Tools – Page 5 – Green Chair Press Blog

A Few Grains of Sand Save the Day

The other day as I was letterpress printing cards from photopolymer plates, I noticed a small ink mark toward the edge of the paper that shouldn’t have been there. I quickly discovered that the bottom corner of the plate was curled thus picking up ink and printing on my card! My usual remedy for this problem is to tape down the offending corner and if that doesn’t work, to cut off the curled piece of the plate.
But what to do about the already printed cards? I remembered a trick my friend Laura Jane taught me — the errant ink can be removed by gently rubbing the paper with a bit of very fine grain sandpaper (I used 320 grit). Whew, cards saved!

The Cult of Gocco

One of the nicest parts of the Book Jam last Saturday was chatting during the slow times with the book artists’ at the table adjacent to mine, Kate Godfrey and Nikki Thompson. Nikki produces books using hand-set type on a letterpress as well as with her Japanese-made Gocco printer (a small screen printing system). Throughout the day, I over-heard Nikki describing her Gocco and how it works to visitors and then end with “but the machines aren’t imported any more and it’s hard to get supplies”.
My knowledge about Gocco printing is pretty limited — it’s popular on Etsy to make cards, prints, housewares and t-shirts. And in one of the first issues of Ampersand that I edited, Nicholas Yeager explains how to use a Gocco printer to etch images in metal. (The owl to the right is a Gocco produced print by Bernadette Sipkes that’s hanging in my house.)
So imagine my surprise on Sunday when I opened the New York Times Sunday Magazine (of all things!) to find an article entitled The Cult of Gocco: How the end of a product turned into a publicity event — and maybe, a new beginning. It seems that an artist named Jill Bliss started the website SaveGocco.com to do just that — create enough publicity that would inspire the Japanese Gocco manufacturer Riso to make and import the machines again with a letter writing campaign.
From poking around on the web a bit, it looks like they’ve had some success, as more and more stores carry both the machines and supplies. Here in San Francisco, Arch is now importing and selling machines & supplies. Online Paper Source and Wet Paint Art sell machines. The Japanese-based Etsy sellers Print Addict Japan, Felt Cafe and good-ness will ship supplies and machines to the US. Nikki says she buys her supplies from Welch Products. And there are yet more dealers here.

Nifty tool: Japanese Screw Punch

I teach letterpress printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book. In my class this past week, we printed these holiday gift tags, complete with a hole in the upper corner for a ribbon or string.

To punch the holes, we used a lovely simple tool called a Japanese Screw Punch (it’s also called a Book Drill or Paper Drill). It cuts through multiple pieces of paper, and even thick stuff like mat board or davey board. Holes of different sizes can be made by swapping out the bits. The advantage over a hole punch is that you can position it anywhere on the paper, not just the edge, and there’s no guessing — you can see exactly where your hole will be placed.
Japanese Screw Punch
They are available online from Bonnie’s Best (with 7 bits for $70) or Wilde Ideas (1 bit, $40, with 6 bits, $81) or Vulcan Arts (punch + 9 bits, $75).

Spiral Binding

Renz wire binder
Yesterday I spent a pleasant hour or so binding a new set of my Reader’s Diary books. Many of the books I make are sewn together with needle and thread, but this one uses a wire or spiral binding. It’s a 3 step process: punch the holes for all the pages and the cover using the machine, insert the spirally wire in the holes (machine doesn’t do that), and then press the wire loops closed (the machine helps with that — I stick the book in a slot in the binder and pull down on the shorter lever to apply even pressure to the spine).

I use the binding machine at the San Francisco Center for the Book — it’s great to live so close to a place with lots of equipment I can rent when I need it! Especially this one. I looked into buying a wire binder, but even the low end models are awfully expensive for the amount of use it would get. Tina Kay, who teaches workshops in using the binder, pointed out to me that the cheaper models only bind a fixed sized spine (usually 11″), and I would definitely want a binder that allows me to vary the spine size.

Screen Printing

My husband and I own several vintage Porsches, and he belongs to a hot-rod Porsche club. My friend Tracey and I became members this year but the t-shirts that are available for club members start in men’s large. So I started looking around for a way to make two small women’s sized shirts for me & Tracey. I’ve made iron-on transfers in the past, but they feel heavy and tacky when I’ve applied them to fabric. I toyed with getting a gocco printer, but they are more money than I want to spend. Then on the Etsy forum, someone mentioned PhotoEZ, a method for creating a stencil using sunlight & tap water that can then be inked onto fabric . The crucial thing for me was that it allows you to make the stencil from a laser printer output.

Here’s the stencil that I made

EZScreen Stencil

And the first t-shirt (making the stencil was easy; I need practice in applying ink–Tracey’s shirt is much more evenly inked)

tshirt

There are three videos on YouTube explaining how to use the stencil kit: