My 2014 Indulgence

On November 2nd I walked from Purgatory to Paradise with Ali Kayley & Dan Glaister & Walking the Land.
Purgatory is a small copse near Fennels Farm on the way to Bisley, Gloucestershire, and Paradise is a hamlet just after Painswick, on the A46 heading for Cheltenham. We started out under grey cloud, & headed into showers, to end our walk with a Paradise picnic, where ofcourse, we were blessed with warm sunshine. On completion of the walk Ali & Dan gave us a personalised Indulgence, letterpress printed by Stawberry Press in Moreton-in-Marsh on the occasion of their first Purgatory to Paradise walk.

Tea & a chat

The quote is by Saki, aka Hector Hugh Munro. In the story this quote comes from, the speaker is eating brown bread & butter with caviar to accompany her tea. Sounds delicious!
The lino cut capital T/Tuscan Egyptian type is printed in ink I made with PG Tips. I printed on Japanese Gampi Smooth paper, so maybe next time I should move up-market & try making ink with Sencha Japanese green tea.

Inspiration

This wonderful coloured & ornamental Clarendon type was produced by William H Page & Co. who were designers and manufacturers of wood type. They were based in Norwich, Connecticut & eventually became part of the huge Hamilton type business in Wisconsin. This image comes from The Public Domain Review which is a fantastic resource of all sorts of images, animation, photos etc.

Typing on a leaf

Wonderful typewriter workshop at the Museum in the Park in Stroud yesterday, playing on machines old and very old, creating typewriter art & poetry, or just recording random thoughts. We also performed a typewriter musical composition (which was recorded live) using the fantastic sounds generated by the machines in action. Forgot how hard you need to stab at typewriter keys.
I ended up typing on leaves. It will be interesting to see what happens as the leaves dry.
Thank you to Andrew Morrison for organising the event.

Because

2 days of letterpress at LENvention2 (see http://len4letterpress.blogspot.co.uk/) in Cheltenham, making a book inspired by a beautiful poem written by Elizabeth Willow entitled 'Because' about the why of letterpress. This poem plays magically with the terminology & sometimes obscure vocabulary of letterpress. The construction of the book was devised by Rachel Marsh.

We were each given 2 lines from the poem to work with. My lines were:

Because of winters and coffins and slugs

Because each page is a poem

Good to work collaboratively and to start and (almost) finish a project from scratch in 2 days.

Thirsty?

A bit of an antidote. Make mine a Budding.

the crashing, rolling sea

Somewhere holding MH370

Missing U

Following on from the January 18th post: With an Illustrator eps file of the U, I had the letter (314 mm tall) outline engraved in lino by laser, & cut away the excess by hand. It was very satisfying to have the precise line of the engraved line to cut up to. This lino-cut U will stand out as being very smooth in contrast to the wood grain textures of the other wooden letters in this font.

I next got 22mm deep off-cuts of hard wood (afromosia & sapele) from a joinery workshop and booked a session with the UWE CNC (computer numerical control) router. This used the same illustrator file as the laser machine.
We used a 4mm routing cutter. This size was determined by the width of the gap between the 2 serifs. The cut depth was set at 5mm, and this was done in 3 steps: 2 + 2 + 1mm to avoid stress on the cutter & possible over-heating. The wood was fixed on the cutting bed in a block of MDF. At the first attempt, the wood moved in the block, so the first and second cuttings became mis-aligned.

At the second attempt (using the other side) the wood was fixed much more tightly in a block of MDF. It took about 45 minutes to cut.
There are no sharp corners in the U, so no finishing issues. I want to cut an A next, so the interior pointed apex will have to be cut by hand.
I made a first (OK) print of the U without having varnished the print surface with shellac, but I plan to shellac finish all the other letters.

After the storms

Damaged fruit salvaged

Following on from the previous post: The digital print & letterpress combination initially went wrong because having worked out how to centre the digital printed orange, I left far too much newsprint packing under the printing paper, so the rollers on the Vandercook jammed half-way through printing. In pulling the paper back out, the top print surface of the orange was scuffed & marked. Playing around with a lino-cut type-high lower case 'a', I overprinted on the orange to hide the scuffs.
I finished by printing a large red 'o' (for orange) over the whole lot.

I like the fact that the wooden type, having been pushed too tightly into the paper to print, has made an embossing effect high-lighted by the overprinting.

Fruit Number 1

Triggered by finding this block (roughly 3cm square) in the archives of a printing business that thrived in Byker, I remembered the coloured tissue paper that fruit used to be wrapped in.

I had also just visited the Matisse paper-cuts exhibition, Drawing with Scissors at Stroud Museum, where I saw the lithographic print of his 1953 Nu aux Oranges.

This gave me the idea to make a letterpress fruit salad, starting with this reference to Jeanette Winterson's 1985 book.

The circle between the type is a digital print on coated archival 300gsm photographic paper which takes up the letterpress ink really well. The intention was that the circle sit centred with the type, but having messed up on the first attempt, I decided to make a print with the circle off-centre. This gave the happy accident of the top of the t just touching the bottom of the fruit & the dot on the i making the stalk mark. More fruit to come...

Printing Colour

The project is to print & play with the word "colour" using large wooden type. The largest letters (C & U) are about 38 cm tall. I don't have complete alphabets.

Once I've decided which size to use, I will draw the missing letters at the required size in Illustrator for use with a laser-cutter.
Wooden type was traditionally made from end-grain maple. I will need to decide whether to use wood (other than maple), MDF, lino or another material.
For printing, the beds of the 2 Vandercook proofing presses at UWE are too small to print the whole word. I can get 3 letters at a time on a Colombian press bed, or I could hand-burnish the letters.
I can split the word into 2 lines:

COL

OUR

I want to print on the same large sheet of paper, so need to investigate the largest paper sizes, or experiment with joining sheets together by sewing or folding (rather than just sticking).