Play day with Caren

We were thrilled when Caren Florance agreed to open our show - she is such a thoughtful and insightful thinker and writer around artists books and printmaking.  She is also an uber-talented letterpress person and of course I was in the throes of delight when we worked out she would be staying with us for a few days.

That meant I could get her into the studio and muck around a bit. Of course, what was totally the best thing about it was that I didn't only muck around - I learned heaps.

We had a morning to play and did quite well really.

I showed her this dirty old tray of type I couldn't recognise.  It was clearly a blackletter typeface, but I had searched my type books to no avail.

Not pretty this tray - it is next on my list for washing and cleaning during my spare moments.

We decided a really good project would be to try and print the type and see what was there - was there a full alphabet? What did all the letters look like? Could we discover what it was once we printed it?

But we started way back with the basics - the composing stick and measuring your lines.

I am pretty sure this is my hand given the hyper-extended thumb! I set the lower case letters.

Getting ready to pop the type into the chase and lock up. Also known as "make ready" this part is the part where it can take forever to get the type secure, pressure right etc etc. We faced a few dilemmas but solved all the problems and as you know, learning to solve problems together with an expert is invaluable.

Inking up - Caren even taught me a way of rolling the ink on a plate then applying it to the platen; you get much faster coverage this way - another excellent tip.

We did many many trials and re-set the tampen paper and actually completely unwound all the pressure off the platen, created a test chase to make sure we had even pressure across the whole chase as we wound it back in and when we got it right, I loved the result - here are all the 'characters' I have in this typeface - I love the extra ower case r where it has a drop; and the additional lower case h where it has a drop below the line as well. But really, the whole thing is just so elegant. Look at that lower case y!

Once we'd printed a couple of samplers, I then of course went to town!

I think I was most enthralled with pieces where I printed this rigid, formal, upright typeface over abstract calligraphic pieces - I loved the tension and the variations so much.

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No scrap of paper was safe from the whirling printing dervish I became. Whilst I was madly grabbing this paper and that, Caren was very kindly dissing some type into a type drawer for me - the perfect guest in so many ways!

And to finish before cleaning up, Caren let me video her tying up a type form. Very good. So this is what you do with type that you want to keep to use again, but in between you need to print other things in your chase.

A fabulous few hours in the studio with an expert, I think we should do it again sometime!