New book-ets underway

 I am working towards the Scotland exhibition as well as the Pebbles, Stones, Rocks exhibition and I am juggling the work and moving between the two quite a lot.

Part of my pebbles exhibition work is about pebbles and stones and grief.  I have written three small poem-like pieces each called Grief Is A Stone and have been underway choosing papers, cutting pages, cutting covers, setting type, printing, changing out type, embossing covers and generally getting all the bits ready so that as some point I can stitch them.

What a surprise - I am working with a soft grey cover (Magnani Pescia Grey 300gsm) which I have embossed here for the first book-et.

Inside will be beautiful soft Japanese paper followed by the title page, opening to the poem, and the back with my name and the press on it, followed by the other part of the soft Japanese paper.

They will be in a small edition of 15 each, but I always need to prepare a few more pages in case of stuff ups. Here the Title page for poem 2 and my name are printed; on the other side the poem will be printed. Apologies for the 'soft' focus, aka out of focus.

Here are the pages of poem 1 drying

And here I am mid-way in the changeover from poem 1 to poem 2. I leave all the blocks and lines in the same position, just replacing the type and spacers as needed for the new lines. It is sometimes funny if you get interrupted and wonder which poem you are up to when you return.

Here I am switching out poem 2 to poem 3 and trying to not have the type all fall out and make a huge mess!

Some of the drying racks in use - interspersed with some of B's printing of small cards.

Before I re-set the type I had a 'what if?' moment and printed each of the poems on some nice sturdy pre-cut cards, just in case I want to do something with them as well...

Here are the titles, with the poems on the other side.

It has taken a lot of work to get this far, but there is plenty more to do once they are dry.