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?
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