Bird and Little Bird

A Good Find.

The last week of the school year is not for the faint of heart people.  Really.  But I have survived and can now have another year of teaching under my belt, so to speak.  That is actually a really weird expression but my addled brain lacks a better one.  So there.

I did manage, in between all the running around trying to get report cards written and materials stowed away for fall, to find this old, out of print book on printing with an Adana press.  This was not easy.  It involved no small amount of confusion, a bit of translating Dutch, attempting to get an international money order for a country that the USPS won't issue international money orders for and then just finally sending a ten dollar bill in the mail to Amsterdam.  Luckily the guy who had this book, seemingly the only existing copy for sale in the entire world, spoke a bit of English and happens to be coming to the U.S. later this summer and therefore, has use for a ten.  Nice. 

Why on earth would I go to such trouble to get my hands on such an obscure and specialized piece of how-to literature you ask?  Well, more to come on that subject.  Hopefully very, very soon. 

Things that are hot.

    I took another letterpress class this last weekend.  I decided to typeset a billion little tiny pieces of type to make a summer calendar since our instructor asked us to work with the theme of "things that are hot."  We had a ridiculous, crazy heat wave last week so in my head, I was obsessed with the idea that summer is very hot and that I might not like it very much.  The weather has improved somewhat since so I am now thinking of my little summer calendar not as a countdown to tolerable temperatures but rather as an inventory of days of freedom.  Yay for highly anticipated summer vacations!  There are about three weeks of the school year left to go and I am just itching to have some free time to work on projects and not feel so rushed all the time.

    Setting the type for the calendar took hours upon hours (about four to be honest) and although I enjoyed it, I think that the reality is going to be that I finally get busy learning how to use Adobe software of various types which will make the whole process a lot faster and easier.  Because I've got ideas, you see.  And if I don't act on them in a reasonably quick manner they disappear into some kind of idea void that is a punishment for my laziness.  Or something. 

    This weekend was also a monument to small time consumerism in our house.  I bought a bunch of new books (does the fact that I bought a stack of modern Japanese fiction along with a book about the rediscovery of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker make me eccentric or just a dork?), a whole bunch of good chocolate, way too much Peet's coffee and all three seasons of Arrested Development on DVD.  Because, yes, I do need to watch them over and over again.  And since I got new reading material maybe I will finally update my reading list on the sidebar... I probably won't update my listening section though since I really have been listening to Johnny Cash all the time for the last many months in a row. 

    By the way, despite the hours of painstaking work, I made a big, ridiculous mistake on my little calendar.  Do you see it too? 

I'm still here...

    So the posts have been um... infrequent, shall we say?  But the master's thesis finally got finished for good last Friday (yay!) and my job has been pretty much sucking my will to live, so there hasn't been a whole lot of me to share with the rest of the world.  And there are still six weeks left in the school year.  You see, it turns out that teaching is only partially about the kiddos and a whole lot more about all the adults associated with them and with the running of all the stuff and is therefore, sometimes really, really hard.  Kids are cute. Especially nine year old boys with autism and a passionate love of bowling- very cute.  Difficult adults- less cute. 

    That being said, it is not at all the reason for this post.  This post is not about that.  No!  It is about the very cool letterpress class that I took on Saturday.  I got a call late in the week that someone had dropped out and I was first on the wait list.  Good luck and good times.  So I spent the day pressing letters and the like on Saturday and thoroughly enjoyed myself.  And when I say "thoroughly enjoyed," I mean it.  Really mean it.  I was tired though (see previous paragraph...) and so I only took a fraction of the pictures that I meant to.  I was struggling a bit with the multi-tasking I think.

The picture up top is of the press as I was getting ready to print my first run.  I was using an old lino cut block with an elephant on it.  After that I sorted through some type from one of the big, crazy cabinets full of thousands of itty, bitty tiny letters.

Then I set the type...

And printed these.

Obsession

    You may (or may not) notice that a new category has been added to this here little blog.  I added the "letterpress" category because folks, I intend to use it.  I took my letterpress class at the San Francisco Center for the Book this past Friday and it was probably the most fun  I've had in years.  The class was nine hours long but went by so quickly because everything was so interesting and cool.  Wehandset type, mixed ink, printed, cleaned up (which takes forever) and washed our hands about a hundred times.  The process of letterpress, how the presses actually work, is much different than what I expected but is impressively intuitive.  I kept thinking "These machines are genius, I can't believe they stopped making them!"  At one point I became a complete and total dork because I just started giggling for no reason other than the fact that I was having a really good time and couldn't help it. I made some simple thank you cards and also printed The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams
on a flat card.

 

So I think that I've found a new craft addiction.  It's a funny thing.  When I first began this blog it was in large part because I was so inspired by the blogging of people like Amy Karol and Hilary Lang.  I loved the cool, clever and innovative sewing that they were doing and wanted to do a bit of it myself, while also sharing some of my adventures with a few other people if they were willing to read.  And while I do love sewing (and have a fabric stash that I should actually be really embarrassed about), I think that the actual gift of throwing myself back into the world of stitch crafts has been that it has led me farther down other paths of crafting as well.  I have always loved letterpress but I don't know that it ever would have occurred to me that I could actually learn how to do it if I hadn't happened upon the amazing (and infinite) community of crafty bloggers.  So thanks all!

    My next letterpress class isn't for a few weeks.  I'm a little sad to have to wait so long to do it all again but I also really have some other things that I need to be working on right now, most especially a couple of items for swaps that I signed up for.  More on that to come...