Levigator Press

A lot has been going on around the Levigator Press studio, although it hasn’t been very photogenic. While the long term plan is to renovate our currently unfinished attic into a new studio, it’s a ways down on the home improvements list and so, in the meantime, it’s time to get the spare bedroom, into which the studio has been crammed, into shape. Since there’s no space to empty out the whole room, it’s been a drawn-out game of moving furniture, painting, building, moving furniture, repeat.

First order of business: the studio table was about fifteen centimetres (six inches) too low for comfortable printing, so I built a set of risers to lift it up. The wall behind it was patched and painted a nice crisp white (you can see the hideous mauve the room used to be at the left of the image below, and at the bottom of the window). At the same time, I’ve been slowly removing the same mauve paint off the original window trim and baseboards. That’s a long term project we’ll chip away at over time, since it’s nonessential. Here is the table up on its risers:

And now the flat paper storage shelf fits beneath it, freeing up enough floor space to eventually bring the letterpress up from the basement.

The wall to the left has now been patched and painted as well, and the sewing machines have moved over to the wall opposite the work table. This afternoon we’re building a wall mounted shelving unit to fit in the space above the work table, to hold inks, printmaking equipment, bookbinding tools and supplies, and the studio books and manuals. Next after that is a wall mounted hanging rack for the litho roller, and then I’ll finally be able to get back to printing even if the rest of the space is still a shambles!