Hope you all had a fabulous weekend. I sure did. I spent my Saturday at the
San Francisco Center for the Book learning how to do a letterpress print on a vintage
Vandercook printer. Perhaps I'm a big nerd but I had so much fun. I love learning new things. We learned everything from setting our type, loading it onto the printer, choosing the design, getting the paper ready and how to work the machine. I can feel my printers muscles already forming.
I chose the 18 point Stymie bold font. It was simple but strong and went really well with the limericks we printed. Here is a bit of the rundown of the class.
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| A Limerick to letterpress. |
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| This is what the metal type looks like piece by piece. |
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| Here is my block of type ready to print. |
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| Printing blocks stabilized on the press. |
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| Overview with inked printing rollers. |
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| Side view of letterpress printer, isn't it pretty? |
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| Final of first limerick(oops...you really need to watch the spacing) |
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| I had better luck with my second limerick... |
All in all, a very successful day. I would highly recommend taking the class to anyone. My instructor was Maia de Raat of
Dandylion Press. She was excellent and it was a really fun class. What great way to spend a Saturday. I'm really looking forward to Letterpress 2 and whatever myriad of classes after that.
