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.

Gold! And a lucky find.

Let me clarify. We have not found any treasure, gold is just an ink colour, and the lucky find was a type tray. Ok, expectation management out of the way, just a quick catch-up today...

I've recently gone down to a 4-day week in my day job, allowing me the brilliant expanse of all-the-Wednesdays to focus on our little letterpress company, Grey Letter Press.

I'll admit the first week didn't go that well, I ended up spending more time cooking and cleaning, as it was such a novelty to be home and have time to do these things. Of course, at the end of the day I felt frustrated and cross with myself. I didn't lose a fifth of my salary to be a bloody housewife!

So, since then I've been much more focused and spent lots of time reprinting cards, look here I am, printing...

Cards what I printed (innit):

In big news, we're trading at our first craft market soon (woohoo!), so we need plenty of stock. I will be posting again about this nearer the time of course, but we'll be at the Crafty Fox Market the Dogstar in Brixton on Saturday 25th April. Do swing by if you fancy it (and buy loads of cards please).

We thought some of our cards could do with a little revamp, so I've been trying out printing some existing designs in gold. Gooooolllld! Whaddaya reckon? This one we've decided is definitely a goer:

Not so sure about this one, I think maybe the original black is better? What say you?

In other news, we've had a weekend away in the delightful seaside town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Apparently, it's pronounced "All-brough", which is confusing. Not much to do if you've got kids or are easily bored, but if you just like sea-views, walking, eating and drinking like we do, I'd certainly recommend it.

We took a very windy stroll up the coast to the neighbouring village of Thorpeness, where we found a lovely sort of vintage market, called the Thorpeness Emporium. All sorts of delightful bits in there, including a gorgeous 1960s John Lewis sofa that totally stole our hearts. Head's won out on that one (can't afford it, don't need one), but we did allow ourselves to be tempted by this very unusual looking type tray:

That's me, nearly getting blown away on the walk back. I'm not wearing a tiny hat, btw, that's the handle of the tray.

We believe the tray is for storing leading, or furniture. Well, that's what we're using it for anyway. Lovely stuff.