Our grand opening event was a huge success, with good crowds coming through the studio all day long, lots of interest in printmaking and the demos, and some lovely people signing up to take classes! Thanks so much to everyone who came out to see us or sent along your well wishes from afar. We’re overwhelmed, grateful, delighted, and exhausted. And super excited to get down to the business of making prints with all of you!
A shot of the shop during the last early moments of calm:
Letterpress demo:
Relief printing demo:
Our demo print: HEY. We printed this on t-shirts for some of our visitors. Can’t wait to see them being worn around town!
Special thanks to: Nicole Drouillard of Mercantile 519, who helped all day long by handling sales while I demoed and schmoozed; Leesa Bringas, who stayed up very late the night before helping set up the retail part of the shop; Eugenia Vlasova and Paul Phillippov of Weeded Words who made vinyl decals for our window and wall, as well as some sweet Levigator Press tote bags; my dear friend Monica Rock who helped with some of the gross jobs while getting the space ready, and who delivered the gorgeous flowers for the opening; and of course Peter, without whose support we wouldn’t even have this amazing space.
Yesterday my friends Eugenia and Paul came by and installed this lovely vinyl on the shop door.
You can see more of their work at their Etsy shop, Weeded Words. We’ll also have some of their work in our store!
And I built these four sturdy work tables. Some of them will eventually have glass tops for inking slabs, but as we’ll likely use a few for screenprinting, we’ll keep them without glass for the time being. They can be moved around the studio, which is great because I keep changing my mind about how I want to arrange the space. Better to keep things ready to be rearranged when the big etching press gets here in a few weeks.
We have been working hard in near freezing temperatures to get the new Levigator Press store ready for our grand opening event, which is less than a month away now. Here’s a look at the space we inherited from the comic book shop:
It was pretty dingy, with horrible carpeting, walls full of drywall plugs, and lots of heavy particle board displays to dismantle and throw away (many, many more of those low counters fill the basement).
We started with a fresh coat of white paint to brighten everything up:
And the accent walls, which were a yawn-inducing dark blue, are being painted this glorious colour:
On Friday afternoon the first coat of turquoise went up:
Still to do: tear out the carpet, finish painting the baseboards, and paint the floor with a beautiful bright red paint. We’re super excited about that red floor! And have enjoyed thoroughly trashing the carpeting before we kick it to the curb.
In my haste to finish up with painting for the week, I splashed turquoise paint across my already battered and stained 23-year-old painting boots. A little memento.
Levigator Press will once again be taking part in the FAM Fest fashion show, coming this Friday October 10 at 9pm. It takes place in the same location as last year, Venue Music Hall on Ouellette Street in Windsor.
CLICK HERE for information about FAM Fest
CLICK HERE to join the Facebook event
I’m hard at work in the studio preparing for the event: printing fabric, sewing dresses, knitting accessories, and preparing a few new surprises. Here’s a little peek of the printing that happened in the studio earlier this week, fabrics for skirts and dresses, and block printed t-shirts:
Finishing up some printed stretch jersey headbands for tomorrow’s farmers’ market.
Printing some new fabrics for cooler-weather scarves and cowls.
Tote bags in progress! These beauties will be ready in time for this weekend’s show at Walkerville Brewery (click here for details)
Bright new fabrics being printed for scarves, bandannas, and cowls. I’m hoping to get a few of these lovelies finished for opening day of the Downtown Windsor Farmers Market this weekend.
Today’s printing included red stripes, patterns of floating bubbles and blooming oil spills in graphite colour, and this lovely little seeded fruit block in my beloved Milori Blue, straight out of the can:
Wall mounted shelving installed = a clean work table!
The only thing left is to install mounts to hang the litho roller from the bottom of the shelving, and then this area will be all set for printing. For now, a load of fabric is being cut and stacked, ready to be printed for new bandannas, cowls, and a few surprises.
Next up in studio improvements we will move to the right of the window where the third and final wall needs to be scraped, patched, and painted, and a new shelving unit built and installed. Once that’s done there will be space in this room to finally bring the letterpress up from the basement, and the printing will resume in earnest.
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!
