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.

I've been driving in my car

We've had a few bespoke projects to work on this January, which has been excellent fun.

I'd like to share this one with you; they're gift vouchers for a local driving instructor. My driving instructor in fact. Yes, after almost 15 years of pathological terror, I have finally started learning to drive. So if you value life and limb, perhaps avoid Bishop's Stortford on a Wednesday afternoon.

The vouchers are printed in 1 colour (black) on 330gsm Naturalis FSC in Absolute White Matt.

Here's the photopolymer plate:

And inked up:

Drying after the inked part was all printed:

I'm particularly pleased with the blind debossed L-plate borders:

The finished product:

I'm pleased to say the vouchers were very well received by our client. 

If you or anyone you know is in need of driving lessons on the Herts/Essex border, I cannot recommend Diane highly enough. 

Noted

Apologies for the hiatus, we've been a wee bit busy in the run up to the festive season. Much fun has been had with various craft markets, epic Christmas card print-runs, typing letters from Santa etc.

Most of our time has been devoted, however, to another new project, about which we're very excited... Personalised Notebooks!

This started off as 2015's solution to our annual 'massive family, no time' Christmas present dilemma, but we're pleased to say has proved popular with our customers as well.

I don't have as many 'work in progress' photos as I'd like, so will be sure to take some more detailed shots next time we're making.

The covers are letterpress printed with the text either being blind debossed or printed with black ink:

We've given a choice of two 24pt fonts. Gills Sans Bold:

Or Bernhard Gothic Light:

We were able to stick with our ethical sourcing policies by using recycled board for the covers. This is from the lovely Eco-craft, and we selected a range of 11 very sexy colours:

The few work in progress shots I do have:

To bind the notebooks, we use a simple 3-hole pamphlet stitch, like so:

Using our very lovely Bookbinding Tool Kit from the LCBA:

Here's hoping we'll be making plenty more of these in 2016.

Scaling up

Grey Letter Press is almost one year old now, and so far in our little life, most of our output has been greetings cards.

Sure, we've dabbled in bespoke work, wedding invites and so forth, but our bread and butter has been cards, cards, and more cards. Quite a lot of them with naughty words on, to be honest.

In time for Christmas this year, we're keen to scale up to something a little larger, and have produced a selection of prints. We thought you might like to take a look at them, and their production process.

First up, our CMYK-Bees:

This one was pretty labour-intensive. We only have the one 'bee' block, so each print had to go through the press 4 times, once for each colour.

Inks:

Cyan bee on press:

Drying:

Here's a detail shot of the final print:

Keeping with the nature theme, and vintage print blocks, here's our Butterflies piece. Two colours this time, so only 2 passes per print:

I had a lovely time mixing the colours for this one. Dusky rose:

And... not sure what you'd call this one? Peacock blue? Jade green? Turquoise?

Moving on from nature to our other great love in life... stationery! Here's our Scissors print:

I don't have many on press pics of this one. Only one colour this time, but still 3 passes on press for each print:

I love the way the lines of the scissors sort of interlock where they overlap:

Finally, our Pencils print. Probably my favourite, but don't tell the other prints I said that:

We tried this one out on 2 types of board, a plain 330gsm (right), and a more textured 450gsm (left):

The 450gsm board (called Wild White) won out in the end, I love the way the design really bites into the paper when using this slightly pulpier board:

We experimented with various shades of blue to complement the tangerine orange:

Hopefully you like our final choice :)

That's all for now folks, all prints are available to purchase right now on our website. Go on, you know you want to.