A Trip to Ditchling

We recently paid a visit to the beautiful village of Ditchling in Sussex. Ditchling has a rather interesting history and for such a small place has hosted more than its fair share of artistic residents. Indeed, it was something of a creative hub in the earlier 20th century and now boasts its own museum, showcasing the work of local artists and craftspeople.

This museum of course was the main reason for our visit to Ditchling, and of chief interest for us were exhibitions on typographic legends Edward Johnston and Eric Gill.  

I assume most people reading this know who Eric Gill is (Gill Sans, guys) and his friend and mentor Edward Johnston was the genius responsible for the London Underground font (Johnston Sans). Johnston has featured on this blog before when we visited the London Transport Museum Depot in Acton. Ooh we do love a good museum.

It was absolutely fascinating to see their work on display, especially that which shows the development of their respective typefaces.

Johnston's original profession was as a calligrapher or hand-letterer, so it was lovely to see some of his work in this area as well.

You'd think this would all be exciting and interesting enough, but Ditchling's delights were only just getting started. Most of the rest of the museum was dedicated to displays on (our very favourite thing)... letterpress! Woohoo!

Their print shop set-up had me green with envy and did a great job of laying out the basic process for those unfamiliar with proper printing.

Just look at the patina on the wooden type... and the massive old type case... and the beasty Stanhope press...! Sigh.

In an absolutely inspired (and slightly bonkers) move, the museum had also been involved with an (ad)venture called the Big Steam Print. This involves printing giant lino-cut designs with a dirty great steam roller. Why not??

Image from artfund.org 

At the museum, they had a huge communal linocutting thing going on, where you could contribute your own little design to a massive linocut sheet that will be printed as part of Big Steam Print at the Ditchling Fair on 18th June (hey, that's not yet! You could totally go and see it!).

Whilst I was running around taking photos of everything in the print shop, Sam Boy and our mate Kathy were doing just that.

All in all, it was an excellent day out. We drove down, but my friend Kathy came on the train, so can confirm it's definitely do-able as a day trip from London. The train station is in Hassocks though, which is a bit of a trek on foot from Ditchling itself, you may want to consider a taxi depending on how much you like walking!

If you fancy getting in a spot of exercise whilst you're there, a stroll up on Ditchling Beacon proved bracing. For lunch, there are plenty of options, we had some lovely sandwiches in the garden at the The Green Welly Cafe, a stone's throw from the museum. The museum shop itself also had some incredibly tempting cakes on display.

Cat Plate - Balscote Press Visit: Part Two

As promised, here's another post on what we got up to on our trip to Balscote Press last month.

This is about the rather miraculous process of letterpress printing photographs. No really.

Being the massive losers we are, we decided the only photos that would do for this experiment were of our beloved cats, Basil and Saffy (they have their own blog here). First step is to convert the image to half-tone:

This basically means it's made up of a series of dots. The greater the spacing between the dots, the lighter the area will appear when printed, and in turn, the denser the dots, the darker the area will appear. Genius.

This is then printed to film:

Then we realise it needs to be a negative and print it to film again:

To create something from which we can print, we use this magical little device to create a photopolymer plate from the film. This is a UV process. Don't ask me how it works...

The basics are that the printing areas will harden, and then the non-printing areas of the plate need to be washed away using this hi-tech method:

And you're left with this (ta da!):

This was all done in rather a rush as we were running out of time, so in future we definitely need to go at it slower. We weren't particularly confident we'd get something printable this time, but we were pleasantly surprised. We got our black ink ready:

Here's the inked plate on the Arab:

And the resultant print:

Just ignore the rather unfortunate shape across Basil's face, it's most likely due to over-vigorous scrubbing of the plate during the cleaning stage. Ahem.

Here's another photopolymer plate (not made in a rush) where you can see some very handsome fishes:

So there you have it! We're incredibly excited about the potential of this technique, the possibilities are endless really. We're very much looking forward to experimenting once we have the time, and when our Arab is ready to play of course.

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.

Assembling our Arab Crown Folio Press

I was hoping to come up with some witty title for this post, riffing on Avengers Assemble, but... I got nuthin'. So you'll have to make do with the Ronseal approach instead.

Don't want to run the risk of boring the pants off everyone, so this post will be mostly image-based.

To give a brief bit of background... we were lucky enough to acquire this press through a friend of ours at The Waiting Room. It's a rather convoluted story, but the short version is that we were given the press in exchange for a donation to the excellent Emery Walker Trust. I covered the moving of the press in a previous post, here.

The press most certainly has a fascinating history, if only it could talk. We know it lived at Kelmscott House at some point. It may be bit of a stretch to connect it to William Morris himself, though we can dream!

Some shots of the components before we got started:

(Apologies for the deceased arachnid in this one, at least he's out of focus)

I'm afraid I personally can't take much credit for the actual assembly work, I left that to Sam Boy, my Dad, and our mate Alex.

It was very much a 'boys in the workshop' day. They loved it. Here they are exhibiting some excellent teamwork skills:

One of the hardest things to contend with (other than only having an instruction manual from about 150 years ago), is the weight of the thing. Some components need 2 people to even lift them, and once the press starts taking shape, moving the frame of it becomes nigh on impossible without equipment (or putting your back out).

Some more work-in-progress photos:

(Rope is always handy)

Here you can see it really coming together:

Impromptu (grubby) photography studio:

Me pretending I know how to operate the thing::

Photos like this show quite how much work we've still got to do (of the cleaning and painting kind):

But we're still feeling pretty pleased with ourselves:

So long ways to go yet precious (that's a LOTR quote by the way), but progress made nonetheless. I really need to work on my treadle technique though:

Day 2 of the rebuilt... and it works! Well apart from the lack of a chase. Anyone know where we can get an Arab Crown Folio chase? #letterpress

A video posted by Grey Letter Press (@grey_letter_press) on Sep 12, 2015 at 11:34am PDT