Big printing week- Craft Fair Venue 11

 Next printery will have more drying space

 One of our most popular cards (all Linocuts)

 The Chandler and Price is nice to feed as it opens almost flat. But too many newcomers to Letterpress fit motors and they run them too fast. This is a recipe for lost fingers! I run this one by foot power at about 300 sheets per hour. That way I get to gaze at the landscape a little - which is beautiful at this time of the year.

 November and December - busy, busy!

This week sees the press foot pedal thumping away! Lots of preparation for the Deloraine Annual Craft Fair and Beyond.  Joanne will be present at our stall at the Deloraine visitors centre (venue 11) and our work is also featured in the street windows exhibition (although the publicity so far has ignored this!) So  if you are planning a visit, drop by and say hello and stock up on chrissy cards.

We have been replenishing our card stocks as you can see. I will also post soon some pinhole photographs from the "new" camera. They look great.

Some press pics etc

We work with five presses - all platens. One of these is an old style Chandler and Price 8x12". Old Styles have curved spokes on the flywheel and lack brakes. They are easy to feed and pedal. Ours is 1904 vintage and still going strong. Nicely elegant but really somewhat primitive for some classes of work. I've always had a picture in my mind of a ballet dancer! Perfect balance. Sometimes I have brought a platen just off impression  and pealed a sheet of Kozo  Japanese paper from the block. Perfect balance and poise hand, foot, and brain. New styles (ours is 1934), lack the charm of the earlier presses but are modernist manufacturing at best, strong and functional. Straight spokes and no decorative casting. They are strong.
 Disk inking can be a bit defeating when you want selective inking and there is no easy way of adjusting the forme rollers. A light touch for shallow etched photopolymer plates is required and this can be achieved by packing the bed rails where the roller trucks travel. Now though, I found a source of Morgan Expanding Trucks, an old invention of expanding trucks that allow very precise settings.
They change the dimension of the roller trucks by using a simple spanner. Heidelberg Windmills of course always featured accurate roller settings and we normally put our photopolymer plates on that press. Now though we can enjoy printing them on our Oldstyle C&P. Thanks to N.A.Graphics of Colorado USA. Its well worth looking for their well stocked web site. I have uploaded an illustration of an Oldstyle C&P from the original sales catalog and a recent picture of our 10x15 New Style C&P.