… printing again. i put the old trucks on the roller at the bottom and used the new trucks on the top two rollers so i could print again without jeopardizing my press.

it’s interesting to see how different ink colors print differently, and how different papers take ink. so far, i prefer Mohawk Superfine. because the paper isn’t as soft as Crane’s Lettra (which was used in the sample pictured above), i don’t get as deep an impression, but it takes ink soooo much better with little to no mottling or variations in saturation.

i talked with Dave at Tarheel Rollers, and i’m going to send him the rollers and trucks. he will reduce the diameter of the trucks to 1.375″ and recast the rollers to be an 1/8″ larger than that. unfortunately, he won’t be casting again until next month, but as i wrote in my last post, that’s o.k. since i won’t be in my studio for two weeks of August.

now, back to paying work!

yep… that’s the word from my knowledgeable friends on the LetPress list serve. no, it’s not a good thing for the trucks and rollers to hit the cast iron base of my press. *sigh*

i’m going to send the new trucks, the old trucks, and the rollers back to Dave at Tarheel Rollers and have the new trucks turned from 1.5″ to 1.375″ diameter and have the rollers ground to just a hair larger than the trucks. i am very confident the problem will be solved once and for all. (hope springs eternal.)

actually, it’s a good time to be unable to print, as i’ll be heading off to Penland in two weeks to have fun decorating paper and dreaming of ways to use the beautiful sheets. until then i’m a bit swamped with client work, which is a good thing, i guess, since i seem to need a lot of money to get my letterpress enterprise up and running!

i received my beautiful new trucks from Tarheel just before i left for my beach vacation. these trucks were made just a hair smaller than the diameter of the rollers to prevent the rollers from smashing ink all over the cut and furniture. i removed 4 of the 6 points of lead i had added to the guide rails and tested the new trucks with the rollers on the press. oh how the trucks glided effortlessly over the rails! then i fired Pearl up with a nice red ink, and stepped on the treadle. at first i breathed a huge sigh of relief, all the problems appeared to be solved and the prints are beautiful… perfect ink coverage and crisp detail.

as i continued to print, i became aware of a thumping noise that i didn’t remember hearing before. i turned the flywheel by hand slowly to see where the rollers were positioned when i heard the noise and saw it was when the rollers were in their lowest position. so even tho the prints are what i want them to be, i’m still quite concerned that the bottom roller is hitting the press… you can see the red ink on the black cast iron in the picture above. now, with the larger diameter trucks, they hit the press even harder.

i looked at how the new trucks were fitting the press at the bottom position and noticed a significant gap where the diameter of the new trucks prevented them from rolling completely under the bed (see pictures above). this was true for both sides of the press. then i compared how the original trucks fit; the left side had a gap (altho not as big as with the new trucks), so the original truck could not roll completely under the left side of the bed. the truck on the right side rolled completely under the bed.

so what am i to make of this? it doesn’t seem like it would be good for the trucks, rollers, or press to make contact like this… yet i can’t see how it could be prevented, even using the original trucks. and worse, i can’t think of how to solve this problem. (or rather, the only way i can think of causes me to shudder… it would involved using the original trucks and having the rollers shaved down so the diameter is smaller–just a hair bigger than the diameter of the original trucks.)

now i will post another cry for help on the LetPress list and put myself at the mercy of those experienced folks. i’ll also contact Mike Anton, the Golding Guru in Missouri, and see if he can tell me how the trucks fit his press. maybe, just maybe, it’s not a big deal if the trucks and rollers smash into the press?

oh dear. my camera, a Canon Powershot A95 is dead… yesterday at the zoo i took a picture and saw the dreaded white horizontal lines. so this may be the last photograph i can post for a while. actually, i’ve been dreaming of purchasing the Canon digital Rebel since i bought the A95 a couple years ago… as soon as i learned about “shutter lag.” coming up with the cash for that baby will prove challenging right now tho.

i’m having new trucks made for the rollers of my Pearl press, so i don’t have anything new to report there. BUT this gives me cause to finish filing a metal chase down to fit my little Sigwalt press… i’d like to have something to post on that one soon, altho there probably won’t be any pictures. *sigh* (maybe i can find a photographer trying to get rid of her Rebel??)

this week i have been “cruise director” for my boy Justin who is between school and summer camp. he’s had a great week… very positive (for the most part) with little anxiety. we went to see Kung Foo Panda, which i thought was hilarious… thoroughly enjoyable! Justin was ready to leave after an hour, but was able to stick with it when i said “no,” we wouldn’t be leaving before it was over. we went to the tiny D.C. Aquarium, which was just enough for his attention span. there was a tank with sea horses in it and i don’t recall ever seeing sea horses that close up… they were so beautiful and delicate! yesterday we took a trip to the zoo for the first time in five years. and today we are off to a dairy farm near Hagerstown Maryland to help feed the calve, watch the cows get milked… and then eat fresh ice cream!

what’s not to like? i just love summer.

i’ve never outgrown crayons… i still love the smell, the colors, and the wax that sticks under my fingernails when i pick pick pick at the wrappers to peel them down to expose more fresh crayon. i spent hours coloring when i was a kid, but as an adult i find that activity is rather boring. so today’s post is a lesson in using crayons to make decorative papers by melting them into puddles on a hot plate.

to start, get a hot plate with a glass top… the glass makes it easy to wipe the melted crayon off it. i’ve never tried a teflon-coated one, but that might work too. get a box of crayons–any kind will work, they don’t have to be fancy, altho the metallic or sparkle ones add a beautiful sheen and sparkle to the color. finally, you’ll need a stack of regular 4×6 blank index cards… i prefer the ones without any lines, but you can use those and just decorate the side without lines (obviously).

let the hot plate get good and hot, then rub a crayon on it. allow a good amount of crayon to melt into a puddle. you can experiment with how much is “good” enough, but it’s more than you might think. then just play! i usually stick with 2 or 3 colors, to prevent the colors from mixing into mud. remember your color theory: complementary colors will make… brown. so when using more than 2 colors i separate colors that are complementary with a color they are next to on the color wheel.

once you have the puddles of color, take an index card and lay it on top of the puddles, then smoosh it around a bit. when you pick it up, do so with flair… a swoop before you pick it up creates nice streaks and swirls. this is the fun part… as you see in the picture above, the pink and green would make brown if smooshed together, so i have the blue in between them. once you’re tired of a color, wipe off the excess with a dry paper towel, making sure to get all the colored wax off so it won’t mix with the next colors.

don’t worry if every centimeter isn’t covered with color… white spots are o.k… but if  you don’t want a white spot, just put the card back down on a patch of melted crayon to fill it in. here are some examples of finished color-coated cards. i usually make quite a stack at one time.

once you’ve made the papers, you’ll figure out how you want to use them, but my favorite way (by far) is to use them to cut out shapes with punches. i love love love this vase punch by McGill. turn the punch over so you can see what you are punching out.

here is a finished card with the vase punched out of the pink/green crayon paper.

here is a suite of cards that i made to thank Justin’s teachers, aides, and occupational therapist at school. the decorative background paper is by my favorite company, Basic Grey. the flowers were stamped with photopolymer stamps by Paper Trey Ink.

this is a detail from another card i made. the butterflies were created with the crayon papers and a punch by Martha Stewart. you can see that lots of different punches will work well. the swirls of melted crayon really make the punched out object look dimensional, no?

… or i should say “it’s off to work i went.” it’s such a bummer when paying work interferes with play… and it will forever be my challenge to make my work seem like play. but at least the last two weeks’ work will be paying for a grand vacation in North Carolina in August, where i will be attending the Penland School of Crafts to study decorative paper techniques for two. solid. weeks. i’m still pinching myself!

i haven’t spent more than 2 days away from Justin ever and i haven’t spent more than a week without Phil in almost 15 years. (altho i guess i should clarify a week as having consecutive days, because when Phil is campaigning for reelection he’s gone a lot longer than a week in total time.)

so after two weeks of keeping my nose to the grind stone, i’m hoping to print at least once this week, in addition to trying to make a dent in all the housework and clutter that have accumulated while i focused on other things. i haven’t been drawing lately and i haven’t even been taking pictures. i tend to be an “all or nothing” kind of person… i like to be able to focus my energy and get things done. flitting from one thing to the next, altho i do this often, tends to make me feel nervous and dissatisfied.

so, studying paper decoration for two. solid. weeks. in the gorgeous mountains of western North Carolina will be heaven… the campus is located on 400 acres. i will be bringing my sketch book, camera, paper craft tools, and my cell phone. i don’t own a laptop so i won’t even be tempted to web surf. i can’t imagine how good i  will feel after two weeks of uninterrupted creative time and walks in the woods. oh my! *sigh*

i’m learning that letterpress is a very inexact science, which is why it’s an art… and when printing on presses that are 100 years old or more, there seems to be no end to the tweaking required to get consistently good prints.

today i added another 2 points of lead to the guide rails and inked Pearl up with a nice green ink. i also inserted the chase in the opposite direction (upside down from the way it was inserted yesterday) to see if i still would have problems with the same area of the plate.

i got very nice, clean prints with great detail and the area of the plate that had been consistently printing lighter yesterday was printing quite well today, which tells me the problem is not with the plate itself, but with some aspect of the press.

the rollers were still spreading ink onto the shoulders of the cut and this time onto the furniture as well… with the majority of the ink, as seen above, at the bottom of the cut. there is also some ink visible on the furniture at the top and on the shoulders in the middle of the plate. how weird is that?

it appears that i still could raise the guide rails more… but how much more? and why am i needing to raise them soooo much when the measurements of trucks, rollers, and press bed appeared accurate for the press?

i also noticed that when in their lowest position, the bottom roller touches the press on the left side of the chase. it’s not a problem to clean up the ink on that area of the press, but i wouldn’t want to let the rollers rest there for a period of time or they would compress the roller on that spot.

well, tomorrow is another day… and hopefully letterpress folks will help me figure all this out before i drive them crazy with my questions!

doesn’t seem to be enough, although the prints i got today were much cleaner than the prints i pulled waaaay back in March. (how can it be that long ago?) anyway, here is what i did differently.

first, i started with orange ink because i wanted a lot of contrast with the blue that i used last time so i would be sure to see it on the plate. however, i wasn’t considering the fact that the rollers are orange and the copper plate is pretty orange, so in hindsight orange was not the best color to choose.

i squeezed out a scant amount of ink on the plate and worked the treadle, but this wasn’t enough ink.

i added this much ink, which may have been a touch too much, but the prints i pulled were quite clean. i fiddled with the impression screws a bit because one area of the print was consistently faint.

at this point, i changed both my packing and tympan. but no matter what i fiddled with, this area remained light. so perhaps there is a flaw in the copper plate?

in spite of getting pretty clean prints, this picture shows that i still have either too much ink or i need to add another 2 points of lead to the guide rails to prevent the rollers from smooshing into the shoulders of the cut. i decided to stop and post this entry to get advice from the letterpress gurus on LetPress. (if they will be so kind as to continue to help me!)

to clean up, i rolled off as much ink as i could onto sheets of newspaper.

then i used California Wash on a lint-free cloth (old old undershirt) and wiped down the ink disk and rollers. the California Wash cleaned the rollers much better and faster than the mineral spirits i used last time. i had quite a buzz on from the fumes though, so i hope its efficiency is worth a few brain cells!

i hope to printing again tomorrow after getting a few pointers. until then… i’m going out for some fresh air!

well, at least these toys are as new as they get in letterpress! i recently purchased this cute little Golding slug cutter, composing stick, and new lead from John Barrett. today i cleaned up the slug cutter and stick and they are ready for action.

i did some calculations yesterday to determine how many points of lead my guide rails needed so the rollers won’t hit the plate so hard. the diameter of the trucks measures 1.375″ and 1.361″ (the trucks are not identical), and the diameter of the composition rollers measures 1.5″. Golding’s specifications state that the trucks should be 1.375″, so both the trucks and rollers are the correct size. i also measured the distance from the press bed to the top of the rails… the distance measures .875″ and type height is .918″ so i should only need to add 2 points of lead. i had added 4 points of lead before taking all these measurements, and the rollers still seem to be hitting the plate hard… so it’s time to ink her up and see what happens. i understand that i’m looking for the cut to leave a faint impression in the ink on the rollers.

i’ll take pictures along the way to document progress and hopefully success!

me and my buddy on our Mother’s Day hike… with Dad and Goldy behind the camera… i just love this picture!

Justin gave me many smooches yesterday with handmade gifts that were lovingly constructed at school. i send a heartfelt thank you to all the teachers who know how much we moms treasure our kids’ handmade gifts, and who know that without their intervention at school some of us moms would have few, if any, handmade treasures from our little ones.

i love and envy the freedom with which children create… their art comes straight from their heart and it shows!