a typecast tour

we took a tour of my letterpress teacher's studio today, and i think it's safe to say the entire class was smitten. so many beautiful, beautiful machines and a really cool space. (i think i could have spent hours in there just taking pictures.) we got to test out one of her platen presses (which she affectionately calls "big boy") and print some coasters. and while you fear for your fingers the first time you give it a whirl, it actually ends up being a lot of fun. and much easier than the vandercooks we use in dolphin press. if only we had had something like that to help us with all of our registration issues on the previous projects...

calling cards (part two)

we critiqued our calling cards in letterpress today, which means i got the ones that claire made for me! such a fun little swap. grid. yellow. lowercase letters. italics. i'm happy.

here are my inspirational pictures that i passed on to claire as she was designing them. these were definitely just the tip of the iceburg of a pretty full folder on my desktop, but totally a top ten for the moment. (or eleven.)

letterpress is a lot of work

but these babies are finally done! the assignment was to make postcards baltimore related... i had to go with sports. the stadium images are photo transfers (my thumbs were raw from all that rubbing...) and then the print is using the wonderous photo polymer. one lesson learned after a day in dolphin: never guillotine a fresh stack of prints. even if you think they're dry. bad idea.

hammer time

matt mcnary from hammerpress visted mica today, sharing work, wisdom, and being our tim gunn for a hammerpress inspired workshop in class. the prints hammerpress makes are pretty awesome. and after attempting to channel their aesthetic during the workshop, i have an even bigger appreciation for the forethought that goes into how they select type, assemble all that ornamentation, and layer color. plus a surge of inspiration and motivation for our next letterpress project (a postcard about baltimore)

here are some of my favorites from their website:

calling cards

our first official letterpress assignment was to make calling cards. one catch. they couldn't be for ourselves. (drats!) but i actually turned into a really fun way to work on something. we all paired up with someone in the class who we didn't already know, and who we weren't a lot alike. (which was determined by an enneagram test our teacher had us take.) i got paired up with a girl named claire. and it didn't take long in our designer to client/client to designer relationship to find common ground. (mustard yellow! and an aversion to capital letters.) she had the brilliant suggestion to send each other some pictures that inspire us. (favorites from the beloved folder pretty much every artist has on their desktop for dumping the things that catch our eye on the web.) here's the assortment she gave me:



funny how just a few pictures can say so much about a person's aesthetic. (claire also hinted at a growing obsession with old wallpaper patterns... which is where the border pattern on the card above comes from.)

i'm never typing on a keyboard again

it's official. i love letterpress. and i love that we learned how to set type today by watching a vocational video from the forties. so good.

no more knots!

yesterday, with freshly combed hair and an open schedule, i took my stubborn self to sprout in hampden for a hair cut. the stylist, a bit appalled but extremely forgiving, took three inches off and sent me on my way... so long as i promised to start combing. (yeah, right.)

and proof that the right thing, no matter painful it may be, really does always pay off... i was able to head over to atomic books afterward and purchase this super cool letterpress book (the cover says it all, it's beautiful) with none other than mr. john waters himself standing in line in front of me. wild.