Hello everyone! Just a little break from these busy few weeks to fill you in on something I did this last weekend with my company in town.
It was a full on steamroller smackdown at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. Well, it wasn’t an actual steamroller using steam…it was noisy diesel.
But it was still a smackdown and still loads of fun.
Even for the kids!
And also for the young at heart (Don’t you just love her outfit on the left? The skirt had a blue poofy slip underneath. So cute!). Seriously, it made me so happy to be around the smell of ink and the clickity clank of letterpress printers again.
It’s been a while since I’ve had time to play with Clark, my letterpress printer.
{image from here by Tim Celeski}
But the whole experience at Wayzgoose put a huge smile on my face to be thinking about letterpress printing again.
They even had old time blue grass music playing in the background to set the mood (I love the type used to make his music book cover, don’t you?).
For those of you that don’t know, this is how the steamroller works, just in case you’ve got an ol’ steamroller layin’ around. First ya gotta ink up your plate. Lay that down on a smooth surface, which acts like your chase bed.
Carefully align and lay your paper on top. Lay a protective plywood board on top of the paper…
Then here rolls the steamroller, which acts like the platen.
And voila!
Hang to dry and there’s your poster size print! We really had a good time.
There were vendors there showing their work (This poster cracked me up!), selling prints, cards, books, even type…both wood & metal. There was even someone selling a Chandler & Price floor standing platen press! It was too soon for me to invest in one and it needed a fair amount of work, but hopefully someone scored the great deal being offered for that.
We also got to use a Vandercook press to make our own print to take home.
I just realized that I totally forgot to take a close up photo of the finished product, but here is a cropped and zoomed in one. Sorry for the lack of quality. I’ll try to remember to take a photo of it for next time.
I’ll also try my best to post whenever humanly possible these next couple weeks while I have company in the country. This week I should be able to get some work done that I can share with you later.
Until then…Ciao!
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