Sunny days

We have been enjoying some beautiful sunshine for the last few days - the garden is bursting with greenery! It's lovely to sit outside and have morning coffee, rather than staying indoors.

The lilac in the garden has bloomed, and smells wonderful. Tomorrow I'm going to pick some for the house. Well, actually Jon will pick them since it requires the use of a step ladder (I am not to be trusted...).

The postman has had some lovely things for us over the past couple of days -

Some pretty type from Devon (more to follow too - hooray!)...

And a box full of leather offcuts for bookmaking from the Midlands - lots of black, as well as dark brown, tan, cherry red, dark green and a nice foresty green, and navy blue! We're looking forward to making some new journals with it all over the next couple of weeks. Although the leather will probably be enough to keep us going for several months!

We've also been busy printing reduction lino cuts - they should be finished by tomorrow afternoon, so we'll post about them once they are finished.

In the meantime have a look at our Etsy treasury here. Jon's ordered his gown for graduation this week - he gets to wear a bonnet, no less.

Enjoy the sunshine!

Happy New Year!

We are starting 2009 with lots of ideas about using our Adana prompted by the arrival of these little beauties from Father Christmas....

Rollers!! No more careful hand inking for us! The Adana needs a bit of TLC - the springs for the rollers are a bit stiff from lack of use but hopefully we shall soon be printing with proper rollers and using the ink disc for the very first time. Hurrah!

We are also looking forward to the eventual arrival of the Model press - it might be a few months yet though, because the rollers need recovering and we have to find a home for it here (we need to do a bit of spring cleaning and chucking out first...)

Here is an advert for the Model in a copy of 'British Printer' from the summer of 1902...

The magazine came with the press, and has some beautiful adverts! The other page just visible in this shot is the 'situations vacant' page with various adverts. My favourite is this one -

'Engraver wanted for Artistic American and View work; must be competent man and able to make his own sketches; exceptional opportunity for first class man.'

What about a competent woman?! Although I'm not sure you could call my engraving competent - perhaps Jon could have applied instead of me...

When we were doing the history of our house (built in 1894), we looked up the 1901 census to discover that the occupants were involved in printing and bookbinding too! Here's an extract from the census - click on the image to see it properly.

Harry Webster (aged 19) was a bookbinder, Lionel (aged 18) was an assistant compositor and Grace (aged 16) was a book sewer. We haven't been able to find out anything more about them, but it's quite nice to think that we have our press and type all set out in what was probably their bedroom.

Quite how six people managed in our tiny house I'm not quite sure - sometimes there barely seems room for the two of us!

Anyway, here's some nice decorative type that came with the Model press in a sweet little wooden box. We haven't used it yet - but we're looking forward to testing it out with those new rollers!

Woodman's Whippet Ale

Woodman's Whippet Ale, originally uploaded by deaconswood.

Goodness, it's been over a month since our last post - how remiss of us!

In our last post we mentioned a little surprise letterpress project we were working on - here are the results! We printed a set of beer bottle labels for our brother-in-law, James, for his birthday. Jon did a small wood engraving of a whippet for the central image, and we used Plantin 24pt for the text.



Here is the block (a 4x5cm maple block) and the type set up in the chase ready for printing.



We are both working on ideas for two large landscape relief prints at the moment, but its slow progress as this is such a busy time of year for us - we will post more details soon!