Stand By Me

As you'll tire of me mentioning, we (as in Grey Letter Press) have a stand at the Crafty Fox Market in Brixton on 25th April. As this is our first ever market, we've had a heck of a lot of prep to do.

We're chugging away reprinting our current range, designing our business cards, thinking about packaging etc. We even bought a cash box. It's all very exciting.

Here are the paper bags we've letterpressed with our logo, cute huh? Our customers (if there are any, eek!) deserve the best...

Our biggest concern so far has been how we're actually going to go about displaying our cards at the market. As part of Crafty Fox Uncovered, we're only allocated a table around 75cm square. Which is obviously fine, but requires some creative thinking to have it not look a busy mess, whilst still displaying as much of our work as possible.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with a good old fashioned wire rack display, but it didn't seem very 'us'. So, one half of our duo having had a former life as a paper engineer (not me, the other one), we decided it might be a good idea to make our own display stand. As if we didn't have enough work to do already...

Well, I'm delighted to say it's done, and in my humble opinion, it looks bloody fantastic! Thought I'd share some pics with you here. It's made out of grey foamboard, cut out with a scalpel, and slotted together by hand.

Please ignore the pencil marks we've still to rub out, which rather spoils the look, I know!

It has the advantage of being easy to transport as it's incredibly lightweight and breaks down to relatively small pieces, as you can see.

For any fellow traders out there who like the look of this, you can download the PDF designs for it here. You've still got the hard bit to do, obviously, but we hope it proves useful!

We've going to use a wooden type tray alongside this as well, to allow us to show more designs, and give our stall more of a letterpress-y vibe. It's all coming together!

We do hope you'll be able to come along and see us. Saturday 25th April at the Dogstar in Brixton - get it in your diary or magic phone thing.

Off with their heads!

S'alright, we're not really decapitating anyone, just bought us a guillotine and I can't think about the word guillotine without that coming to mind. We'll only be trimming board with it, promise.

So here he is, lovely no? Please ignore our hideous kitchen, we can't afford to do it up because we keep buying letterpress gear.

We had no idea that Adana made guillotines as well as presses. I'm so pleased he's as handsome as our little 8x5!

We bought this on ebay a couple of weeks ago, collection only. The seller turned out to be a charming bloke called Glenn, from Inky Beard Press.

He's based in Whitstable, so we managed another trip to the seaside this month in order to collect. It was absolutely pissing it down, but I'm always happy to see the sea, whatever the weather.

We enjoyed an interesting chat with Glenn, he showed us around his little workshop. He has a marvellous collection of type, and this hunking beauty of a press, a Crown Folio Arab. We are very jealous:

Here's some of his lovely work. I love the 'public hanging' poster:

We can't wait to get cracking with the guillotine and are anticipating it will save us a shed load of time. We've been trimming by hand (it seems we do everything by hand!) with a scalpel up to this point, so hopefully this will give us a few days of our lives back.