Today in the studio
Printing some new fabrics for cooler-weather scarves and cowls.
Levigator Press
News
New in the studio
Tote bags in progress! These beauties will be ready in time for this weekend’s show at Walkerville Brewery (click here for details)
Levigator Press at Walkerville Art Walk & Rock this weekend!
Friday, July 4 and Saturday, July 5 I’ll be taking part in the Luv Local Makers’ Market at Walkerville Brewery as part of the annual Walkerville Art Walk. Luv Local opens an hour earlier than the rest of the Art Walk on Friday night, so it’s a great place to kick off the event (while enjoying some of our fine local beers). I’ll have some brand new work, so if you’re in the area, come have a look!
Luv Local hours: Friday, July 4, 5pm to 9pm
Saturday, July 5, 11am to 5pm
Walkerville Brewery, Windsor (map)
Downtown Windsor farmers market
Levigator Press is teaming up with Mercantile 519 this summer for a few local events, starting with the Downtown Windsor Farmers Market which opened its 2014 season this past Saturday morning. We’ll be there again this weekend (Saturday, June 7) and then will be back there every Saturday from September 6 until the end of the Market season. Check out the Events tab to see all of our market dates, and keep an eye out for other events we’ll be announcing soon!
A few pictures of our booth from opening day:
photo courtesy Nicole Drouillard/Mercantile 519
The market was bustling with around 40 vendors present, up from 15 at the previous year’s opening day. The morning was warm and sunny, the food was delicious, the shoppers were all lovely people with handsome children and adorable puppies. It really was a perfect market day.
Levigator Press debuted a new line of summer scarves in woodblock printed, lightweight breezy fabrics. We’ll get a few posted to the Etsy shop this week, but if you’re in the Windsor area, come see us at next week’s market!
Today in the studio
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:
Women’s Work event at Canadian Club Brand Heritage Centre
On Sunday, May 4, Levigator Press will be taking part in a charity art show at Hiram Walker’s Canadian Club Brand Heritage Centre in Windsor. Here’s the event information, lifted from the Windsor Star:
Women’s Work: This event is just in time for Mother’s Day recognizing work made by the hands of women. It’s a celebration of traditional craftsmanship and fine art, Sunday, May 4 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Canadian Club Brand Heritage Centre, 2072 Riverside Dr. E. Enjoy whisky tasting, cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, live music, raffle and silent auction. Proceeds to benefit Hiatus House. Tickets are $25. Call 519-973-9503 ext. 205. Email info@canadianclub.com.
Hiatus House is an organization in Windsor that provides support for families dealing with domestic violence. It’s an important resource that’s worth supporting.
Plus, there’s whiskey! And Levigator Press will be set up right in the sampling room. I hope some of you will come by and say hello!
Studio update
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.
File under: unfinished
(cross-posted here from my personal weblog)
Here is another project abandoned around 1998 or so, recently rediscovered.
It’s an embroidered panel designed for a small book cover, for a book roughly 8 by 10 centimetres (3 by 4 inches). Somewhere in the attic is the book it was intended for, probably about 6 signatures of 3 folios each, sewn on linen cords, rounded and backed and trimmed, with endpapers sewn in and board covers laced on, naked and waiting.
The cover’s design is based on 16th century embroidered bindings such as those found at this link. The vertical floral motif in the centre is designed to run down the spine, and the horizontal gold bands will line up with the ridges formed on the book’s spine by the tapes the signatures are sewn onto.
Like every abandoned project in the history of forever, this one was entered into with loads of enthusiasm and worked away at like gangbusters for a good while. And like every abandoned project, the fun parts (outlines, filling in the tiny sections of colour!) went quickly but the promise of a beautiful finished object shone more dimly, from further away, once the tedious background-filling was practically all that was left. Add to that a growing disappointment with the low contrast of chosen colours and this pretty thing was doomed.
Will it ever get finished? Hard to say. The base fabric isn’t nice enough to just leave unstitched, but the dark blue is deadening. It should be picked out and replaced with red, or pale blue, or pink. But the thought of picking out embroidery stitches from a 15-year-old dead project isn’t an enticing one. The book would probably have to be remade as well, since after 15 years in a box who knows if the covers are even on straight anymore.
For now, this little panel is out of its tin work-box and pinned up onto a corkboard in the studio, where it can act as a reminder of every creative failure ever. Also, because it’s pretty to look at.
Bookbinding workshop at Mackenzie Hall
For those of you who missed out on the Longstitch Binding class last year, we’re running it again, this time through the City of Windsor at Mackenzie Hall Cultural Centre (3277 Sandwich St West in Windsor).
Here is the course description:
Beginning Bookbinding: Longstitch Binding (106607)
Longstitch is a European method of bookbinding in which folded sections of paper sheets are sewn directly through a soft or rigid cover to create a staggered stitch pattern on the spine of the book.
Materials and an instruction kit are provided, and you will leave the class with your very own completed book!
Date: April 22
Time: Tuesday, 6:00pm-9:00pm
Fee: $26 / 1 night
You can sign up online at reconnectwindsor or register over the phone with your credit card by calling 519-255-7600. The deadline to register for this class is Thursday, April 17, so hurry!
studio update
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!