Cow Cards

Recently I took on a project for Ashley from Monster Bites (which featured Tweedle Press on their cool blog a few months back). Ashley wanted to send me some old programs and flyers from one of her college's alumni events, and have me hand recycle them into new sheets of purple paper for note cards. I added some purple flecks from my own stash of scrap paper, and letterpress printed cows on the fronts. We came up with a joint message that states how the note cards were made, and they'll be handed out to other alums at an event. What a great idea! Talk about sustainable. And bovine-chic.

I love how my hand recycled paper takes a letterpress impression - it's so squishy and absorbent, and prints beautifully with my vegetable based inks.





Ever sine Paul came down to give Leonard a once over, he's been behaving rather well. My previous inking issues have been almost completely solved by adding roll bearers to the forme, and now I know how to adjust platen pressure myself. Leonard still has a problem with maintaining consistent pressure, but at least I can achieve the prints I want eventually. At some point I'll need to invest in a Vandercook, but this is working for now! Leonard is just big with the makeready. Oh well.

So Speedy!

So I went in to print on my 8x12 last week, and I decided that with 300 prints at 3 passes each I absolutely HAD to get brave enough to use the motor. Pushing the wheel with every print for all 300 of the Empty Boxes teaser cards (and sometimes an extra push in between for more ink) nearly killed me - but really wouldn't have been possible to use the motor with. I had to firmly slide the inside fluting of the cardboard onto several gauge pins to keep them in place - something that took more time than a quick switching out would have allowed. So anyway, here are a few things I learned:

1. Ye who spends good time on makeready will be greatly rewarded.
I took my time measuring out sheet placement, gauge pin placement, and packing so that when it came time to actually run the (very nice & very expensive) paper through the press, the prints came out really nicely. That was pretty exciting.

2. Kort Adjustable Quad Guides are my friends.
Gauge pins and me, thus far, haven't really gotten along. I finally decided to try some of the ones that Boxcar Press recommends, and they really are pretty sweet. Expensive, and they take a little extra time to get into the tympan, but you really feel like they're going to stay put. Also, it's much easier to adjust them a little without having to unstick and restick little clampy feet that tear up your tympan. Hooray for Kort!

(image from NA Graphics, where I bought the pins)

3. Printing with the motor on, even at speed 3 out of 15, is way faster.
Once I was happy with the quad guides, feeding the paper in and out was a cinch. Occasionally I'd have to push the throwoff lever, whether for more inking or to just give myself a little more time to get the paper in, but I think in all those prints I did I only managed to accidentally print on the tympan once. Not bad. This really makes me feel like an order someday for 1000 of something would be totally doable.

(now available for purchase on Tweedle Press and Etsy)

4. With heavy coverage, even a powerful 8x12 can't get much impression.
Although the red bits of these cards created a good punch, the black printing area was just too heavy to really get into the paper. I suppose this is one of the limitations of a platen press. Maybe someday I'll have a bigger studio and can find myself a nice Vandercook for jobs with heavy coverage.

5. Yes, I use sweater drying racks to dry my prints. What? It works.


And now for few miscellaneous notes:

• Remember the cardboard postcards I printed the other week? Well, the website for Empty Boxes is finally up and you should check it out. This is a new company I'm part of that is trying to help companies reuse as many shipping boxes as possible before recycling or trashing. It's totally eco, and totally neat.
• Next week I'm participating in No Impact Week, which is a shortened version of Colin Beavan's "No Impact Man" experiment. During this week, participants will take a hard look at everything they do in their daily lives the negatively affects the environment, and try to curb as much of it as possible. Hopefully some of the things we learn will turn into habits. Check it out!
• I know I mention them frequently, but The Evanston Print and Paper Shop rocks! They routinely save my butt with last minute plates, paper cutting, and other things. In fact, I'm heading over there today to cut down the aforementioned Cheshire holiday cards.
• Yesterday I added a new product to the Tweedle Press Shop and Etsy Shop: Dead Things / Birdo Coasters. Cute and creepy, makes a great gift!
  
  

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 11/6/09 (when I was printing): "I Was Wrong" (Social Distortion). Mike Ness makes killer music to print by.

must. kill.

OK, this blog entry is being posted a bit late - I wrote most of it, then went on vacation, yadda yadda. So I'm actually referring here to some printing I did a few weeks back:

I've had a frustrating couple of days in letterpress world. You might remember these calling cards I printed a few weeks ago, which came out decently but overall I wasn't thrilled with the level of impression the paper took. So, I decided to order in some 134# Aqua Cranes Palette paper, since the 100% cotton is supposed to do really nicely with letterpress. It really is tasty paper, and I was excited to try it out. So on Friday I prepped my Pilot with the same calling card plate and mixed a nice deep green color. I pretty much ran into every problem across the board: not enough impression, uneven inking, un-crisp printing, too much ink, not enough ink, etc. It was just one of those days. So, I decided to just pretend it didn't happen and instead try again on my big 8 x 12 tonight.

Unfortunately, things didn't go much better. I'll start with Problem #1: Uneven Print, and excuse the crap photo but I'm too tired to do any better:

See how the print is heavier on either side, like the "www" and "m"s in "com"? It gets lighter/crisper in the middle, but the edges just look really...squishy. I thought maybe it was just an uneven impression problem, so I spent a long time doing some serious makeready - cutting out individual letters from packing to try and compensate. The weird thing is, this exact same problem was happening in the exact same places on the plate when I tried the print on my Pilot at home.
Question: Could this mean that the plate itself is uneven?

As soon as it started to look okay, I ran into Problem #2: Uneven Inking. Basically it seemed like a lot more ink was being laid down on one side of the plate than the other. There's a circular graphic at the top of the card, and it was really apparent that one side of the circle was printing more heavily than the other. Looking at the back of the cards, it didn't seem like the impression itself was uneven (indicating uneven platen pressure), so I thought it must have been the roller just laying down more ink on one side. I tried taping up the rails to raise the rollers on just the bottom of the chase, which only sort of worked. Since I don't have a picture, I'll do my best approximation via Illustrator:


Question: Is it common for uneven inking to occur vertically like this? How can I compensate for this?

This brings me to Problem #3: Un-Crisp Printing. Once again, I'll do my best to illustrate this problem without a photo. The left side is what the graphic should look like, and the right side is how it has been coming out:


As you can see, there are some fine details in the flowers that should remain unprinted. Instead, the flowers are completely filling in with ink. I noticed that the problem got worse the longer I printed, so I'm wondering if maybe the ink was heating up and getting too squishy. I thought maybe the problem was simply too much ink, but when I removed some from the press all I got was a mottled print - incomplete coverage indicating too little ink but the lines were STILL filling in. The only thing I can think here is that I need to dry up the ink a little. I ordered some drier from Braden Sutphin the other day and will give it a try - but does anyone know if I'm on the right track here? I'm pretty out of ideas, and I know that a crisp print CAN happen along with a deep impression.
Question: Is ink consistency to blame when ink amount has been ruled out and fine details are still filling in?

::sigh::

I Think I'm Starting To Get The Hang...

...of platen presses. I'm learning the ins and out of jiggering with taping the rails, moving the gauge pins, adjusting the packing, and ink distribution. I'm sure there are still many more tricks to discover, but for now I'm happy that things are getting easier instead of harder. Today I did a custom run of a bunch of "Yay!" Peggins cards for Beth, who as a teacher has many graduates to whom to send congratulatory cards this summer.

Registration for this 2 color run was a little tricky, as you can see the filling for the Peggins' bodies can't be the slightest bit off or you can see it sticking out of the blue line. Luckily, I tend to make what seems at the time to be an absurd amount of extras for makeready. With one color jobs or two color jobs with crop marks for registration, the makeready to product ratio is a bit better, but with this one I ended up with about 70 good cards out of the 110 I started with. This means I've got a few extra that I've put up for sale in my Etsy shop - hop to it if you want one! The cards are a bright blossom color with white and blue printing, and they come paired with a chartreuse envelope. Adorable, if I do say so myself.

I had planned on stopping there with the Pilot for today, and going into work on my 8 x 12 for some really cute custom note cards for Page. They're #10 size, just like the Tea Menus from last week, so I need the 8 x 12 bed and base size. However, it has been insanely thunderstorming all day and I didn't fancy wading out to the car with all my inks and paper. So, those cards will have to wait until tomorrow (sorry Page!), but I can't wait to see them printed. The colors are going to rock. So, instead I opted to stay home and print another job on the Pilot - some coasters from my "Dead Things" series. Since I had already printed up some of the prehistoric beast stationery, I decided to continue with him on the coasters.

I wasn't able to get a very deep impression on these, but I think that's OK. I get afraid when I have to pull down too hard on the Pilot's arm that it's going to crack, plus this coaster stock is really thick and stiff. I think the black print on the surface with just a touch of impression looks mighty dandy, and as soon as I take pictures in their final packaging I'll put those up for sale too. Now that I'm out of things to procrastinate with, I guess I'll clean my press. AGAIN. I'm seriously considering videoing a "Get Great Arms With Letterpress" exercise series - left arm does the arm pulling/wheel turning, and right arm does the scrubbing.

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 6/19/09: "Do You Feel Loved" (U2).

Success!

The first website I ever designed was for my band in New York, and on it I created little animated dancing bodies with photos of our heads grafted on. That's how I'm really feeling right now after the first successful print on my big letterpress - like a silly, giddy, repetitively dancing cartoon character with my head on top. YES!!!


The throw-off arm is still a little sticky, but workable after I loosened the bolt holding the throw off pin circle. I sprayed a little WD-40 in there, and now at least the pulling of the throw-off arm forward (to print) is relatively smooth. I still need to work on what's making the pushing of the arm backward (trip) stick, but this is great progress.

As for the throw-off arm in "print" position making the press stop (see the video from last week), this time I tried running the press without the chase in first. No problem! Luckily, as I was wandering around inspecting the grippers before putting the chase in I noticed just a bit of ink on one of the grippers. It would appear that one of the gripper arms had been nicking just the very end of my Boxcar base, thus preventing a print and the press from moving further. So, this will officially be my:

moment for the week. After all the lovely advice I received from Rich at Front Room Press, I guess at least I'm glad I didn't have to try and start adjusting all those things.

I got to do a bunch of exciting makeready, cutting out various shapes to put behind my little dead things on the stationery. The finished pieces probably have a little too much impression and have a few breaks in the lines, but the ink coverage is pretty perfect if I do say so myself. I'm considering naming my presses after various characters from Alice In Wonderland, given that the name of my shop is Tweedle Press. Cheshire? Jabberwocky? Mad Hatter? I'll have to see what of their personalities begins to shine through.

Finally, I would like to say that in the future I intend for not all of my posts to be quite so technical and letterpress geek. I'd like to post about some stuff that would be of interest to others as well, so look for entries on the following topics in the near future:

• Starting A Small Business
• The Creative Process
• Finding A Niche
• Work/Creative Environment

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 4/10/09: Life In Technicolor ii (Coldplay). You must check out this video - it's hysterical.