eleventh hour

As the sun dipped in the sky, I finished signing prints, stacking up 50 completed editions on the table and trying in some way to tidy up the mess I've created in the studio these past weeks. And then Anna, Tana and I ran to the lake and drank prosecco and swam (icy) and celebrated the fact that we made it! Good grief. We finally made it…

Home later today and I'm going to miss this place and its people so very much. It has been a treat to experience it all.

beast

The mild winter here seems to have left the tick population spirited and rife. We find them on the cats, on us, on the kitchen floor, in our supper…

Funny, but for this. Everyone's had it here - or got it. So you can understand why Tana has begun collecting the critters that she finds on herself and Zoey the dog and taping them to the wall. It's a grim memorial to the battle they all fight here continuously…

post

Found an amazing range of postcards in Rosendale on Saturday and have found that by photographing them, it becomes much easier to loosen my own grip on them and pass them on to someone else! Particularly the lovely people who have been looking after my cats or are feeling poorly at the moment…

ink + pressure

The folio printed - finally! Laura showed me how to make my own photopolymer plate and I printed the whole thing on a Chandler & Price (or platten press). So as the folio opens, the title is revealed.

Below - the next step. The pile of folios waiting to have u-flaps tipped into them…

 

three empty nests

Easter.

Felled.

Wasp.

view miscellany vol. i

them bleedin' corners

I have spent much of this week cutting out odd corner shaped pieces of book cloth (240 of them) to wrap around and glue into each of the two u-flaps that will hold the pamphlet in place in each folio.  I then spent almost two and a half days covering each of the u-flaps (120 of them). I still have about 35 to go. They take a long time.

While I've been doing this Anna and Chris have been working on the far trickier task of covering the main bases which the u-flaps will stick into. These are now finished and are about to be printed onto… 

Below you can see the stack beginning to emerge…

assembly

 

And introducing the production liners this week, from the top: Anna Haglin (our resident master bookbinding intern); Chris Petrone (studio director and problem solver extraordinaire); Cheyenne Mallo (an old-timer, my friend from last time and now WSW volunteer); Steph Bell (another old-timer, friend and volunteer (you may remember her scraped knees from my last trip…)); Monica (a new addition, a volunteer and very swift-fingered). And bryn mustn't be forgotten - no photo oddly, but she's been putting in late nights and keeping me entertained and just going after-hours. Lastly me and my favourite apron.

A busy week - but I think we may be on schedule. Just. Thanks to these folk: measuring, cutting, gluing, folding. Only possible to get through all of this with their hard graft.

blighters

It's these little blighters that caused all the trouble: the spines and hinges. If you've never made a hardbound book before it will sound like madness to say that it took us two whole days to get this sussed out. But we're there. As I sit here, I'm surrounded by piles of half-wrapped folio board and stacks of 'u-flaps' drying. It's 11pm and I've put in a 14 hour day folding cloth over awkward corners and wiping glue up and down my arms to keep if off my copper folder and so my precious book cover.

We're getting somewhere but it could still be tight.

More soon.

so where was i? vol. ii

So this is the final version. This is what we have to make 60 of. A rather beautiful, but troubling (it gets marked easily) grey-green cloth with a grey-beige lining. Picks up all the captions on the prints and in the booklet really nicely.

in the studio vol. i

So amazing to arrive at the studio and find people already being industrious on your project…

Boxes filled with the physical results of digital files sent flying through the air between England and America. Drawings and notes and lists and paper samples pinned to the wall. And all for my project. 
Wow. I am so flattered.

so where was i? vol. i

So a little under 6 months ago, this was where I was at. Trying to work out the design of the portfolio that would contain all my prints and my booklet. The above pictures were taken of the mock up that Chris made. We shimmeyed around all over the place, trying other ideas. But I always returned to this one as the one I liked the most. So this is what we'll be spending the next two weeks trying to make 60 of - with much help from Anna, Chris, Bryn, Steph, Cheyenne, Tara, Tana and Lindsay. 

Different colours, but essentially the same format. We're just out of the trouble shooting phase now - and have finally made a near perfect final dummy.

The production line commences this week…