A bit of manual labour

After much searching and some lost opportunities, we've been lucky enough to lay our hands on an Arab Crown Folio platen press. Woohoo!

For those whom that conjures no immediate mental image, it should something like this (this pic from letterpresser.co.uk):

Here's an 1890 advert for it, a beauty I think you'll agree:

Here's what ours looks like:

So, bit of work to be done! Well, I tell a lie. The above is what it looked like a few weeks before we went to collect it. Since then, a lovely fellow called Christopher (in who's barn it was being stored), was kind enough to give most of the components a paraffin bath and now they're looking considerably less greasy. Still plenty to be done, but a bucket load of progress made, certainly.

Phase one of our work with the Arab involved moving it from Christopher's barn, north of Colchester, to my parent's garage, south of Colchester. A surprisingly smooth process, involving 5 people, 3 cars (van plans fell through), tarps, blankets, gardening gloves, and a good bit of elbow grease. In good news, neither the press nor any personnel were injured.

Here are some of the components during the move, I cannot WAIT to get this baby up and running.

And here it is, all neatly stacked up and covered with sheets like a spooky ghost, in its temporary home:

Phase 2 will be rather protracted, as it involves clearing the greenhouse and gigantic hedges from our garden, pouring a concrete base, and building a shed studio to house the press. I'm medium-confident of achieving this over the summer. If anyone has a burning desire to come and help out...?

More posts to follow on our progress. Or lack of, as the case may be.

Who's Your Daddy?

Yep, you guessed it, this post is about Father's Day cards! For those of you not up to date on the special occasion calendar, Father's Day is 21st June this year.

We were determined to come up with some Father's Day cards that were a bit more interesting and original than our Mother's Day offering this year. Nothing whatsoever wrong with our Mother's Day cards, they were very lovely, nicely printed etc., but nothing particularly clever or unusual about them. So that was the brief we set ourselves for Father's Day. I feel like we've achieved that. I also feel like I'm getting RSI from typing 'Father's Day' over and over again.

So, now available in our shop, here are our 3 designs, along with a couple of in-progress / on-press photos, though I confess I don't have many of those...

The hammer outline originally had another design planned for it, but whilst it worked on screen and made us giggle, we just couldn't get it to come together on press, so we abandoned this one:

The hammer works much better on his own though, don't you think?

If our own Dads are reading this... sorry about the spoilers, you will be getting one of these... but you can choose which one if you like :)