on the bench: organizing

I do dearly love to organize...though in the studio, sometimes the piles just stay piles for months!  Wednesday was an in-between day, so I thought I'd tackle the huge stack of printed papers (printed in April!). First sorting by color and pattern, and then taking inventory.  All in preparation for this big event:

friday: oh, what a week

Yes, it's been a doozy.  It feels like this heat wave has been going on for weeks and weeks.  Years even.  The studio is thankfully cool, but just getting there is a chore in this heat...and then I'm not in much of a mood to work.

But today I really had to get things done:

Paper folding and scoring...

turns a (single-sheet) folio into a signature of its own.

Carving out an inset for a cover label

Lining up the pieces, in preparation for gluing

Sneaking a peek at my cover, making sure I've left enough room at the spine for my signatures.  I'm sewing up the book tomorrow, and will try to get some good pics to post--this should be a really interesting project!

Also this week--updating my sadly faded sandwich board with a fresh coat of paint, and prepping the stencil for painting next week!

on the press: start to finish

The thing about custom work is that you never really get leisure time--there's always a deadline, and by the time you get the plates and paper and envelopes back, I've got 24 hours until the client expects to pick up their job.  Yikes.  So the above is my work table at about 2pm, less than two hours after my UPS guy Randy dropped off the package from Boxcar.  That's paper diagrams, figuring the best yield, and piles of paper cut to press sheet size.

Then on over to the ink table, to mix a particularly picky pale green ink.  Usually I'm right on, but today--three tries to get to 7490.  That's three of this:

And this:

And this:

And three press inkings, and press cleanings.  And ten wasted sheets proofing colors.  And so finally, at 7:45:

Oh, and a run of black ink for the second color, too!

on the press: the perfect green

I'm really more of a red person.  That is to say, I print more often with reds and pinks--and design cards and prints for reds.  And then I designed this print, and had to find a good ink for it.

A color bright and springy, but not "new growth" spring.  Not too rich, like deep moss on bark.

The perfect green? Pantone 355U. (In my humble opinion, anyway.)