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.

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...

Post!

A couple of exciting things have arrived in the post recently.

'Swiss' packing for the Adana, and all sorts of goodies, from Happy Dragon Press:

I'm really looking forward to getting this set-up. Hoping for an improvement on the current cereal box and newspaper combo.

And G.F Smith certainly know how to make a girl feel special (well, aside from spelling my name wrong):

G.F Smith's sample ordering service is absolutely exemplary, really well thought out. I thoroughly recommend it!

Printing experiment

So here it is, our first printing experiment. I'm really pleased with how it went, though it was rather a shock quite how much 'fiddling' is necessary before you can get anything like a decent print.

We have a very limited stock of type at the moment, basically some nice big Gill Sans numerical digits, and a random selection of other lead type, none of which forms a complete alphabet! The lead type came with the Adana press we bought, all jumbled up (or 'pied', to be technical) in a big crate, and we've not finished going through it yet.

So, with this rather sad selection of stock, the best we could come up with was this:

24 is our house number, and Basil is the name of our cat, so this sort of makes sense. Ish.

The platen needs to be 'packed' before printing, usually with newsprint and the exciting sounding 'tympan paper'. If you're total amateurs on a first run, this amounts to chopped up Evening Standard and sketch book paper. We'll do it properly eventually. Honest.

We decided to go with a nice classic black for our first printing, we don't really have a surface on which to mix inks yet, and even though our kitchen is still to be 'done', we don't want to actually trash it. Here are the rollers inking up... it's gorgeous stuff printing ink, really glossy and tacky and viscous. I kind of wanted to eat it. Probably not the best idea.

We managed to make a few rookie errors, including not moving the gripper bar (that's the crossbar bit) up high enough to be out of the way of the type, which is very naughty, we're lucky we didn't damage the type. I don't have a photo of that, too ashamed.

As you can see, we had to run through quite a lot of proofs before we finally got something that looked alright. Both of us were astounded by the extent to which the most infinitesimal adjustments to the position of the platen (it's controlled by 4 screws at the back) can affect the look of the print.

Here we are mid-process. Had to move to the floor as our dining table is too wobbly:

 Here's the finished product (not a masterpiece, but not bad for a trial run):

And here it is being modelled by our cat Basil. As you can see, he's really enthusiastic about the whole thing:

 Hopefully it won't be too long before we can lay our hands on some more type and start producing prints that actually have a reason to exist. Sadly, due to the fact that no-one's making it anymore, type is extortionately expensive, so we may have to be a patient!

We're rollin'

Our lovely rollers have arrived for the Adana, so we're almost ready to go! Getting the 'proper' ones from Caslon wasn't cheap, but really worth it to know we have the best quality rollers.