Gamewell Press Blog

Look Ma, No Hands

Or at least no hands constantly moving the throw-off between every impression, and no inadvertent double inking of the form while said hands fumble with feeding the paper while treadling. Yes, thank you very much, it looks as though I've finally gotten the hang of...printing on the Pearl?

I think I wrote before about the trouble I've been having feeding the paper in time to print the next impression while also treadling and removing the just-printed paper and examining it. Too much multi-tasking or a lack of coordination or something. I just couldn't do it all in the three rotations it takes for the Pearl to print. What I've been doing is pulling the throw-off after every impression so that I would have extra time to feed the paper and examine the previous print. Of course six rotations was way too much time and I'd end up standing around for a few seconds. I think 4 or 4.5 rotations would have been perfect. Since the Pearl was going through the rotations twice, the form was also being inked twice, which really could have been disastrous to the quality of my printing. Fortunately(?) I still consistently under-ink the press pretty much all the time, so I just kept it under-inked instead of adding more ink like I normally do. It worked, but it was stupid.

Anyway, I've finally gotten the hang of it. Part of it is certainly just practice and an increased familiarity with my lovely little press. I'm now more comfortable judging the right amount of pressure and speed to exert on the treadle, so the press moves just fast enough for me to properly feed and print. I think my earlier problem was partly caused by inexperience: I'd either treadle the press too fast for my feeding speed or I'd treadle so slowly that the press wouldn't maintain momentum. Rich also left some helpful tips in the comments of an earlier post where I was complaining about my feeding difficulty. Now I do sort of lean my body against the feed board while treadling and feeding, and it does help, although I'm not sure why. The feed board and the iron arms connecting it to the press don't look all that strong, but they seem to be plenty hardy enough to support part of my weight. I think that my upper body is leaning against the feedboard and my lower body is standing on the one leg I have planted firmly on the floor, and this leaves the other leg to treadle without interference or interruption. I've really got to get some of those tension mats though because that foot on the floor can get really sore after a day of printing.

I think one important factor to successfully printing on the Pearl that wasn't so vital with my tabletops is proper setting of gauge pins. Obviously on a press without momentum, you can set the gauge pins however you want, take all the time you need to place the stock into the pins, and it doesn't really matter how secure the gauge pins are since you control how quickly the press closes. On a treadled press (or a motorized one), you really have to set those guides up so that you can feed the paper into them in a fluid motion because if the guides move or the paper gets caught somewhere, you don't really have time to correct it before the platen starts to close. I'll admit that I was often lazy with gauge pins on the Kelseys, and I would only cut the front slit and not the back to doubly secure the quad guides to the tympan. Now that I've started doing that on the Pearl, registration works much better, and cutting that second slit is very simple. I'm not really sure why I made it out to be difficult. It's also important (duh!) to have the side guide set up, not just as a printing guide for registration (like on a tabletop), but also to hold the stock in place. I know, this seems kinda obvious to those of you who mostly use larger presses, but really, I now have a new appreciation for using gauge pins by the book.

Finally, I think it also helps that I'm currently printing on a harder stock than normal. The last big project I printed was on Lettra and that 100% cotton paper totally sticks together and dries out your hands. I suppose we'll see if this rock star feeding continues the next time I try to print on cotton paper.

Pedal to the Metal

So I’ve been messing around with the Pearl the last couple weeks, cleaning parts of it, testing various things, setting the platen, but I hadn’t actually printed anything besides tests until Sunday. The press just felt a little weird and I was hesitant to get started until figuring out why. There seemed to be drag and pull in excess of what I’d expected, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was just me and my over-concern for the press or whether something might actually be wrong. Sometimes I feel like I might be too wary of breaking a press – they are, after all, way older than I am (the youngest of my three is the Pearl at 86 years).  Obviously, printing presses are somewhat fragile and you don’t want to over-pack them or bang them around, but I suspect I was too wary at first in exploring the capabilities of the 5x8 Kelsey or that now I might not treadle the Pearl anywhere near as fast as I probably could, just because I’m afraid of an imaginary clonking or unlikely break.

Right, so I was having this press problem, and I couldn’t decide if it was real or not. I’ve been practicing treadling and feeding a lot. I know that sounds silly, but I wasn’t having the easiest time treadling AND feeding sheets into the press, taking them out, examining them, and feeding the next. I was never a video game player or a drummer and my body gets confused when I try to use my leg, both hands and my brain all at once. Of course, now I’m sort of wondering how I walk and drink coffee every day! One thing I’m going to need to change to improve the feeding is paper size – I can’t pre-cut business cards and then expect to perfectly feed those tiny pieces of paper into the gauge pins in a treadle and a half – oh no.

Anyway, I’ve been practicing. Because it’s been hard to get a good, consistent rhythm going. I did pretty well when the rollers weren’t on, but the press got harder to treadle with the rollers because it slowed down significantly when the rollers ran over the ink disk. When I added ink, treadling became almost impossible while the rollers were on the ink disk. I really wasn’t sure whether it was a roller-setting problem or whether I just wasn’t treadling hard enough since I am, well, cautious and not strong would be a kind way to put it, but we could also go with pathetic, scaredy weakling. So I embarked on a series of tests.

Just by the by, I have a new favorite book, and I've added it in the sidebar as well. It's Platen Press Operation by George J. Mills, and though I've owned it for a while, I never really looked at it until maybe March, when I got the 6x10 Kelsey. I bought it about a year and a half ago because there was one copy for sale at Letterpress Things and I'd recently noticed that NA Graphics had run out of copies, meaning it was once again out of print. Although NA Graphics plans to reprint it, the librarian in me knows how long that can take (and see, it’s already been over a year) so I snatched it off the table. John Barrett said that I really didn't need it since only had the 5x8 Kelsey, but I like to be prepared. So I took it home and added to my rapidly expanding printing book collection and there it sat. My main letterpress reference book has been Cleeton's General Printing, and it's a great book, but sometimes the instructions are a little unclear to me, and since it's a textbook, the author assumes that my teacher will check my work (I wish!). Anyway, before I got the Pearl or even the 6x10 Kelsey, I was ogling small floor model presses, and I thought I might do well to open up Platen Press Operation and do a little preparatory research into what bigger presses entail. The book certainly covers all that, but I was pleasantly surprised to realize that there's also lots of great information for any printer in there. Mills has a more conversational style than Cleeton and some of his methods and explanations resonate better with me.

I also learned a super-handy trick for checking your roller tension. Mills has you cut three strips of paper; two should be about 2 inches wide and one should be one inch wide. I don't think it matters much how long they are. Sandwich the thinner piece in between the two larger ones with its top sticking out a bit and put a chase with type locked up in the press. Hold the paper stack over the type and roll the rollers until a roller is sitting over the paper and type. Then pull out the middle piece of paper. If it slips out without any tension, the springs are too loose, but if you really have to yank it, they're too tight. Much like Goldilocks, you want it to be just right. After noticing the drag on the rollers from the ink disk, I ttried this when I set the Pearl’s platen and the rollers seemed to pass the Goldilocks test. If anything, they seemed maybe a teensy bit too loose, so I decided I must be mistaken about the roller tension. I also checked the roller height, which also seemed right on target, so I decided the problem must lay elsewhere (perhaps with my lack of muscle?). 

The action of the rollers still didn't improve, but a couple days later I locked up one of my business card plates and noticed that when the rollers ran over the plate, they made this weird plinking noise – it was actually kind of musical sounding, but it didn't seem good. Although the plate was inking well enough, closer examination made me think that the rollers were too tight on the plate and pressing too hard. I’m pretty sure the only reason the plate was inking well was that as usual, I hadn’t put enough ink on the press.

At this point the conclusion that there was too much something with the roller somethings was kind of inescapable, and let me tell you that this put fear into my heart since I had so much trouble with the roller hooks and springs when I was setting up the 6x10 Kelsey. I actually never posted about that because I wanted to tell you the whole story, including how I fixed it finally. But every day I thought I was closer to finding a solution and something else would go wrong, and suddenly there was almost too much to blog about (and since I'm not normally concise, can you imagine?). Anyway, based on my prior roller adjustment experience, I was loathe to believe that I might have to do all that again, so I kept trying to come up with other conclusions, such as I just sucked at treadling. Of course, it’s treadling; it ain’t hard, so I got a second opinion and Glendon too agreed that something was wrong.

There’s a little pin that controls the tension of the rollers, and we decided to try to readjust that first. The pin fits in between the roller spring coils and clicks into the roller arm, so you can pull out the pin with pliers and reposition from say, in-between the last two coils of the roller spring, to in-between the second to last and third to last coils, thereby creating a shorter spring. Shorter springs equal less tension, and a longer spring equals more tension. So we repositioned it by one coil and it seemed to help a little bit, but not much. As we’re messing about with the roller contraption, all this dried ink and dirt was showering down onto the floor and it was kind of difficult to reposition the pin and hooks due to all the gunk. So we decided to just take apart the whole assembly and clean it. There was so much caked on crud that actually took a while to get it dissembled. We took it all apart, wiped the hooks down with oil, sprayed WD-40 on the springs and holes, scraped off the crap and rubbed it down well.

Lord what a difference! Everything now runs so smoothly, like butter! We didn’t have to fix anything else. It was neat. And easy. Now I’m a treadling queen (although I could still use some feeding tips if you’ve got ‘em). Mills' paper test didn't lie, the roller tension was correct, but the hooks and springs were so dirty that they couldn't move in the saddle as much as they needed. Now while I'm running the press, the springs and hooks are constantly moving - even if incrementaly. Part of the reason I'm relating this story is that I kept overlooking something really obvious while troubleshooting this problem, and it's something I want to keep in mind in the future. Basically, I was experiencing problems on the ink disk (mostly), but all of my tests (roller height gauge, paper strips) took place around the bed of the press. Obviously the rollers were working well around the bed, but running into trouble at the top of their cycle. Now I don't know of any tests I could have done up around the ink disk, but that disconnect seems like part of the reason I couldn't diagnose the problem more quickly.

It’s funny that cleaning was the solution since I was just recently blathering on about how you don’t need to take apart and clean every press and the old presses have a “patina” from age, and blah, blah, blah. Sometimes cleaning is good. I still wouldn’t ever do much more that oil and wipe down a press that didn’t have major rust, but that’s just me. I know some people enjoy the restoration work, and that’s great for them and their beautiful presses. Me, I’m lazy and I like the whole printing part WAY more than the restoration part.

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.

Lessons from Boxcar Press - Gauge Pins!

I've noticed that this blog comes up fairly near the top in Google searches for "setting gauge pins," "how to gauge pins," etc., and this has made me feel ashamed since I don't show a how-to, I just complain that no one on the internet was showing a how-to when I needed one. I've been meaning to put together a how-to-set-gauge-pins-post, but now I don't have to because Boxcar Press has gone and put together a video on this very subject.

This is way better than me posting about this because I would never have made some fancy motion picture. You would have been stuck with slightly blurry, still photos, so I say hooray for Boxcar. The video is ostensibly about how to not smash your gauge pins into your Boxcar base, which has always seemed fairly obvious to me (don't put the pins in contact with the base), but I know we all have our own weirdo stumbling blocks.

Anyway, what it seems really useful for is a demonstration of how to put in the pins and what goes into their basic packing (although I might have added a couple sheets of bond). I've seen a few questions about packing come up lately, and while an entire book could easily be written about packing, this video seems like a good start. They have a couple other how-to videos on their website, like one on adjusting roller height and one on makeready, and plans to add more.

This still hasn't convinced me to actually purchase a Boxcar base, but I am still leaning towards it. If anyone has thoughts or opinions, please share. I've seen so many posts lately on the listserv or Briar Press where people who print just fine with type or wood-mounted plates get a base and polymer plate and suddenly everything goes to hell, so that's frightening. A few months ago, I bought a very, very cheap honeycomb base on ebay, and I just ordered a couple plates for that from Owosso. They should get here in the next couple days, so if I ever finish printing wedding invitations, maybe I can play with them this weekend. I held out on using the base for months because after I bought it I realized that most bases are .668" for mounting 1/4 inch, .250" plates, whereas mine is .759" and takes 11 point plates. This difference from the usual made me hesitate, especially since I kind of wanted my free plate from Owosso to be copper and that doesn't come in 11 point. Finally last week I realized that it can't hurt to give what I've already got a shot before spending a couple hundred bucks on a new honeycomb or Boxcar base. As I said, we all have our own weirdo stumbling blocks. I'll report back soon.

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!