Playing around with words and flowers

In those in between and random moments I have been pondering what it would be like to have some of the key words in the Women Friends poem printed on a large sheet of paper.

Using our beautiful century old Amalia wood type from Italy, I worked out how many I could get, given the limited number of letters in a fount.

Half way through I remembered we had lower case as well!

So I set them up in the large proofing press and inked them and rolled a few out.

One thing about century old type - it is all a bit variable in its height. As you can see, the lower case m on the left gets hit very early and a number of the other letters must be a lot lower and they barely get contacted at all (INE in shine, l in melting).

Before I invested a significant amount of time into properly proofing the words - checking heights, building them up, trying to get everything evenly inked and evenly heighted (a personal made up word), I thought I should just sit with the pages a while and se if they were going to be of any use anyway.

The second run was better from an inking perspective, but the height issue remains.

So today I cut them down a bit, to see if they might work as backgrounds, then I got distracted by needing to do some prep for next weekend's workshop, so I didn't photograph anything beyond this! Soon I hope.

On another note I finally pulled the threads out of the tibouchina dye pot.

Remember this splendid colour?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. I got nothin'.

Isn't it all an amazing experiment???

So as you do, I grabbed a few more heartsease flowers, added them to the original heartsease pot and threw these threads in there to see what might happen. Still waiting to see.