the below photo, but there are three more packing sheets and the pressboard behind that. I used regular cover for this packing; I tried a sheet of softer paper, but harder was definitely working better for this. Packing is something I need to experiment with more, to really understand the difference between hard or soft packing and different printing papers, so you can hopefully expect a report on that at some point.

I have to make a couple points here. 1. I was really very pleased with how well the Kelsey and I, working together, were able to achieve such a nice consistent print of such a large form. Kelseys have a bad reputation, and they really aren't the easiest presses to work with given their limitations, but I think I've learned so much more by using my press than I would have if I had started out with a Pilot or a Pearl. Or a Vandercook. Part of me thinks that a monkey could print adequately on a Vandercook, which isn't to say that I would kick it out of bed for eating crackers (the Vandercook, I mean). 2. By-the-book makeready is awesome. It may take a bit more carefulness and thought at first, but the consistency and quickness of results make up for that. I'm often a bit slapdash with my makeready. I'll pull a proof right onto the tympan and slap on some scotch tape. I still think that's perfectly fine if it's two letters printing crappily, but I've also ended up in a situation where I've taken it too far and had a ridiculous amount of tape or paper right on the tympan. I'm reformed though! I'm now a proper makeready kind of girl. And honestly you feel so proud of yourself for doing it that it's worth it for the self congratulation alone.

Below is the final project, and in a couple weeks I'll post pictures of the rest of the wedding material (envelope, invitation, RSVP 2-sided postcard). We wanted to wait until the guests receive the invitations before showing them anywhere else. As a huge bonus, the bride is a wonderful photographer (she took the picture of my shop cat, Gus), so at least for once the pictures I post will be high quality!

O, G, Impression Woes

I think this post could also be titled: Change the tympan dammit - setting guage pins isn't that big a deal - good lord!

So when I finally got around to finishing the prop cards, the final steps were printing my name and placing the g in the middle of the little border. I thought this would be a pretty quick job once I finally got around to it, but as is often the case with my letterpress printing, this was not to be.

I kind of expected that placing the g would be trying as I've had an extremely difficult time with this before due to careless paper cutting and registration. However, I cut those three cards pretty exactly and apparently I was also very consistent when registering them for the first runs, so placing the g directly in the middle wasn't the issue. It's nice to realize that I've identified a point of weakness (paper cutter, registration) and taken steps to fix it. Watch Maggie learn!

No, the issue I had was getting the g to print well and I had the same problem with the o in my last name. The bottom half of the g printed much much more heavily than the top half and the o had this incredibly heavy impression that the rest of my name didn't have. The o came up first, and I took the chase out and examined it, but everything seem properly locked up and planed although I redid it just to be sure. That didn't fix the problem, and after some fiddling, I realized that it must be a problem with the tympan. At this point, my tympan sheet is really old and has all kinds of last minute make ready and printing on it, but I also have the guage pins set up exactly how I want it for all the business cards I've been doing. I'm still not done with the business cards, so I wanted to avoid changing the tympan if possible, and my make ready solution to get the o to stop printing so heavily was kind of ridiculous - or at least not by the book.

As you may know, make ready can be rather tricky. For example, if something, say the letter a in the word smack, was printing lightly, you would want to add a layer of tape or tissue to the make ready sheet to make it print a little more evenly. However this added pressure on the letter a might also relieve some of the pressure on the letters right next to that a. So then the m or the c may not print properly. It can be kind of a process to get everything printing just right. Honestly, I didn't have the time or energy for just right, so I hoped that my makeshift solution would work and it did for my last name, but not so much for that g in the border. I printed directly onto the tympan and placed pieces of tape going over the rest of my name on either side of the o. I think I had to put two layers on each side, but it did end up printing the whole name evenly.

I tried this same trick when only half of the g was printing, but it didn't work as well that time. Sometimes when the top half of a forme isn't printing but the bottom half is, it means that you have too much packing, but I only had a piece of pressboard and two sheets of card stock, so I know that wasn't the problem. Then I thought perhaps the impression screws were not even. Oh those crazy impression screws, don't you love how they loosen on their own?! So I started fiddling with the impression screws, which I really hate doing. You are actually supposed to test and set the screws and then never touch them again, but since my Kelsey is an older model, it has no washers or bolts, and the screws occasionally move on their own. I should then retest and set them, but that process takes an hour or more and I often don't realize that this is the problem until I'm already in the middle of something.

Well, I adjusted the impression screws, and that, like the tape, helped some, but really not enough. I concluded that the only way to fix this was to change the tympan, and I really wasn't willing to do that in order to print three cards. Next time. Between the tape and the impression screws, the print improved enough that I decided to go with it. It wasn't the best print job ever, but again, it's done.

Business as Usual

I spent most of Labor Day printing new business cards and wishing that I had a bigger press. I do love my little Kelsey, and it is perfectly capable of producing good printing, but everything would be SO MUCH easier with a bigger press.

My new card is standard sized (2x3.5") and consists of three parts: my name, contact info, and cute dingbat (cute dingbats are soooo important; don't you think?? Giggle, giggle). That really isn't a huge printing area, but I still ended up printing it in two parts - I almost printed each section separately. The Kelsey just isn't capable of exerting enough pressure to print all three areas at once consistently. I don't mean that I need the pressure for my crushing impression - just enough pressure to have the entire forme print evenly. There is, of course, an ongoing debate between those that prefer a deep impression and those that insist that a kiss is as far as on should go. I'm not going to get into that now, but since I'm printing with metal type, not plates, I'm only aiming for a small impression. Enough to know it's letterpress printing and no more.

I did the dingbat first since images usually require more ink than type does. It went okay, but I did need to change the tympan, take out a couple pieces of card from the packing and put in a couple of thinner pieces. Also my Kelsey is the older model (with the curved lever), meaning that there aren't nuts on the impression screws, meaning that sometimes (like humidity changes or something) they fall out of whack a bit. That had happened so I had to mess around with those a bit too. After that, I still needed a bit of makeready on the bottom half of the image since it was a much thinner line and not really showing up as well. I cut more paper and printed 20 or so cards. I think that took a few hours total. Cutting takes forever too, but it was really all the fiddling with the packing and impression screws that ate the most time. I think the printing bit took 15 minutes. Then I still had to do the set-up and printing for the text bits.

Now every printer knows that the makeready and set-up take far, far longer than printing ever could, but I just think that on a bigger press, say a Pearl or an 8x10 C&P, I could probably print the whole damn card at once (although the makeready would be trickier) and it would just look better. In fact, I know that this is true. I recently printed wedding invitations for friends from polymer plates (I'll post pictures once I stop taking sucky pictures or at least have enough knowledge to fix 'em in Photoshop). Since I don't own a base and the invitation was 11x14, I used a Vandercook at the Center for Book Arts to print them. I printed about 100 in two print runs (so 200 times through the press) and the whole project only took around five hours. Printing is just simpler when you have more strength. I want more strength.

Okay, enough complaining! I'm certainly having fun with the press, despite my whining, and the new cards turned out pretty well, I think. (if you think differently, let me know - I'm seriously looking for constructive criticism). The larger font is 18pt Pacific, the smaller is 8pt Della Robbia, and the paper is Crane's Lettra. I was going for a Victorian look what with the whole old fashioned bicycle, but I must admit that only chose Della Robbia because it is the only small font I have that has been distributed into a case. Have you ever tried digging through 6 or 8 point pied type for the correct letters and numbers? Don't.

I do like them better than the first set I did - technically I mean.

I'm also working on a sample pack (of sorts) of calling cards for a friend of mine, so I also used this color ink to print part one of one of her cards. I'm thinking the type will be chocolate, but Glendon thinks that will look awful. Anyone else want to share an opinion?