Holiday Letterpress Workshop

Come and letterpress print your own Christmas cards and gift tags! We’ll have four presses set up with holiday cuts, engravings and type from the studio collection for you to print from.  Each participant will get 15 high quality Crane Lettra 5”x5” white cards and matching envelopes and 15 gift tags to print on.

*$45.00 plus HST

Sun. Dec. 7^th, 1 pm – 4 pm or Wed. Dec. 10^th 6:30pm – 9:30pm

Yay! Letterpress cards and tags from the most recent Ladies of Letterpress swap!
two Canadian presses, one Australian pres and a bunch of American presses.

Recent photos

Albert is working on a design for a large-ish post card to advertise the studio !

New Birthday cards for the shop.

Student's lock up on the Craftsman Press.

KOZO Studio!

Lines of metal type set (and about to be re-distributed) by a student in the ABCs of Letterpress class.

ABCs of Letterpress student tying up their form for storage until next week!

S. Printing on Cookie the Vandercook SP15.

Ugh! Time to put all that metal type back.

Broadsides set in metal type and printed on the Craftsman press!

Fall Workshops

Yay! I have posted the fall workshop dates! Thankfully Albert has agreed to teach some more workshops so both of us will be teaching and making use of the studio. To see the dates and details click on the tab at the top labelled 'Workshops'.

Now, here are some photos of the wee one that has kept me away from the studio for a while. That is her, below, napping in a photo tray at the studio.

She is very good natured but a bit demanding and loud. Before she was born I had the idea that I would be able to work at the studio while she quietly slept and would just have to take breaks from working for breastfeeding and diaper changes. That was what it was like with my first one! She was so quiet I was actually worried about her at one point! Apparently our first child was not a normal baby. Normal babies cry quite a bit and are a bit more demanding of your time. Not good for working at the studio. I also experienced Post Partum Depression which also wasn't great for getting back to work. My husband took time off of work and this summer I started going back to the studio a bit at a time. Life is a bit more normal and predictable now. Our newborn that cried normally is now 10 months old and now she chatters away non-stop. She even does this while she is sleeping! She is a joy and constant source of amusement to us and her big sister  and starting in November you will probably be able to meet her at the studio!

Working on it!

Not liking the way this blog looks. I'm bored with it! So, I will be playing around with it in the next few days. Please be patient. As many of you already know, I am not a computer person so it may take some time. Hopefully by the end of my messing around there will be information on what has been happening at the studio, the workshops starting in October, and some pics of my new-ish baby!

I leave you with a picture of a broadside created by my friend George Walker that he gave out a great dinner we all attended in at Gord Sisler's place. Yup. That's our mayor. 

Spring Collective Show

This Saturday May 24th come out and join us at the Spring Collective Show. It's curated and organized by a fellow East Ender! This is it's first year and is happening at St. Matthew's Clubhouse at the south end of Riverdale Park across from The Rooster Cafe on Broadview.
Paintings by Laura Hains, Inked Lily, Margaret Pring, Stace Schmidt, Darlene Swinton
Ceramics by Annette Hansen, Jewellery by Jewelust, Letterpress from KOZO Studio, Hats from Hats by She, Natural sodas from Savannah Naturals and more.

Lately in the studio

First off: new workshop dates for the summer have been updated! We're going to try and offer the Intro workshop on a more consistent basis.

In old news: these pictures were taken from a workshop in February (yes, there have been people working in the studio).

The students were attempting a 2-colour plate. We set up a different colour on the two Vandercook SP-15s we have in the studio.

Running purple for the poinsettia petals

Green for the stems and leaves

Going from one press/colour to the other didn't work out as smoothly as I had envisioned. I ended up giving a crash course on setting gripper bar paper gauges. Now they know how to rotate the sheet counter-clockwise by 1 degree.

Don't laugh, but the student's name is Mimi. Neither of us noticed the type was set backwards - but how could you with I's and M's?

In the end: success!

Look what I noticed when I was going through my old record collection! I had never really taken note of what the cover image was for this Stiff Little Fingers album when I was in high school. Probably because I wasn't at all familiar with letterpress yet!

:)

Back in the studio

The studio has been pretty quiet over the holidays but we're slowly getting the presses humming for 2014. Let's shake the dust off the type, oil the presses, and get some printing done!

There are new workshops scheduled and we're in the middle of an "advanced" type-setting course. Pictures of the students' work will be posted soon.

Can you spot the typo?

Here's a lock-up of some 24 point Alpha-Blox on one of the Vandercook SP-15's at the studio. Alpha-Blox was a modular system created by American Type Founders that allowed a compositor to create a variety of designs and letterforms with a set of discrete shapes. This is the linear set; there is also a reverse set. Combining the two creates opportunities for some really abstract imagery.

Alpha-Blox are fun to play with mostly because all the sorts are square. So a lot of the headaches that come with setting metal type and locking-up are avoided.

-Al (studio assistant)

Don Black Linecasting in PRINTERESTING

Here is a nice little article about Don Black Linecasting. My letterpress candy shop!
I usually organize a trip out to Don Black Linecasting for students that I have taught in the past year. Becuase of our baby (I'll talk about that later on) I haven't taught all year but my studio assistant Albert has! I haven't talked to Craig yet, but I'm still hoping to bring some of our students out there for an introduction in the spring. Many of my past students have loved the place and bought presses and all the fixin's from them.
Look around the Printeresting site as well. I love this site!

Don Black Linecasting « PRINTERESTING