Our friend Nicole Drouillard of Mercantile 519 visited the studio today to do a bit of letterpress printing. She’s getting ready to move to Michigan, and wanted to print up some postcards to send out to notify friends of her change of address. She made this simple print in blue and silver on four different colours of bright card stock, with tiny maple leaf and star ornaments to signify her move from Canada to the United States. Thanks Nicole!
It’s been a quiet week in the studio but I got to give an impromptu midday bookbinding lesson today. Thanks Bev!
These sweet little journals measure approximately 8.5cm x 10cm x 2cm thick (3.5 x 4 x 0.75 inches). They’re small enough to stuff in your bag and sturdy enough to stand up to a good deal of travel and enthusiastic use. The exposed spine is sewn with a combination of the “Coptic” link stitch and a climbing woven stitch, and allows for the book to lie fully open. They feature a mix of reclaimed papers for the textblocks, and are covered with colourful press proofs from our studio.
These are fun to make, and deeply satisfying for an artist with a bad case of horror vacui.
You can check them out in our studio, or here in the Levigator Press Etsy shop: Levigator Press on Etsy
Sometimes I get so caught up in teaching a class that I forget to take photos. That’s what happened in tonight’s fun Coptic Bookbinding class, so you don’t get to see the final results! Here are a few shots of student books in progress, though:
Tonight’s printing:
Here are a few images of our lino printing students carving their blocks in tonight’s class. Next week we print!
We had an order for some of these large Coptic link stitch sketchbooks, and made a few extra for the shop. They’re 8.5 by 11 inches with 96 pages (48 leaves) of heavy weight paper suitable for drawing, collage, or for holding photos. The books will lie flat when open. There are only three, so drop in soon if you want one!
Today we received a lovely gift from the former publishers of the Essex Free Press: a small selection of this gorgeous wood typeface. It’s the last bit they had left, just enough to keep printing NO TRESPASSING signs for farmers. We’re pretty sure we’ve seen a few of these signs out in the county, and we’ll be looking out for them now!
I’m sure we’ll get a lot of good use out of the many anagrams for NO TRESPASSING we can come up with:
We just had our final class of 2015, another session of our Block Print on Fabric class. Once again we had four friends sign up for the class together, which was a fun way to end the year. Here are a few images of their printing:
Our friend Jennie was in the studio today pulling some first proofs from a series of adorable hipster animal linocuts she’s been working on. There are many more in the works, but you’re going to have to wait a bit to see them. But trust us, they are SO GOOD.