Bye Bye Love

Wow, it's been an embarrassingly long time since my last post, but this has been an incredibly busy summer. I just got back from the Northwest where I met up with my parents, visited my Grandparents for the first time in 3 years, saw my Aunt & Uncle for the first time in 8 years, saw my cousin for the first time in 17 years (she was 6! now she's 23! that's kind of weird), and met her boyfriend's extended family. Yeah. We're not the closest family ever, mainly out of laziness, I think, since they're all great people. None of us are very good about calling or emailing or updating blogs on a regular basis.

Please note the "Lead is not Dead" shirt. I'm all letterpress, all the time.

We also spent a couple days at Glacier National Park in Montana, which is a beautiful, amazing place. You should all go and soon because they're now predicting that the glaciers will be melted by 2030 if we continue at our current rate of environmental destruction. And while thinking about how awful that is, I also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out an alternate name for the park once the glaciers are gone. Because apparently I don't have enough of my own crap to worry about.

Even though it was August, there was snow in patches on the mountains and gorgeous wildflowers everywhere else. I took a bunch of pictures of flowers and hope to turn at least a couple of them into plates for cards or stationary. To do that I'm going to use this super-awesome and fancy and high-tech, of-the-minute tool that some of you may have heard of called Live Trace. Yeah, that's right, I've upgraded from Adobe CS to Adobe CS3 and from a 4-year-old pre-Intel iBook to a older, pre-Intel, but still better Powerbook. I'm still behind the times but way less so, and I've got Dreamweaver so I can finish my website and Live Trace in Illustrator so I can trace! in a fancy manner!

In other letterpress news, I finally got around to selling my 5x8 Kelsey, along with a bunch of excess basic start-up stuff that I'd somehow managed to accumulate, start-up lessons, and a type cabinet with 13 cases of type. Nice type too. I'll admit to considering holding onto almost all that type, but that was type cabinet number three and it had been wedged in between my kitchen table and my TV since May. I did keep some excess typecases that didn't fit into the cabinet and am now the proud owner of 14pt & 18pt Typo Roman Shaded and one 12pt & three 6pt versions of Copperplate Gothic. I'm rather in love with Copperplate Gothic right now.

Anyway, the cabinet was between the table and the TV, and the 5x8 Kelsey had been sitting on the side table by my couch since March. We're talking about a very small room here people, and I was getting close to losing my mind. Gus, my shop cat, thought that it was super-fun to jump onto the kitchen table (where he's not allowed), clamber onto the type cabinet (which had 5+ galley trays of set type on top of it), and attempt to tightrope walk on the TV, so that didn't help either.

Gus denies everything. You can see the type cabinet & kitchen table in the background

As you can imagine, I was sorely tempted to keep everything at first, especially the Kelsey, but after those cramped months I was so pleased to have the space back that there was very little sentimental sadness in selling my very first press. Okay there was some; when I think about all we accomplished together and how beautiful that little Kelsey is, I get a bit misty. However I'm thrilled to report that there is no letterpress equipment in my living room/kitchen for the first time since January 2008. NONE! Okay fine, that's not actually true. There are two typecases sitting on a kitchen chair, but those are totally temporary. My living room is basically a living room again. The letterpress stuff has been relegated to the hallway where it belongs. And the bedroom. And the bathroom.