31 December 2009

We Had The Neighbours Over for Lunch


I've been meaning to post more about the house, but somehow other things kept taking precedence. Today was such a good day for avian neighbours, though, that I was finally prompted to blog.


With the exception of bald eagles and ravens, who tend to fly overhead but not stop in, I saw every kind of bird today that I had seen at the the house so far, plus a couple of new visitors.


We have two suet feeders, which are frequented by black-capped chickadees, bluejays and downy woodpeckers. We've had large flocks of chickadees, who are entirely fearless and cheerful little birds. I can't say how many have visited at once, because they don't stay still long enough to count. As for bluejays--who like both the suet and the loose seeds--we usually get five or six at a time, but I've seen as many as twelve flitting about the yard at once.


The downys tend to stop by singly, but there are at least two of them; we've spotted a male and a female (the males have a red spot on the back of their head). There is a flock of mourning doves who visit the loose seed (and who will even chase off the bluejays, if they get too obnoxious). The number varies, but I think there may be six or seven altogether.


There are also at least two crows who visit regularly, but unlike city birds, they're quite shy and keep their distance from the house. They fly into the trees if anyone goes outside, but I think they're beginning to figure out that a person outside often means tasty things to eat. One of them is a relatively small bird, and the other is so large I keep checking the shape of his (or her) tail to make sure it is actually a big crow, and not a small raven.


Today, I glanced out the window and saw--to my surprise and delight--that the black and white, red head-spotted woodpecker clinging to the nearest suet feeder was much larger than our usual downy visitors. It was a shyer bird, a hairy woodpecker. He sat and ate off one feeder while the little female downy had her lunch on the other. I ran upstairs to get my camera, but he flew off just as I was adjusting the focus (which is what also happened with the crow photo, except I managed to snap a poorly exposed pic of him flying away).

The other new visitors were three (or maybe more) tree sparrows. They look much like house sparrows, except they have very reddish brown heads and eye-stripes. According to my bird book, they're winter visitors. They didn't pay any attention to the suet, but instead hopped around pecking at the remnants of the seeds left by the jays.

I also experimented with some leftover bacon grease from this morning's breakfast. I always hate to just throw it away, as it seems like something the local wildlife would enjoy. So this afternoon I mixed a bunch of bird seed into it and made it into a sort of mushy cake on a scrap of wood, then put it out on the picnic table to see what would happen. The bluejays loved it. They don't always like to get so close to the window when we're right inside watching, but there were as many as five at a time pecking at the bacon seedcake. So now I have a use for bacon grease.


Photos, from top to bottom (all by Niko):
  • Bluejay on a suet feeder.
  • Black-capped chickadee on one of the suet feeders, on the table because too many bluejays at once broke the hanging chain.
  • Female downy woodpecker on suet feeder
  • Male downy woodpecker on suet feeder, restored to its hanging position with the help of some twine
  • A bluejay and a mourning dove (look close, she's brown and hard to spot)
  • Crow, who decided he didn't like the look of my camera and flew away as I was pressing the shutter release
  • A bluejay laying claim to the bacon seedcake.

27 December 2009

Contest! Win a Flying Machines Calendar


A contest seems like a nice way to finish off one year and begin another, so from now until January 6th, I'm going to run a contest here on my blog. Those of you who've entered blog contests before will be familiar with the format. The more you help me spread the word about my blog and my shops, the more entries you get.

Things that will get you one entry each:

  • choose your favorite item from one of my shops (Etsy here and here, ArtFire here) and leave a comment on this blog post

  • heart one of my Etsy shops

  • choose your favorite post from this blog and mention it in a comment

  • follow my blog

  • follow me on Twitter (@anagramforink)

  • retweet the Twitter post announcing this contest

  • become a fan of my Facebook page

  • recommend my Facebook page to your friends

  • watch me on deviantArt, or fave one of my deviations


If you buy something in one of my shops, you'll get two entries; spend $50 or more and get five entries. Make sure you post a comment here letting me know what you did, so I won't miss any. Also make sure your email address is in your post or your profile so I can contact you if you win.

The prize: one of only 30 hand-printed letterpress flying machine 2010 calendars. See this blog post for more photos and info on how I printed it, and find it here and here in my online shops.

In the delightful but unlikely event that I get lots of people entering, I'll add another prize. If lots and lots enter, I'll add a third prize, and so on. (As for how many = "lots," I'm not really sure. 25? 30? Some number dependent on whim? Probably.)

19 December 2009

2010 Flying Machines Calendar!

On Tuesday I finished the last printing I needed to get done before the new year: my 2010 "Flying Machines: possible and improbable" calendar.


On Thursday I trimmed, hole-punched and packaged all 30 of them, and of course signed and numbered them. I had already pre-sold two at the Halifax Crafter's Market, and had two other people interested in buying when they were finished. So I've now sold 5, will keep one for my files, and will probably use 5 or so for gifts. So that leaves 19 for sale in my Etsy shop and my ArtFire shop.

The calendars are printed on one of my favourite (non-handmade) papers for letterpress: Mohawk Via Vellum 80 lb cover. The 100 lb is nice, too, but doesn't fold as well for greeting cards, so I usually buy the 80. The vellum finish gives it a soft texture that doesn't interfere with the printing as heavily textured papers sometimes do. I chose warm white for this, rather than my usual cool white--although cool white tends to have less affect on the ink colour, the warm white seemed better suited to the subject matter, and goes well with the brown ink.

I printed the names of the months first, using a different historic wood type from the Dawson Printshop's collection for each month. I added a lot of transparent base to the ink, and printed relatively lightly in order to get all the texture and imperfections of the old wooden type to show up. For printing the wood type, I used the shop's Vandercook Universal 1 proof press.

Then I printed the numbers and the images at the same time, from polymer plates. I used quite a bit of packing on the cylinder to bring up the pressure and get a nice deep embossment (technically debossment, I suppose). The letters for the days of the week were printed the same way, only with a different colour of ink, of course. The polymer plates were all printed on the shop's Vandercook Universal 2 proof press, a very rare press (apparently only 50 or so were made).

All of the images except two are ones that I found in my various history of flight books (I have a small collections). Many of them are Victorian, and a few of them were in full colour, which meant I had to remove the colour in Photoshop before converting the files to vectors. The two images that weren't ones from my own books came from a file of miscellaneous images on the Printshop computer. Some of the machines pictured actually flew, while others are simply exercises in imaginations.

I'm going to post a contest here soon, where you'll be able to win a copy of the calendar. I think what I'll do is make it a trivia contest, where you'll have to identify some of the machines--maybe which ones actually flew, for example. More on that very soon.

16 December 2009

Letterpress, Not Screen Print

Despite the many print jobs I've had in the past few weeks, I still managed to design and print two new holiday cards. Well, I cheated a little on the design, and took one of the motifs from my first design, enlarged it, added to it a little, and printed it on its own.

I started by drawing the images by hand, then I scanned them and opened the files in Illustrator. I used live trace to convert the images to vectors, which generally print much better than, say Photoshop files. Once I was happy with the designs, I had to separate the colours (which was easy since I only used two colours in one card and one for the other, so all I had to do was select the relevant parts and drag them to a new file), then convert everything to registration black.

Registration black--that is, black that will be printed with CM and Y as well as K, and not just the black ink cartridge--is necessary to make the negative dense enough to block light. I send my files off to a pre-press guy, who sends me back a negative. I cut the pieces for the different plates apart and then use a platemaker to create the images on polymer. After washing with soft brushes to remove the unexposed polymer, the plates are dried and then cured in the sun. I leave them to cure for at least 24 hours before printing.

I tried to print the single reindeer card with a split fountain (there's no actual ink fountain on the press, but it's basically using two--or more--colours on the same press; in litho class we called it a "rainbow roll"), and you can see from the photo that it looks great on the rollers and even on the plate. Look at the image of all the printed cards, though, and you can see that they dried in a solid grey-blue. I'm still not sure quite why that happened.


I also printed a two-colour card with 3 reindeer, but neglected to photograph it in process.

Interestingly, everyone who saw the reindeer card at the craft fair thought it was either a screenprint or a die-cut until I showed them how the relief printing created an embossed effect where the white deer shape is raised above the surface because the coloured areas were pressed into the paper with so much pressure. I guess I have to learn how to design letterpress images that look like letterpress.

Photo credits: Top = polymer plates for holiday cards and 2010 calendar. Second = two inks at once on the press and the plate. Third = a whole pile of reindeer cards, printed and drying. Bottom = my booth at the Halifax Crafter's Christmas Fair. A little crowded, but each time it looks a little better. All photos by Niko Silvester, taken with an iPhone.

Experiments In Coptic Binding

One of the jobs that's kept me so busy these past few weeks was a binding job for a friend of mine to give as a gift. (I won't mention who the friend is or who the gift was for, on the slender chance that the surprise could be spoiled. I don't think the recipient is likely to come across my blog, but you never know).

The specifications were for a journal, with reasonably nice writing paper (nothing expensive) and a leather cover, with the recipient's initials blind-tooled on the front. My friend found an image of some journals she liked the look of--the spine wasn't visible in the photograph she sent, but they were either Coptic or longstitch (an evolution of Coptic), with exposed stitching on the spines. I've done similar books before, though with hard covers rather than limp leather.

I used Classic Laid paper for the text block (for those who don't do books, "text block" is the stack of pages, regardless of whether or not they actually have text on them). It's kind of the go-to paper for anyone who learned binding with Joe Landry. It's relatively inexpensive, but has a traditional-looking laid finish and feels quite nice. And though it's textured, it's not so textured that it's difficult to write or draw on.

For the cover I got some very nice, but also inexpensive, chocolate-brown cow leather. With this kind of cover, you need a thicker leather than you would use on a hardcover with leather spine. The leather itself is both the cover and the sewing support, so it needs to be strong.

I laid out and punched the sewing holes for longstitch, then went looking for a diagram to refresh my memory of the sewing pattern. And of course I couldn't find one. Not in my books and not online. And I seem to have mislaid some of my binding notes. While looking online, though, I found a really nice Coptic stitch that uses two needles for each thread, and a separate thread for each pair of holes. It turned out to be even better for the sewing holes I'd punched than my original idea.

I made a practice book first, since I hadn't done one quite like it before (it's the top one in the photo). Then I went on to the real thing, after deciding to do three pairs of holes instead of two (because of the larger size). I ended up juggling six needles at once, but I think the result was worth it. And my friend was very happy when she got the book in the mail (it's the bottom one in the photo).

I had the practice book on my table at the Halifax Crafter's Christmas Market, but I was not at all sad when it didn't sell. I've had my eye on it myself to use as a naturalist journal. Of course, I could always make another one.

Photo credit: Coptic stitch blank journals bound and photographed by Niko Silvester.

18 November 2009

Another One Down

Yesterday I finished off another print job. This time it was 500 business cards and 1000 hang tags for Lesley Armstrong, a Halifax textiles artist. Even printing two-up, it was a big job and would normally have taken four days of printing, plus a day or so of prep and finishing. As it turned out, the "soon, but there's no rush" timeframe I was initially given was actually more like "right now, but Tuesday will have to do" (from now on, I'm going to insist on actual completion dates). In order to get it done on time, I condensed four printing days into three (thankfully, there were no big problems), and printed on the weekend, which I don't normally do.

While I was finishing the job, I thought a lot about the difference between "perfect" and "acceptable." Usually, I like them to be the same thing. But when printing a big job on a press not known for its accuracy of registration, the difference between perfect and acceptable gets bigger. I always print more than the actual number required, but sometimes it still comes down to weeding out the worst misprints and leaving the rest in. Of course, I'm talking about prints off-register by less than a millimetre, but I can see it's not perfect, and it bugs me.

Another factor, though, is the "handmade factor." When something is handmade, clients want it to look handmade (without being shoddy). A perfect letterpress print by the old definition would be indistinguishable from a digital print, except the printing would be denser, and perhaps softer on the edges. These days, though, the appeal of letterpress is its ability to impress the type or image right into the paper. You can feel letterpress. And the imperfections that would once have been rejected become interesting.

I was speaking about just this concept with Vince (former Dawson co-manager) during his visit from Kingston last week. He commented that people want some of that imperfect look, and I suggested that maybe we need to start thinking of printing from polymer plates the same way we think of wood type--the imperfections will happen and maybe we shouldn't try so hard to get rid of them (with old wood type, it's often impossible to get a perfect print, anyway).

So I finished the Armstrong Textiles job on Tuesday when I weeded out misprints, clean up a few ink smudges, and did the final trim. Oh, and hole-punched all 1000 hand tags by hand. Ouch! Today I finally started on the binding job that's next on the list, sent a quote off for the NSCAD President's Chistmas cards (to be printed next week, most likely), and caught up on some paperwork. I even got an article for Handmade News done (on how to make a little book from a single sheet of paper--it'll go live tomorrow), blogged for About PSP, and tidied my worktables. The studio is still a mess, but it's just a teeny bit less of a mess.

Tomorrow I need to finish a PSP article and maybe get started on a review, and finish prepping the digital files for my calendar and holiday card so I can send them to film on Friday.

Photos (all by Niko): Top - Vandercook Universal 1 proof press inked up in green. There's a little polymer plate on there, ready to print the second colour on the hang tags for Lesley Armstrong.

Middle 2 - Armstong Textiles hang tags and business cards, 4 to a page.

Bottom - A colourful beetle that landed on the ground in front of me while I was taking the air just outside my house.

11 November 2009

One Down

I was going to photograph the order for Halifax stationery shop Duly Noted and post it here, but in my zeal to get the job wrapped up tonight, I packed and bagged the whole lot before I remembered. They ordered three dozen each of four different cards--two are designs by former Dawson co-manager Vincent Perez, one is a design by other former Dawson co-manager Carley Colclough, and one is printed from an old cut.


I also wrote and queued up an article on paper grain for Handmade News. I'm turning my bookbinding "inspiration" column Leaf by Leaf into more of a how-to and have re-located it to the Craft Techniques department. It'll go live tomorrow.

Then there were the usual house odds and ends. My studio space is still a disaster. Maybe I'll have some energy when I get home from the printshop tomorrow to organize a bit. Though I also have to start my "Hot Holiday Games for PSP" article.

Photos by Niko of cards designed by Vincent Perez.

09 November 2009

Or Falling Off a Bicycle

Well, I managed to do pretty well with keeping up on my NaNoWriMo word counts. Until Friday. I missed a couple of days, but managed to get caught back up again. Then came Friday, and snow, and a full day in the printshop, and driving home in the dark and wind. I was both tense and limp by the time I got in the door. I managed to feed myself some leftovers and then collapsed on the couch next to Bill, who'd had an even worse day of driving than me--his driver's side windshield wiper went on the way in the school and he had to drive leaning over to look out the passenger side. To his credit, he made it to school, did the whole day and made it home again.

And the weekend was full of house things and driving back and forth to Truro trying to get the right bits to install the new faucet, and again no writing happened. So anyway, I'm three days behind on writing, which is really just a point of pride. There's nothing saying I have to complete NaNoWriMo, but I'd really like to. And of course, today is such a perfect day that I've had a really hard time keeping myself inside working. There's a gate that needed disassembling, so I could have the boards to put up a shelf, you see. And now I really want to go out a snap a photo of a mushroom I spied in the undergrowth near the driveway, and I have to move those last couple of gate boards up next to the house, and, and, and.

In other news, I'm working on a fairly large job printing business cards and hang tags for a textiles artist. I had hoped to get started on that today, but getting Bill to school takes precedence over getting me to the printshop. He should have his truck sorted out by tomorrow, though, so I'll head down then. The polymer plates are ready, and they look pretty good. Some of the type is quite small, but I've printed type that small before and haven't had too many problems. So main issue is going to be the pressure on the press. The Vandercook Universal 2 that's in the shop has developed a problem where the press bed won't drop as far as it should, no matter how you crank it. By using very little packing, it's still possible to print polymer plates--as long as the paper isn't too thick. I'll be printing on textured card stock, so I hope that I'll be able to get the pressure to cooperate. Otherwise I'll have to print on the Universal 1 in the Design shop. Which I actually like better, but I'll be more likely to be in the way of some class or another, and the Universal 1 has issues of its own.

(Photo: the Dawson Printshop's Vandercook Universal 2 proof press, before it developed press bed pressure adjustment problems. Photo by Niko.)

Anyway, if I can get that job started tomorrow, I might be able to finish it by the end of the week. Then it'll be back to holiday cards, a 2010 calendar, and book jewelry. And maybe a couple of really fantastic blank journals. Oh yeah, and a binding job. I'll need to start that this week, too.

01 November 2009

Like Riding a Bicycle

I haven't written much fiction at all in quite a long time, and that's not a good thing. I've sort of been making up for it by reading a lot, but reading fiction is not the same as writing fiction.

So I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year, hoping to kick-start myself into fiction writing again. With so many other things on the go, I'm not sure I'll manage the 50,000 words by the end of the month, but I'm at 1711 so far, which is just a little over the necessary 1667 a day to reach the goal and "win" NaNoWriMo.

It wasn't until I actually sat down to write this evening that I actually decided what to work on. I didn't really want to work on White Foxes, even though I really would like to finally get it done. I wanted something I could start and finish, not something I was halfway through, even though I'm pretty sure there are well over 50,000 words left to go in White Foxes. I considered writing the second book in the Kentaurs series (I wrote the first one last time I did NaNoWriMo), but I don't really know what happens yet--not even how it begins, except that Octavian goes looking for his brother Archer.

But then I remembered that I had been thinking about making The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring into an illustrated serial novel instead of a comic (hypothetically leaving me more time to work on the long-time-in-progress Fey comic). It's something I already had a beginning for (though in a very different form), notes for the near future of, and a general idea of where it was headed. I suspect it may grow into a series of short serial novels, but I won't know until I get there, I guess. So, 1711 words and it's pretty silly, but I'm having fun and it means that anyone who has actually been reading Aeryn on webcomicsnation might actually have something new to read soon. Cool.

I've attempted NaNoWriMo three times before now, in 2003, 2004 and 2005. The first two times I did really well, ending up with The Secret Common-Wealth (a faery story) and The Madness of Kentaurs (an alternate-world fantasy), both YA novels and both well over 50,000 words. The third time was the year I started at NSCAD and I realized almost immediately that it was a really bad idea to try to do end of term projects, and write a novel. The end of term projects alone almost did me in. So, I know I'm capable, at least.

Here's to hastily written novels!

30 October 2009

Catalogues for Sandra Brownlee

I'm supposed to be printing cards today. A Halifax stationery store, Duly Noted, is patiently waiting for an order they put in several weeks ago. Alas, today the car decided not to start. In fact, it didn't even seem to try to start. I'm hoping it's something simple that BillyZ will fix in five minutes after he gets home this evening, but in the meantime, I'm not printing.

I'd have had the order finished a couple of weeks ago, if not for a couple of rush jobs that I didn't feel I could turn down (not to mention that the extra income is very welcome since we just bought a house). The first job was the certificates for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia’s Masterwork Award. (How could I say, "No," to the Lieutenant Governor?) The design had mostly already been completed when the Dawson Printshop printed last year's certificates (I was in Pennsylvania for a few weeks when that happened). Former Dawsonite Carley Colclough did the rest of the design long distance from BC, and then I made the polymer plates and did the printing.

I miscalculated a little when getting the paper together; the paper was from the Colours line by Papeterie St Armand, which is rather smaller than most of the stock we use. And the certificates are quite large. I had thought I would get four certificates from each sheet, but was only able to get two. This meant I didn't have enough paper to make many mistakes. I cut a lot of scrap for testing and re-used some of last year's discards. I managed to print all six certificates (the five finalists and one winner) without a single mishap, which has to be a record, considering it was a four-colour job. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least. I'm very proud to have printed something that will have the Lieutenant Governor's signature on it.

The second rush job was binding the exhibition catalogues for Sandra Brownlee's show at the Mary E. Black Gallery. The show is called Departures and Returns and is on right now, so if you're in Halifax be sure to check it out. It's textiles, but her notebooks are also on display, so there's something there for book people, too.

A few of the 72 softcover catalogues had already been sewn, but I did most of them. Then I had to glue on an inner cover--it's like a wraparound cover you'd see on a paperback, but instead of being the actual cover, it's what the dustjacket wraps around. Then I had to tip in a plate to each copy and fold and install the dustjackets. It took me two full days of work to do all 72--good thing I sew fast. And I was very happy that the books all had their sewing holes punched already, which saved me some time.

On Monday afternoon as I was sewing the catalogues, I got a slightly panicked call from Sandra. She'd decided she was really unhappy with the cover size of the deluxe edition of the catalogue (which I wasn't working on), and wanted to know if I'd be able to help put them together if she changed the size. So Wednesday I drove to Joe's studio where Joe and I and a couple textiles friends of Sandra's worked on covering and attaching the new boards. The originals had been made larger to accommodate some weavings Sandra wanting to include. She decided to re-do the weavings at a smaller size, so the covers could be made to a size that fit the pages of the catalogue. We completed 12 of the 30 in the deluxe edition, which was plenty for the show's opening--Sandra can finish the rest at her leisure now that the show is installed and opened.

So today I was meant to be in the printshop, printing, but am not. Instead, I'll get the files ready to send to film to make the polymer plates for this year's calendar (flying machines! wood type! days of the week!), and I'll start on the next batch of tiny book jewelry (the Japanese-style binding, as I have to get more materials for the European-style ones) for the Halifax Crafters fair in early December. And perhaps I'll make some paste and get to work backing some suede with kozuke for another batch of mini SteamBooks. Maybe I'll even make a couple of larger ones this time.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll get a bit of work done on the website and do some writing. but that is probably wishful thinking. Oh hey, it's almost November. I have to decide if I'm going to attempt NaNoWriMo this year. Now that I'm not in school, it might be an achievable goal. And I really need to get writing fiction again.

05 October 2009

Moving to the Country

I meant to have a nice detailed blog about the house--I even took a bunch of pictures--but since we have less than two weeks now to finish packing everything and get it to the house, and I'm working on a print job (meaning I have to be back and forth to the printshop), and the usual writing work, I haven't had time. Plus when I have had a moment free, we've been at the house, where there is no internet yet. So you'll just have to wait for the big house post. In the meantime, here's the outside.



It doesn't look like much, but oh do we have plans. It's solid, and that's the main thing (well, except for that deck, which needs jacking up and new boards). What we really fell in love with was the property--four acres of trees and meadow. And a cave.



It's a small cave in the gypsum bedrock, but a cave nontheless. Water trickles out of it, and cool air even in the heat of summer. And I met this lovely fellow there:



Naturally, I didn't get too close. I was close enough, though, that I learned porcupines talk to themselves as they trundle along.

20 September 2009

Latest Writing: Flying, Books, Words

19 September 2009

Best Promo Video Ever

What a great way to promote your work this is. (I have one of his rings. It fell behind my desk and I'm going to have to move the whole desk to get at it. Grrr.) I could totally see Dr Shallowgrave in something along those lines, though I'm not sure how I'd work my art/craft into it . . .

04 September 2009

Recent Writing

It looks like I got a bit behind with my writing updates. So here's what I've been up to for the past few weeks:

  • Leaf by Leaf: Hi, I'm Niko, and I'm a Bibliophile (HandmadeNews.org)


    This is the introductory article for my new column at Handmade News. In which I introduce myself and the column. Not much else to say about that. (Books and photo by Niko Silvester.)




  • Leaf by Leaf: Getting Started With Bookbinding (HandmadeNews.org)


    The second installment of my column addresses the difficulties for people wanting to start making books, when there aren't many resources around. I provide a few links to get people started, and suggest a simple pamphlet binding to start off with. (Pamphlets and photo by Hannah on ArtFire.)


  • Leaf by Leaf: It Starts With the Paper (HandmadeNews.org)


    This is the third article in my regular weekly column on books and paper. As you probably figured out from the title, it's about paper--how wonderfully inspiring it can be, how easy it is to buy too much just because it's nice, and how to choose paper for a project. (Handmade paper and photograph by paintingpam on ArtFire.)


  • Glorious Gemstones Word Find (HandmadeNews.org)


    This time, the word find was inspired by my rockhounding trip to Scots Bay (which you can read about in the archives. I included all the names of gemstones I could think of, and naturally thought of a whole bunch more really good ones after the puzzle was finished and submitted. I also made a quick little graphic to use with every word find. As you can see, it's not the height of design, but it'll serve its purpose until I can make or find something better.


  • Air Conflicts: Aces of World War II Review (About PSP)

    Niko tackles flying games. And despite the mediocrity of this game, I think I miht be hooked. Flying is fun! (Alas, no image for this one--I didn't even have screenshots to post with the review.)


I'm also working on some articles for Suite 101, but I'm trying to do a set of related articles and post them together. I really need to get going on that, though, as I'm several weeks behind.

03 September 2009

Bookbinding Etsy Street Team Back to School Sale

Woo! One of the Etsy Teams I belong to is BEST: the Bookbinding Etsy Street Team, and this week--Sept 1 to 7--we're having a sale. I'm offering free worldwide shipping, plus if you buy two or more items, you get a free Dawson Printshop wood type letterpress calendar.

Here are all the shops participating in the sale:

I wish I had a bit of extra cash so I could buy a few things myself. There are a couple of books I've had my eye on, and a few I just discovered.