Book & Print Friday: Posters, Intro, Secret Possibility

Alas, I can't think of anything to alliterate with "Friday" that means "books and letterpress printing."

As usual, I have a big backlog of half-finished bookbinding projects. I started working on a larger version of my "steambook" blank notebooks, but I need to get some longer eyelets to finish them. Alas, I'm on a somewhat restricted budget at the moment, so ordering those will have to wait, especially as I want to order an etching tank from the same retailer. I do have the fish skins now that I needed to compete the other 2 of the edition of 3 of my little book of improbable fish prints, so I hope to get those done shortly.

In the "things completed" category, I've finally finished all 9 in the edition of Waterlily books I printed over a year ago. They're letterpress printed from hand-set metal type with three classic Japanese haikus about water, hand-folded into origami lilies and hand bound in hard covers with chiyogami paper on the covers. I haven't managed to get them listed in my Etsy shop yet, but it's on the to-do list.

As for letterpress, I haven't done much since the holidays. I have polymer made up for a fox and bamboo card (that's the digital proof, below), and I will be using the sea things plates from my calendar (which is nearly sold out) to print cards on watercolour paper that I will then hand-colour.

Next week I start teaching an Intro to Letterpress class for Extended Studies at NSCAD. It's Thursday evenings for seven weeks. The last class I taught (on wood type) was an absolute blast, so I'm really looking forward to this one. It will necessarily be a little bit more technical than the wood type class, but I still plan to focus on printing printing printing. I'll probably be teaching the same class again in May/June, but I'll post again when I know for sure.

And finally print jobs for other people. I originally had a job lined up for a repeat customer to be printed in early January, but they ended up needing it much earlier--right when NSCAD (and thus my printing space) was closed and I was on my way out west for the holiday. Fortunately, I know some other letterpress printers and was able to pass the job on to Micheline Courtemanche of Betty & Bing. For the immediate future, I have a small run of posters to do next week from hand-set type. It should be fun, even thought the timeline is a little tighter than I'd like. And I have one other potential job that I'm pretty excited about, but which may not go ahead, so I won't say anymore. Well, I will say it will have me printing on St Armand handmade paper, which is one of my favourite things to print on ever.

And that's it for the moment, I think. I used up my writing notebook two days ago and have to make a new one. I found one in my stash that's sewn, but has no covers yet, so I've been writing in that. Maybe today I'll get some time to put a cover on it.