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.

Apocalypse Now

Anyone who knows me well, or has had the misfortune to go drinking with me, will know that I have a slightly very unhealthy obsession with the end of the world and related topics.

Apocalyptic or post-Apocalyptic fiction is probably my favourite literary sub-genre, and that's true for films as well, as long as they're not too scary...!

Of late, zombies are what's been on my mind (one of the less realistic end-of-days scenarios to concern myself with, I admit), because Samuel has been playing The Last of Us.

So this weekend, we thought it would be fun to make ourselves a zombie themed print. As usual, we were limited by the type we had available (this really isn't the right font), but I'm quite pleased with this nonetheless.

Locking-up:
(we didn't do this as thoroughly as we usually would, it was getting late and we figured if zombies are approaching, careful letter-spacing probably isn't at the forefront of one's mind...)

Inks:
(only red and black will do, for zombies, really)

A quick proof:

And the final print:

We've done quite a lot of other printing this weekend, but it has been less than satisfactory. For me, this was a bit of a wake-up call slap in the face as to how far we've really got to go before we can consider ourselves anything more than total amateurs.

I think my trouble is remembering that real life doesn't actually happen in a montage. If you want to get good at something you need to practice, practice, practice... and in this case, possibly also seek advice or tuition from someone who actually knows what they're doing!

So, we've booked ourselves onto a one-day Adana course at St Bride's Library in October. Hopefully we can make sure we're getting the basics right, and move forward from there...