Print on this box!

Oh the joy of handmade box paper! We've been into making recycled paper from cardboard boxes during the past year. Donna just made this lovely stack of box paper that we are taking to the printer's fair.

Jessica from Springtide Press just sent us this gorgeous print that is on our box paper. Oh so yummy! We plan to have our box papers available for sale online in the near future.

Oh what a luau!

You would think we had one heck of a luau here with the hoards of pineapple tops we have drying out on our patio! The next papermaking project on deck for Donna and me is making pineapple paper. I tried to get Donna to festoon a pineapple top hat ~ala~ Carmen Miranda for a blog photo but she politely declined. We need to let them dry out before we let them rhet. Normally not a problem in AZ but this year we have been getting lots of rain from the monsoons.Hmmm...I just noticed all the pineapple tops are in boxes marked bell peppers! Regardless, we got heaps o' pineapple tops!

Pineapple tops make the most lovely golden and somewhat translucent paper. I can't wait!

Nature Papermaking Class

We taught nature papermaking last weekend at the studio. Donna and I spent the two weeks prior prepping fiber--chopping, cooking, rinsing & more rinsing, then beating it into a pulp. It really has a lot of similarities to industrial size cooking!
We found bamboo fiber to be tough as nails! We soaked it for a week and cooked for about 14 hours in lye and it was still pretty tough. We have it soaking in water still trying to soften it up!

We cook fiber in large kettles--I swear a watched pot never boils! We cook with the lids on but need to check them so they don't boil over.

A tangled mess only a papermaker could love! Once the fiber is cooked and rinsed, we "beat it to a pulp" in our beater. This is the plant fiber Yucca which is notoriously bad behaving--see the suds? It can be used to make soap! The first time we beat it at the studio it was like an "I Love Lucy" episode--soap suds were overflowing everywhere--in ginormous proportions! We had to move the beater outside, it was such a mess. This Yucca behaved and made only bitsy suds.

Well behaving Yucca!

Everyone concentrating on their deckle boxes.

Couching newly formed sheets of paper.

These folks made a ton of paper. Yay! It was worth all the cookin' & prepping.

Winter Blue Handmade Letterpressed Book

Since Mike put the kibosh on my printing three ideas at one time--i.e. talking some common sense into me, I still needed to get those ideas worked out of my head and onto paper. They just took different directions with different projects. I wanted to do a series of snowflakes with three ink runs over handmade blue jean paper--for a project with a them of blue--could you have guessed that? I made a plate with chipboard snowflakes that we die cut and glued down and made type-high.

Here's Donna on her maiden run on the Vandercook. See how her clothes coordinate with the project? It always seems that I'm wearing the color of ink I'm printing that day. I figure it's a biological mimicry strategy so if I get ink on me, then no one will know ;) We printed the front side of the paper with 3 colors and the back side with only the dark snowflake color. We rotated the paper each pass to get movement on the page in terms of shape and color.We started with the darkest color ink first and they went to opaque lighter inks. I love the tone on tone!

The last layer we printed wood type in white for the text--it's a cinquain poem titled Winter Blue. It was a long printing day with a couple of snafus during the day but near the end I was generally elated. I exclaimed to Donna--"We make a great team"! I thought so because we never printed together and it worked out so well.

"Not really" was her reply as she didn't miss a beat and kept printing. I almost coughed up a lung and totally burst out laughing when she said that--she has such dry sense of humor! She explained that snafus might not happen if we were a better team--or she had more experience printing. I think about every editioned project we do whether its papermaking, letterpress, bookbinding--sometimes it goes smooth as glass and other times snafus & hiccups are bound to happen--you run out of the right letters of type, there can be a last minute typo, the packing on the press changes, sheets won't form, glue won't dry, Federal Express is closing in 15 minutes, etc. You just have to adjust where you can while maintaining the original intent and keep on going. The final outcome is the reward. By the way, she is the best art partner!

Flora & Flauna Handmade Paper/Letterpress Print

This was supposed to be a book for a book exchange. It started out being a book that I was going to print than make into an origami fold. But the more I printed it, the more I decided to leave it as a simple print.
The handmade paper is an "ends of the day" paper--which means it is a combination of a bunch of natural fibers--cholla, palm pine, cotton, abaca and anything else we had in the pulp refrigerator. Sometimes that makes the nicest paper. I've been intrigued with bird images this past year, so when the topic for this exchange was Flora and Fauna, I decided to print the bird cuts with old wood type that I'm quite partial to. The key thing is that you have to be careful when printing handmade paper. If there are lumps or knots in it, it can actually break or mar your letterpress cuts or type. Mostly we try and print on smooth paper so not to run into this problem (we did that once with a handmade paper made with soft inclusions where we broke an "e" in a magnesium plate). But this paper was malleable and cooperated pretty nicely. Some of the old wood type had nicks in it so they show up but that just gives it character.

Because this was supposed to be book, I had to do a little book explaining why everyone was getting a print. Sometimes, I make my life crazy!

Pulp Fiction--Fuller Craft Museum

The Pulp Function show at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton Massachusetts has gotten great reviews, including one in the current issue of American Craft magazine. The show is ending on January 6, 2008 so if you are in the MA area, get out and see it.

I just ordered the exhibition catalogue because there are tons of really good artists in the show and I want to do a more comprehensive post down the road. A couple of people I went to grad school with are in the show--my super talented professor friend, Kerri Cushman and fellow artist Aimee Lee--congrats to both of you! Aimee Lee's piece is pictured in the American Craft photo spread. It's the paper brick wall on the far left. Go Aimee!

I was finishing the grad program the year Aimee was starting so I didn't get to know her well but I'll tell you the work that I've see this gal produce has been amazing! She is one hard working artist. I loved reading her documentation when she was building the brick piece for her thesis performance. I'm contacting her for a more indepth post about her work. So stay tuned!

Ah...the smell of freshly dried paper...

...it is almost like the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies...NOT! But after you make the paper, you are always crazy antsy to open the dryer the next day because you can't wait to see the paper! This paper is going to look luscious letterpressed printed in a warm chocolate ink. (the color, not the flavor :) Donna and I continued on our papermaking marathon today. We left the studio with pulp-y arms & legs as well as completely exhausted. Only a few more papermaking marathons days and we should have the paper part of this project wrapped up...then on to letterpress.