my cupid

When he was born, I had high hopes of designing and printing birth announcements for Marcus. But, really, what was I thinking? Any "spare" moment I had, I slept. Or ate. Or did laundry. Once things settled down, I started to think about announcements again and decided that it was too late for those. When this month rolled around, I thought Valentine's would be the perfect time for Marcus to introduce himself to our family and friends. So, when I had the energy and Marcus was sound asleep, I quickly handset a short greeting, set up the Adana, lay down some ink already mixed from a previous project and printed away. It felt really (really) good to get back on the press, even for a short time. I had enough sense to print these well before February 14th so that I could hand-finish them with slits to insert a wallet-size photo, handwrite short notes, stamp and send them off.

The sweet photo of Marcus was taken by the fabulous Ingrid. It was his first official photo shoot and three weeks old and he slept right through it. My sleepy Valentine.

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custom cards for Karol

One of my favorite things to print are custom cards. I love getting the chance to break out my wood and metal type for this type of creative. These were a special request from Karol, who wanted to commemorate the momentous occasion of becoming a godfather and to give his godson a card. Gavin is the little guy's name and has already been given the cutest nickname, G-man. Karol asked for the print to be in blue so I went ahead and ran the job with five different shades of it. So fun!

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sunburst stationery for PAL-SAC

I first became aware of PAL-SAC when I spotted one of their postcards at the White Squirrel cafe last December. I was so delighted to learn what they're all about and that they're right here in the city! I connected with PAL-SAC creator, Angel Chen, to talk about creating some stationery for the event. These Sunburst cards will be available at this evening's letter-writing event to support the continuation and expansion of PAL-SAC. They take place every second and fourth Monday of every month at the Naco Gallery. Keep a lookout on their site for other locations.

I really enjoyed creating these prints. The mustard yellow, black and grey cardstock are one of my favorite colour combinations.

I stayed up last night and watched the Oscars. Did anyone else watch the entire show? My favorite moments were Christian Bale's win, Cate Blanchett's gown, and Florence and the Machine's performance with AR Rahman. Good stuff.

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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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