Tomorrow, September 18, is Letterpress Appreciation Day. The date was picked because the standard height of wood and metal type is 0.918 inches. And that’s got me thinking about my own press and how I use it. It’s a competing mix of new (designs & plates made via computer) and old (a 125 year old, treadle operated machine printing the design). My fancy ink jet printer is less messy, smaller, more forgiving, more flexible, and above all less tiring to use. But it won’t print coasters, or white ink on black paper, or die cut. So even though I could use more room in my shop, I like (and need) my press for those special things that only it can do. (The picture is some coasters I recently printed.)

Our biannual exhibition opened Friday Sep 4th and the reception is this Friday, Sep 18 from 4-6pm. If you’re in Santa Fe, it’s at the Rotunda near the plaza. My book Persimmons is included in the show.

Probably the task I dislike most is taking pictures for my shop and website. Getting the thing I’m photographing lit evenly, making sure the colors are true, finding just the right angle… My letterpress prints and collages have proved the hardest to get right, because the lighting is so important (needs to be lit evenly from top to bottom and left to right). I’ve accumulated quite a mass of gear too — lights, a tripod, white cards to reflect light, a little light box. That light box has made photographing my matchbox books a breeze, but doesn’t work well for much else.

This week I needed a photograph of my workshop. A very different challenge from product photos that show the viewer what they are buying from all angles but an interesting shot that encapsulates what I do in my shop. Another challenge was that the resulting photo had to be about 3 times wider than tall. Most of the stuff in my shop is tall, not long. I tried a lot of test shots with my phone camera, and then my husband suggested I was thinking too big and should try a close cropped photo. He helped me stage my spiral binder with all the things I use to make my planners & notebooks. Here’s the result.

Lyndsey Green‘s full-size animal illustrations are featured in this tiny (2″x2″) concertina called The Tiny Book of Tiny Animals. She says it has “8 of the world’s smallest animals illustrated by me and printed roughly life-size to show how incredible they are! This includes the world’s smallest bird, mammal and vertebrate. One side shows the animals with some facts on the reverse.”

Creative play comes in all forms. I have a craft robo pro cutter that has been quite an inspiration for me. I started using it to cut out the pop-ups in my books (the first one was a miniature abridged pride & prejudice). I design the cut-out in Illustrator and then send it to the cutter (like you would to a printer). It not only cuts, but scores. Once I figured out how to use it and design for it, I started experimenting with matchbox books because it was a snap to make the matchbox container.

More recently I decided I wanted some sort of repositionable page marker for my planners and notebooks. What could I do with the cutter I wondered? I had a lot of thick clear mylar in my paper drawer, so I started with that. Worked pretty well, but the feedback I got was that they needed to be colored and maybe weren’t thick enough. After a long fruitless search for thick colored mylar, I bought some samples of vinyl that was sticky on one side. My idea was to laminate the vinyl to the mylar, but that proved to be a mess (couldn’t get it to go on without a zillion bubbles). So I tried laminating it to paper—both sides. That worked much better. If you buy a planner, now you can get a page marker too. See an example in the photo or here.

Dani Fox posted these 2 nice photos showing her process for preparing the spine and the finished leather notebook on her instagram feed. Her feed is here. Her blog is here. And her website is here.