Stuff What We Made (Adana Workshop Part 2)

Further to my effusing yesterday, here are some more pics from our fantastic letterpress workshop at St Brides.

After the theoretic preliminaries, we moved on to setting up the Adana for print. The first thing we discovered is we have been using waaaayy too much packing on the platen at home, you generally only need around a millimetre.Whoops.

The next genius tip from Richard was using a slip of paper pulled between the platen and the locked-up type, to determine when the screws are correctly set. You should be able to pull the paper out without tearing, but it also should not fall if you let it go. This is probably the most useful thing I have learned all year.

Once we had the basic set up sorted, we got to try our hands at preparing various things for print...

Here are our attempts at lino-cutting. We only spent about 15 mins on these, and I must confess I am overwhelmed by how not-crap mine is...! I have no drawing, painting, or really any artistic skills of any kind. I thought I was going to have to go and hide in the cupboard when Richard said were going to do some lino-cutting, save myself the inevitable embarrassment. So I'm really very pleased with how this turned out...

Here's my little rabbit:

And printed:

Samuel went for a chair (of course!):

And here it is printed:

These were actually printed on a galley proof press, hence the lovely strong blacks. It wouldn't be impossible to get this result on an Adana, but it would take a whole lotta make-ready and fiddling about!

Next lesson was a bit of type-setting.

We each chose a short quote and used a proper composing stick (uh-huh, get me and my lingo) to set the type. The traditional lay-out of a type tray makes very little sense to the layman's eye. It is based on letter frequency, and I'm sure if you're a pro, it's all good, but for us rookies it was excruciatingly slow. Once you settle into a rhythm though, it's surprisingly relaxing. I could definitely do more of this, and as with everything, I'm sure practice makes perfect.

I elected to print a quote from one of my very favourite films: Wes Andersen's Grand Budapest Hotel:

Just pretend you haven't noticed the upside-down letter s's. I'm fuming!

Samuel went with some 90s rap lyrics, because you know, why not. I love the contrast of style and content here:

So these are the main things we came away with after our fascinating day, but in terms of knowledge gained, I've barely scratched the surface here. We've so much more still to learn though, and we're raring to go! I've gone back to work/reality very begrudgingly this week; I want to be at home printing!

Could this be the most beautiful room in the world (Adana Workshop Part 1)

This Saturday we attended a letterpress workshop at the wonderful St. Brides Library. It was entitled "One day Introduction to the Adana" and that's certainly what we got, and then some.

I've decided to split this over 2 blog posts as I may over-gush otherwise. The course was taught by a tremendous fellow called Richard Lawrence, who has been in the letterpress business for longer than I have been alive. His encyclopaedic knowledge, patient instruction and dry sense of humour made the day an absolute pleasure. Our fellow workshopees were a lovely bunch as well, which was lucky, 'coz you never know...!

Our main goal in attending this workshop was to understand the basics of setting up our Adana ready for printing. Having bought our press in a right old state and refurbished it ourselves (see previous post), we have had no instruction at all how to go about fine tuning the thing to get the best possible results, and muddling through on that front really hasn't gone well so far.

We could print from it of course, but thus far it's always been a little disappointing. This sadly has meant that the Adana has mostly been sitting on the side in my library our spare bedroom, a little unloved, whilst we do all of our printing on the big ol' proof press, 'coz it's just easier.

I am pleased to say we learned exactly what we needed to know and plenty more besides. Richard was full of all sorts of useful little tips and tricks of the trade, and happy to impart them to us novices. I'm delighted to report that having followed his instructions to the letter upon returning home, our little Adana is putting in a much improved performance, and I expect it to be doing a little less dust-gathering from now on.

So for this first post, I'd just like to introduce you to my New Favourite Room in the World, where our workshop was held, then next post will be more about what we did there. The studio had an extraordinary collection of presses, type, furniture (the printing kind), leading and other equipment. I don't know what half of these things are called, so I'm not even going to try descriptions here...

Here's me being overwhelmed and playing photographer:

To be Continued...

Empire Lines

We acquired a new font this week, Empire, 60pt. Here it is:

Just did some fiddling about to start with to see how the type printed. Pretty good I'd say...

It's one of those fonts that looks kinda awesome whatever you do with it (lucky for us). More to follow when we have more time to do something bigger with it. Lovely stuff!

Neil Gaiman Card

Printed a card for a friend's birthday today. The two things we know Kathy loves are cheese, and Neil Gaiman. So clearly, she is a lady of taste. After failing to come up with a cheese-based concept for a birthday card (this will remain on my to do list), we went with a Neil Gaiman quote instead.

We tried a sort of gradient thing, but it needed more time than we had to perfect, so we'll save that for another day.

And the finished product...

Not exactly a masterpiece, but fit for purpose I think.

Mixed type and not a lot to say...

We've had rather a hiatus from printing of late, been a bit busy with real life (boring). This may continue for a little while longer, but towards the end of this month, we'll be back on it, and this blog should get more interesting again (well, "interesting" might be a bit generous).

I've got a couple more cards to blog about, but have to wait until they've been given to the, uh,  lucky recipients before I post any photos, so as not to spoil the surprise.

So in the interim, here' some things we've acquired...

Some mixed type from an antiquarian bookshop in Penzance. That's a lotta P's. Not sure what I was thinking really, but was so excited to have stumbled upon some type whilst on holiday, I got a bit carried away:

A bucket load more wooden furniture (you can never really have enough):

And for our Christmas cards this year, some lovely Naturalis board from G.F Smith:

And some very sexy grey-lined envelopes from Pitshanger. These are rather expensive, but just so gorgeous, we couldn't help ourselves!

50th Anniversary Card

Another personalised card today; this time for our neighbours, Diane and Gordon, who are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary next week. Can't even begin to imagine what it feels like to be married to someone for 50 years, so congrats to them!

A very simple concept for the card, but we didn't have a huge amount of time on our hands today:

Our press assistant wasn't particularly helpful, as usual:

So here we are:

I really struggled to get the right shade of purple for this, had to mix it twice and still didn't really get where I wanted to, but am happy enough with the end result: