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.

"Alice in Winter Wonderland" Holiday Cards

OK y'all,

Since I've been neglecting the blogosphere for the likes of my new website and some fancy new designs for holiday cards, I thought I'd at least show you the latter. The first series, "Alice in Winter Wonderland," I had already begun developing when my friends Hayley and Sheila asked if I could do some letterpress designs for their photography business Goode Green. If you remember, Sheila was the one who took the awesome pinup photos of me and my friend Rebecca a few months ago. Seriously folks, if you need some kickass pictures give them a call! Anyway, I'll be selling these through them including photos, and on my site without photos. You'll have the choice between a blank inside or a block of custom text:





I've decided that because I'll be folding these to create cards, I'll be printing on some super delicious Somerset paper from England that's made with 100% reclaimed cotton rag. This makes for an incredibly soft sheet that takes an impression well and scores/folds nicely, or so the folks at Evanston Print & Paper tell me. I've also gotten some Gamblin and Charbonnel etching inks (made the old school way, with linseed oil and pigments), because I've heard these work really well for large areas of coverage. I'm hoping to do a test this weekend or next week.

I have some more designs to show you, but those will be in the next post...

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).

N.I.B., Production Technician

I think I can safely say that this was my first "official" day of letterpress production. Even though I'm still in the test phase with the water-based inks, if these notecards turn out well and not too smudgerific I'll probably put them up for sale.


These would work as a great all purpose stash if you just want to tell someone "crap, I'm an asshole" or even "sorry your dog died." I have some more handy lessons I've learned from today's printing on the Pilot:

Lesson #1: Don't clean the Boxcar base with oil.

After my last printing session, I guess I got a little carried away with the canola and wiped down my Boxcar base to get the last traces of ink away. In my letterpress classes they always warned me not to be tempted to wipe down the base with anything really, even mineral spirits. Sure enough, when I went to stick the plate back on today it went sliding around, totally unsticky. So I had to use some serious elbow grease to um, de-grease the base before the plate would stick again.

Lesson #2: Distribute the ink on the disc and rollers BEFORE putting the chase in.

This probably seems obvious, but is a small breakthrough for me because I had been cranking away on the arm to distribute the ink after putting the chase in. This meant I had to be very careful not to let the rollers ALL the way down or I'd ink the tympan. If you work it out before putting the chase in, it's a lot easier. Duh.

Lesson #3: Slow pressure yields better ink coverage.

I went through a lot of test prints before arriving at the method that ended up working pretty consistently, and found that a slow OOOOOMPH on the print yielded better results than a quick SNAP. Not really sure why.

Lesson #4: Rubber bands are your friends.

It took some practice, but finally I got the rubber bands across the grippers in a place that was helpful and not in the way of the print. The only problem I ended up having was that the rubber bands I found were old and a little sticky, and the paper kept glomming onto them as I pulled it away from the plate, whacking out and creating interesting random ink stripes from hitting the rollers. Eventually (as in, after I took this picture) I ended up taping a piece of paper to the top rubber band so my cards slid free more easily.


I'm still not ready to discuss gauge pins, but clearly I had a bit more success with them today as I was at least able to produce consistent prints. I probably just need to investigate some pins that are easier to work with - perhaps the ones I have are particularly irritating.

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 3/27/09: Talons (Bloc Party). We're going to see them tomorrow night at the Aragon. YES!

Lessons From The First Day of (Attempted) Printing

Wearing my trusty Friday overalls and acceptably indie/chic This American Life tee, I set about my first real day of letterpress troubleshooting on the Pilot.

Lesson #1: Me and gauge pins? Not friends. I'm assuming that since we don't know each other very well our relationship can only improve. But right now we're not really speaking to each other.

I'm super paranoid about denting my Boxcar base, and I'm not really sure which parts of the pins should absolutely NOT contact the base. I'm also not 100% sure about which parts are supposed to hold the paper, and they just never seem particularly secure to me. I'll probably do a whole post specifically about these little fuckers, but right now we need some space.

Lesson #2: Taping the rails is fairly painless, and has fast results.

When I first started inking the plate for my "shit / i'm sorry" notecard, ink was getting all over the place. In the Boxcar video on taping the rails, the guy uses some fancy nylon strapping tape, which I don't have at the moment but may look into. Instead I added about 4 layers of scotch tape to the rails to raise the rollers a bit. This improved things dramatically, but there were still some places being inked that shouldn't have been. Another layer or two, and the plate was inking perfectly.


Lesson #3: I have a lot to learn about packing a platen press.

The first couple of prints I pulled, there seemed to be good ink coverage around the edges but not in the middle. So, I kept adding more and more packing thinking it must be the problem. However, the more packing I added the less even the print was. After a few hours, only about the bottom half of the print was coming through clearly. What the hell? I even tried using makeready buried under the tympan just under the top half of the print, but then things got even screwier. Finally, I thought "this can't be right" as my packing bulged and there was barely any OOMPH when I pulled the arm to print.

So, I went backwards about 11 steps and left only a small amount of packing. This did the trick for the most part, and I didn't even have to use any additional sheeting under a specific section of the print. I'm sure all of this has some very technical explanation to do with pressue distribution, but I'm just not used to such things yet having mainly worked on flatbed presses. Exhausted but somewhat accomplished, I finally produced a mostly acceptable print:


Lesson #4: The jury is still out on print quality and smudginess, but water-based ink cleanup sure is a breeze.

Seriously, 90% of the ink came off using no solvent whatsoever. I used a small amount of vegetable oil towards the end just to make sure everything was ship shape, and no stinky mineral spirits (which I'd like to avoid in the interest of preventing future flipper babies). I'll have to wait for the test prints to dry before I can really speak to the smudginess factor, and I'm not 100% thrilled with the ink coverage. However, the colors are nice and I think it's worth continued testing.

Lesson #5: My neck hurts.

Pulp & Press Soundtrack 3/20/09: Take Back The City (Snow Patrol), Don't Drag Me Down (Social Distortion). Yeah, Mike Ness rocks balls. I wonder if he needs anything letterpressed.