Alice and the Arab - Balscote Press Visit: Part One

Last weekend we were lucky enough to have a 2-day private workshop at Balscote Press near Banbury. Our main goal was to learn as much as we could about operating the Arab press, and hopefully come home armed with the knowledge we needed to finish the restoration of our own press.

We had a wonderful time hanging out with Brian in his workshop and learnt a shedload of useful stuff. Most importantly for me,  I'm not scared of the Arab anymore!

I'm going to break our trip down into a few different blog posts so it doesn't get too long and boring. First up: printing our Alice in Wonderland block on the Arab.

Here's Alice locked up in the chase:

We need to get us some of those awesome giant double quoins.

Next we ink the press with this stunning shade of red:

We had a lot of make-ready to do (or "fiddling and diddling" as Brian called it!) before we got her printing to the quality we wanted. Here's the block being inked:

The wooden blocks you can see also getting covered in ink are called type-high bearers. They are a brand new discovery for us, and help to evenly distribute the ink by supporting the rollers at the side.

The press in action:

We printed onto the top packing sheet first (usually called the tympan, but in this case it's an A4 plastic pocket!) to get the positioning right:

Lots of Alices:

Doesn't she look lovely:

Posts to follow on our other activities including making photopolymer plates from halftone photographs (who knew that was even possible?), and making our own rubber stamps.