Whole lot of letterpress poster printing fun

 

Fiona and I held a halfday (morning) workshop at DEP on Wednesday for four women from one of our local kindergartens.

The idea was to print a large poster (76cmX55cm) using wood type. The plan was to print words that reflected the ethos of the kindergarten.

After some workshopping of words and inspecting trays of type the decision was made to all use the gorgeous almost 100 year old Italian wood type - about 150mm high.

The photo below is of me talking with the group - but in reality both Fiona and I did the teaching-guiding. The group gave their approval for phos and this blog.

As you can see from the proof below it is always good to check your bs and ds. We had a bit of an issue with the capital K - it was a bigger font - different thickness - probably carved by a different workshop all those years ago.

The inking up was a joyous time - including a bit of play with mixing colours and playing with purple stripes at the end. All hands on deck!!!

We printed a couple of originals of the poster. We had intended to print some A4 poster; but ran out of time. So instead we had fun printing tea towels. Great photo of the stash of posters and tea towels and the printers.

I hung the tea towels on the drying rack today - the letterpress ink on the cloth (linen-cotton) will take a few weeks to dry.

The sun was steaming in about 2pm today which made for interesting light and shade patterns..