Gamewell Press Blog

Brother, Can You Spare $1500?

I had an emergency root canal today. Partly this is a good thing, since I no longer feel like someone is hammering a nail through my jaw into my head, and that plus codeine equals blessed relief. However I had already used up my measly dental insurance allotment for the year (it's not my fault. It's genetic. I have flawless dental hygiene, but I grind my teeth like my mother and have rotten teeth like my father), so I have to shell out for my $1500 root canal from my own empty pocket. Too bad my non-existent emergency fund is empty. Ah, New York City, you are an expensive rat bastard.

But, coincidentally, I was already in the process of trying to regulate my sad, sad finances by getting a handle on what, exactly I'm wasting all my money on. To that end, I made this handy dandy two-sided notebook. On one side, I'm going to write all my to-do lists, since I generally write these on scraps of paper, lose them, and realize when I find them two months later that I still haven't framed that print yet. On the other side I was going to write down every single cent I spent, so that I could identify that perhaps I shouldn't spend $45 a day on coffee, and then voila! My money troubles would be over! Of course now I have no money to spend at all, but a two-sided notebook is still a neat idea. Maybe I'll use the second side for all the things I wish I could buy or brainstorming potential winning lottery numbers. The possibilities are endless!

I got this brilliant idea from Etsy - they had a little tutorial on it. Now I'm thinking that I'll make and sell 5 million of them, and then I'll be able to pay off my dental work. It will be awesome, my entrepreneurship. Wouldn't you want a 2-sided notebook with a letterpress printed cover? On one side, you can keep your hopes and dreams, and on the other side you can note your harsh realities! In keeping with the recession-chic theme of this post, I printed the cover of my notebook with a factory. I think factories are sometimes kind of depressing, what with the harsh labor conditions, the environmental damage, or the closing of said factory and ruining of the town, so this factory is in keeping with my depressed mood. On the other hand, it looks like a happy factory, right, with the bouncy smoke rings and the trains? So maybe it's blue-collar industry keeping America afloat, looking on the bright side. Union-negotiated dental insurance for all. Fluoride in the water. Two-sided notebook - oh, the possibilities.

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.

Evolution of an Invitation

A lot of newer letterpress printers are graphic designers of some sort or another, and I've said before that I'm not. I've been doing a lot of reading and experimenting and I'd like to take a typography class and a couple other classes, but money is tight. My point is that I'm kind of making this all up as I go along. The design process, client relations, estimating production costs and time, these are all new to me (as such things would be to anyone getting into a new field), and sometimes I feel like there's a very steep learning curve. That's one of the reasons I've been printing things at cost for friends and family and not seeking out real business yet - when I end up hand setting parts of a wedding invitation not just once but about three different times, it's much better to be doing this as a learning experience for people I care about. No amount of money would make that tons of fun and there's no way I could charge people for that sort of labor anyway. I'd like to know how people who handset job printing deal with this. For job printing, plates seem like the way to go. I guess I'm a product of the computer age in that respect, proofing and design on the computer is way less trouble than on the imposing stone. And perhaps less fun?

All the wedding invitations I've done until now have been designed by others and I've just printed them. This is fine with me - I like to print first and foremost and this also meant that I have so far avoided learning all that wedding etiquette-type stuff. When I offered to print invites for my friends, John and Alissa, I thought it would be even simpler. John and Alissa are getting married in Louisville, Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend and it's going to be a summery, casual and laid-back kind of wedding. They don't want a typical, more formal  wedding - no colors or a theme, etc, and that sounded nice until I realized that picking colors for the invitations would now be a challenge since ANYTHING could go. I have a foundry type cut of a frog on a bicycle (you can see it here on a business card),  and John knew that he wanted to use that but really didn't have any further design specifications or restrictions in mind. He also wanted to just work within the limitations of my set-up: a size that the 5x8 Kelsey could accommodate, handset type, etc. Sounds pretty simple, right?

John and Alissa came over one afternoon and looked at my type and all the different cuts and we talked about paper and sizes, etc. I also have a Gocco, which is a small Japanese contraption that does a sort of silkscreen type printing, so we thought we could use that for any images we wanted to use that I didn't have for letterpress printing. So John goes home and thinks about this and comes up with a design that uses both letterpress and Gocco printing and a couple weeks later, he comes over so we could try it out. Sort of a test run.

This was actually very strange at first because I've never had anyone in my space during printing before. My "shop" is actually the hallway between my bedroom and my living room/kitchen, so there isn't a whole lot of room to move around. Really I'm the only person who can be in my house without knocking something over or bumping into something (usually my bike, which is also in that hallway), so it was sort of awkward having to maneuver around John to go between the Gocco on the kitchen table and the press in the hall. He also wanted to help and I really didn't know how he could besides cutting paper. But we ended up having fun, and I put him to work setting his and Alissa's names in 24pt. Gallia type for our test print. It was surprisingly nice to have a friend gain an understanding of the letterpress process. Glendon of course knows more than he wants to and I have a couple librarian friends that have done it before at Rare Book School in Virginia, but generally people don't really get it. So that was cool, but our tests were a disaster.

I don't even have pictures of them, but they just looked bad. John had decided that he wanted colored stock with the Gocco printed flower in white and then the letterpress printed text over that. I warned him that the white ink would be somewhat transparent and might not be possible, but on three of our four paper samples, the white faded so much as it dried that it was hardly visible. I told him that we could work around that to a certain extent, perhaps by adding a tint to the white or that we could use white stock and print the flower in a pale color, so we moved on to the letterpress portion of the afternoon. I had been wanting to incorporate Gocco and letterpress before, so I was eagerly anticipating this, but it looked awful. The Gocco ink and letterpress ink do not like each other. The letterpress ink on the paper and over the Gocco printing appeared to be different colors and the way the ink was sitting on the Gocco section just looked bad and mottled. The other strange thing was that I had given John a list of the fonts I owned and he picked a combination of 24pt and 14pt Gallia, and then he had even found digital copies of them so our mock-up actually used the fonts. So cool! Except that the digital fonts are much smaller than the actual size of the metal type when printed. We decided to up the size of the invitation and I began to worry that the whole thing would look too heavy.

Yeah, pretty much everything went wrong that day. I suggested to John that he just get at least part of the invitation offset printed, but he didn't want to. He didn't feel all that attached to his design and wanted to work within my capabilities. He had to leave so I began cleaning the press, thinking "crap, what are we going to do now?"

It's funny how mindless tasks, like cleaning the press, can sometimes help you work things out. So I thought about the frog cut and the Gallia font and what else I might have and suddenly came up with this idea of using these two cuts I have of a trellis with flowers running up it. It just kind of popped into my head that it would look nice in a limey-springy green and a summery turquoise. The text could be left aligned and I could sort of intersperse little flowers or swirls around the jagged edges of the text lines. I thought it could be summery and relaxed but still kind of elegant. I was actually kind of excited about this new idea. John and Glendon play together in a bluegrass band that was having a show later that night, and when I got there, I outlined my new idea, and they both wrinkled their noses. They couldn't picture those colors and they didn't remember particularly liking the cut I was thinking about. It actually turned out that both of them (and, well everyone) thought that my trellis was a picket fence, so no one liked it. They're right too. It's a very ugly picket fence or a very nice trellis and I'm glad I looked at it wrong! But John was willing to give it a shot - he didn't have a better idea.

So a couple nights later I handset the text, which was such a pain. I don't have tons of Gallia, so I started running out of certain letters pretty early. If we had used that original set-up, I would have had to print it in three sections to get all the letters. And then it looked like crap (does anyone sense a theme here?). I was just doing a very quick proof - inking up the type with brayers instead of using the rollers - and I didn’t even attempt to fix the leading, but I wanted to give John and Alissa an idea of what I was imagining so that we could figure something else out if they still hated it.

Both of them liked it more than they thought they would, and we decided to work with that design. John and I both agreed that the 24pt and 14pt Gallia was too much and that we needed to break it up with a smaller, less noticeable font. This presented a new problem since I have Futura & Della Robbia in 8 and 10 pt, an unsorted mishmash of things in the 10 & 12pt range and then a bunch of 18 and 24pt fonts. I was pretty sure that the Gallia required a san serif font, so that narrowed it to Futura, but I was worried that the 10pt would look too small, so I did some mock-ups on the computer, using a few different options, including throwing out the Gallia completely and using Greeting Monotone or Pacific. Results, in keeping with the project so far, were surprising.

It turns out that John hates Greeting Monotone, which I find weird since I really like it, and though he liked Pacific, he had grown quite attached to the Gallia so wanted to stick with it. The Futura looked weird with the Gallia - it was way too round and seemed cartoonish. The Della Robbia, while a bit small, looked much better, so 10pt Della Robbia with 24pt and 14pt Gallia was the new plan. I hand-set everything again, this time adding in leading and John and Glendon came over to "help" again. Since neither of them was convinced that the blue and green were perfect, I suggested that they choose another color to print with, and after much deliberation, they settled on a kind of hunter green. I hate that color, but I rolled my eyes and inked up. We also added various ornaments this time, and John had thought my idea of interspersing the ornaments at the ends of the text lines sounded difficult (which was true), so I had him choose which ornaments and where to put everything. I think he was right about ornament placement since with the large Gallia and the small Della Robbia, ornaments scattered throughout may have looked odd. Anyway, I printed some proofs and we made some changes and I thought to myself that perhaps it would have been simpler to have just bought a plate from Owosso!

We did agree that this print was headed in the right direction, but John didn't want the body text left aligned right near the trellis border. He thought it would look better if aligned more at the center. I still disagree with him about this, but I reset the stupid text that way for the next proof and he continued to like that best. I have to admit that I didn't argue with him much about changing it back since I would have had to respace everything again and at that point I was getting tired of the whole process. With this proof I also simplified the ornaments and placed them so everything seemed evenly weighted. The I chose a pinky, raspberry color that I thought would look equally good when paired with the turquoise, lime green or hated evergreen colors.

This proof, with minor spacing changes, became our final working copy. John and Alissa deliberated about the colors and finally decided on the two original colors, which was sort of funny since I had since decided that I liked the pink and blue best. Below you can see the final product. In the upcoming post, Dueling Wedding Invitations, Part Two, I will go into excruciating detail about all the problems I had printing that, but I wanted to first detail the design process for this. Lessons learned? Custom design is a conundrum. How one keeps the amount of changes and time spent on design under control is something I'd have to seriously work on in a paying situation. When/if I ever begin doing this for money, I think I'll offer templates that can be modified or hi, I'll print your design. Also, boy oh boy, handset type is great for me and my projects, but when printing for business, not pleasure, I believe I would mostly stick to plates. And, I am flighty, and by the end of this whole thing (at least a month and a half), I was thoroughly sick of these colors, these cuts and this type. How do you keep from burning out? I'm sure there were other design lessons, but right now I can't think of them, and I'll probably remember them next time I make the same mistake. And then I'll let you know so that you can either not make the same mistake or laugh at my stupidity -  I'm fine with both.

Dueling Wedding Invitations, Part One

 

Welcome to the pretty picture edition of the Gamewell Press blog (okay picture content is pretty - I need photography lessons). As you may know, I've spent the better part of the last month and half printing 2 different wedding invitations for 2 couples. Having a day job and being an amateur can cause things to drag on a bit. These couples are both wonderful and friends of mine, but their invitations are incredibly different. It was kind of interesting to print them back to back since it made the contrast so apparent. And I felt all versatile and shit.

First up are the invites of Jen & Hooper. I already posted about their save the dates, so you may remember all that makeready fun. They'll be getting married in Central Park at the beginning of April, and we should all pray that it's warm and sunny. They are both wonderful artists, and Jen designed the invitations and accompanying material with guidance from me about what's best suited for letterpress printing. She also had some non-letterpress printed inserts that used the same types of images. It was really fun shooting ideas back and forth with her, and I hope we collaborate again in the future.

Jen liked the fluorescent white Crane's Lettra a lot, so that's what we used and the gray envelopes are from Paper Access. It is all printed from Owosso magnesium plates in black ink, except the birds, which I printed with my brand new (Merry Christmas!) silver ink. The envelopes (and save the dates) I printed on my 5x8 Kelsey, and the invitations and RSVPs were printed at The Arm, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on the nicest Vandercook I have ever seen. If you need to rent press time in NYC, I can't recommend the Arm highly enough. Dan is a great, helpful guy, and he's very flexible - offering late hours, etc. I got there around 5:30 and left around 11 or 11:30, and there was still someone else there printing on a Pilot. As someone who has a day job, works best at night anyway, and doesn't really like to leave the house on the weekends, this was much appreciated.

I banged out the wedding invitations and RSVPs all in one night, and since they were on a Vandercook, it was pretty simple and went smoothly. The only thing I really have to note is that when printing on a Vandercook, remember to leave an extra inch on your paper for the gripper bars, etc. Um yeah. That's all I really feel like saying about that.

The magnesium plates were each mounted on two pieces of wood, and on each, one piece was a bit thinner than the other. I solved that problem by putting one sheet of bond paper under the lower area. Easy peasy. Gotta love the Vandercooks.

Doesn't that picture look kinda like the opening of Star Wars? Art deco Star Wars. As you can see, there's A LOT of impression - a bit more than I would prefer - I'm not liking the crushed paper in some spots, but it's Jen's wedding, so Jen decides. That's what I think and I'm sticking to that. There's actually hardly any show through on the back of the paper - none for the birds and just the faintest outline of the text body, so that's good. We used almost the same amount of packing for the birds and the text - I think I took one sheet out for the text and for my druthers, it would have been best to take one more out, but it's bride approved. The RSVPs have less impression since they're two sided.

The envelopes were rather tricky registration-wise. It didn't occur to me to flatten the envelopes until it was too late, and there was NO WAY I was going to do any of that crazy, multi-layer envelope makeready. The rubber band did a pretty good job of keeping everything flat. Setting gauge pins can be challenging at the best of times - the Kelsey's platen does not open flat like a C&P, so it can be rather difficult to get your hand in there to measure straight lines, check straightness, or cut straight with a knife. I think I end up with ink on my hands at least 50% of the time and once I was peering in so intently that my forehead got a nice stripe from the ink disk. At this point I try to get them as straight as possible and just measure the test prints (sometimes over and over again). You can see above that the lines I drew on the tympan do not exactly correspond to the actual gauge pin placement It wasn't hard exactly, it just took a while to get the angle exactly right.

 

Maybe you can't tell from the photos, but the paper is rather textured and a bit sparkly, so it was kind of difficult to get good coverage in every spot. Or so I thought! The sparkles and texture did interfere a bit, but I really thought it was going quite badly - there were all these lines in the rabbit. I knew, knew! that the packing and ink were good (adding more ink wouldn't have been possible what with the outline font) and I had done spot makeready on the image, and I was getting a little beyond frustrated. Then I looked at the plate and realized again that those lines were in the plate. On purpose. Yup.

Printing while tired can cause impaired brain function and be hazardous to your temper. There were a lot of very late nights in the course of these two wedding invitation sets (especially the 2nd group), and they were each (at about 75 and about 110-120 consecutively) the longest print runs I've done yet. Great, fantastic learning experiences, but oh my god I'm so excited to just screw around with little projects for me for the next month or so.