2 small books

To get making momentum going again I recently completed 2 small books that have been in the back of my mind for a long time.  Both have originated from pre-printed materials.

The first was as a result of receiving some beautiful seed packets - thank you Mr Fowler!  They were so good just as they were I wavered for a long time considering how best to utilise them in a book, but finally their intrinsic packet qualities won out and I decided to keep them in their intended form and play around with words instead.

The finished book is a collection of 4 seed packets tied roughly with garden string.  Each is rubber stamped with the details of a different seed type: Hope, Despair, Change and Success, including when to harvest and what to plant with.

Seeds

Rubber stamp printing onto paper seed packets, bound with garden string 

70 x 100mm

edition of 5

£8

The second book is a follow up to a book I made last year A Series of Small Admissions.  As time has passed I have considered the pile of unused tickets and kept a note of fleeting thoughts and realisations that fitted the criteria for this concept 'A concertina book of tickets, each revealing a small personal admission on the reverse, in proportion with the scale and transient nature of the ticket'.  The hardest thing has been not to include or admit to anything too big!

A Second Series of Small Admissions

Rubber stamp printing onto paper tickets with card end covers 

53 x 34mm

edition of 25

£4

Both of these new titles will be available at Plymouth Artists' Book Fair, or by contacting me (email address on side menu).

News from the print room

In August the press went off to the press doctors, and came back with a some fancy new spots to help me reset it level in between jobs.  I think the real lesson was that I need to be both more patient and more organised when I print - not something I'll find easy with my 'let's hammer out a few prints before teatime' ethos. Also, it may just be that some of my wooden type is not going to be great on this kind of press, will have to test it out and see.

And test it out I did! After an invigorating LENvention 2 meet up, creating and printing in a group of 9, I felt inspired and shamefaced into having another go, absurdly choosing coloured ink to do so, but stuck to one typeface and had more success this time.

Since then my caseroom has expanded from under the spare bed (what do you mean that isn't where everyone keeps theirs?) and spread out onto the landing alongside my press, print rack, typewriters and other essentials, thanks to some donations and the odd bit of internet shopping - old type wrapped up in brown paper and string is the best isn't it?

I've been using some spare time this week to try and get it all organised, which feels a little counter-intuitive as really I wanted to spend the time printing, but being better prepared will get better results - I hope!