WBAC Holiday Sale

Things have been pretty busy at Bedford Creek, and as a result, many things are going in the mail on Monday!

The Wells College Book Arts Center has a holiday sale at the end of the week, and so I'm sending some postcards and holiday cards there. The "Get Even" postcard is an example. (There's an Oddline one too, no worries.)

The Save-the-Date cards I've been working on are finished, and just waiting for Monday morning to be shipped off; unexpectedly, the ink didn't dry as quickly as normal, so I had to wait before I sent them.

Holiday cards are almost done; one more run with red tomorrow morning, and they'll be ready to go too!

Linoleum

Yesterday was the first installment of things I printed on a Vandercook. Today is part two; a different technique than rainbow rolls, but still just as exciting.

Linoleum cuts! This one is formally called a "Reduction Cut," because by the time you finish printing, you have nothing left of the block you started out with. The image was inspired by the family of foxes that I have living across the road from me. Adorable!

Four color run; there's a white background that didn't show up so well on the white paper, but turned out nicely on the brown paper.

Rainbow Rolls

Rainbow rolls are so much fun to do! I haven't yet figured out how to do them on a platen rather than a cylinder press, but playing with the vandercook presses proved to be a lot of fun, as was digging through the WBAC metal image collections.

The basic idea is that you load each end of the cylinder with a different color, and then you let them distribute together. It makes a new color in the middle, so ideally you don't pick colors that make mud. And you can either print your image with it (which I did not do) or print a background with it.

Inspiration

I printed this weekend; little spring notecards. I plan on sending some out soon; mostly they were something to do that was fun while I visited Wells this weekend.

I'm buying my rollers tomorrow! Going to the bank and just doing it, rather than wait around longer. I think that will be a good adventure.

And I've been making a list of printing inspirations recently:

-chicks (I really want to build a chicken coop)

-nazca lines (National Geographic did an article on them)

-fish (I've been cleaning and changing my tanks)

-printing (because I constantly dream about it--can it be it's own inspiration?)

Old Projects

No new news on the press front, but I've been busy with older projects.

Back in 2007, (and still at Wells) I worked on a 100+ page book, "Voices Along the Shore." Being my first book, I was quite distressed when I found a printing error. Maybe it was a bit much to take on for a first book? But now I've put that aside, fixed the error, and am facing down the 1000 pages or so that need to be bound. Time to pull out the German Case Binding pamphlet and remember how to do that.

And I've been working on the webpage. (As you might have noticed.)

Preparations

Press search successful!

Now just need to build a floor to house the press. An entire press shop! I'm so excited.

Here on the left is an example of the cards I printed recently on a Vandercook. I found a great metal plate mounted on a wooden base in the collection of the Wells Book Arts Center, and printed when I had the opportunity to a few weeks ago.

Hopefully all will go well with getting the press here--fingers crossed! Moving a press is no small task.