Open

I mentioned back at the end of April that I had spent a long time wrangling  a piece of letterpress work.

It was one of those times when I wanted to work with some of my own words.  I wanted to print some poetry/prose I had written, begun when we were last in Scotland.

Whilst we were there (and ever since really) I have pondered and on occasions struggled with the notion of home, of places that call, of landscapes that are so dissimilar yet make me feel the same. The sense of yearning I have for both places I call home - the big sky and the emptiness...

In part this work also came from wondering how on earth did we end up with a cottage in the remote Scottish Highlands?

The full piece is not yet complete, but it did take so much time I figured I should note it down now in case it never actually gets completed.

The work is called open.  Once again my suitcase is open and I wonder about the decisions that got us to this point.

The plan is that this card of poetry will sit within a folder which will also be letterpressed - still a work in progress that part.

The trickiness about this work that took me three days to sort, was that I did not have enough small size type to be able to set it in one go.

Then when I did work out how I could set it, I realised I could only print it sideways in the big old Lightning Jobber; but at least I could print.

I won't bore you with all the details, but rather than be able to print it in one hit, I had to set out what I could; print; remove and clean the type then re-use it in the next part. Print that (hoping to align properly) and then repeat.

Everything about it was tricky, even to the point of trying to tighten the quoins evenly and in the same sequence as the previous set so that they didn't push a line of type higher or lower than intended.

There were many difficulties. But we prevailed.

The words began here and went thru many an iterations.

Setting the first lot of the verse.

I ran out of "n"s, so to save type, I removed the final word points and ended with decisions in the final work.

The first 'verse' down.  I even had to create 'verses' as I went along in order to be able to print.

The second 'verse' challenged me again, and I thought to indent it, in case it didn't align or register properly.

And even then, I didn't have enough type to complete it.

And so to the third 'verse' (and the last two lines of the second).

I realised (at this late stage of the game) that I didn't have enough "B"s to do each of the lines  "Before, beyond and previous to." So I worked out I would need to delete one of the lines, and its reference.

This was the stage that proved to be absolutely beyond belief challenging.  I serious contemplated giving up thinking I must have been bananas to even think I could do it being so under-resourced with type and all the trickiness it entailed. But I was so close!

This is but two of the dozens of attempts to try and get the indented second 'verse' to align with itself, as well as the third 'verse' to align with it and the first verse.  Seriously what was I thinking?

In the end I succeeded in printing about 20 decent ones and that, quite frankly, astonishes me.

I learnt a lot of lessons from attempting this.  I have another one in the series to do, so at least I hope I learned something.

On the other hand, a part of me revels in the notion that I had no idea what I was taking on, and the kind of naivety that let me even set out from shore should probably be celebrated.

Had I thought, or known, of all the difficulties I may never have even begun; and yet I blissfully headed off and problem solved and problem solved and problem solved my way through it.

I say "I" but Barry was alongside much of the way as well and kept telling me not to give up.

"Nevertheless she persisted" has never been truer for me.