i heart my adana, quirks and all

There are some days when I feel like printing but don't look forward to the clean up. Though the C&P table-top is not as big of a press as a floor model, it's still a bit of a process to clean up. Especially with highly pigmented colours like black, blue and red - the last thing I want to do is spend thirty minutes on the rollers.

It's been a long time since I printed with the Adana Eight-Five. I broke it out today because the clean up doesn't take very long since it's a small press. The rollers are smaller, shorter and the ink is a breeze to wipe off of them. Because I'm printing with a straight black, I opted to print with the Adana instead of the C&P. Feels good to have these kinds of options in the studio.

Not sure if this is common with other small presses or if it's just with the Adana, but I find that after some time, I have to adjust the screws at the back of the press. In other words, I have to re-calibrate the press after a couple of jobs. It used to drive me nuts. I had some anxiety over the thought of it because you normally just want to calibrate it and it should be good for every job you run. Not so, not with my press at least. But things went fairly smoothly with it today. I made it easy on myself and only planned to use a small forme so the calibration was painless. A few quarter turns of the impression screws here and there and I was set to go.

I am printing on 10 x 3.5" cardstock and because it extends beyond the platen I had to use makeshift "pins". As you may already know, I don't use gauge pins to hold cardstock in place. Instead I use those handy photo corners. But because I couldn't use the photo corners in this case, I just used an index card. One cut and fold later, it acted like a shelf.

I could print them little black flags all day. Update to come on what these prints are for!

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