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| Thank you card by Monkey Chow |
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| Letterpress Thank You Card by BiMPRESSED |
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| Origami Paper Crane Thank You card by Sarah Coyne's Egg-A-Go-Go |
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| Merci Danke Thanks Grazie Card by Zoetropa |
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| Elk holiday card set by Cricicis Designs |
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| Boston Handmade Member, Jen Tang models one of the Boston Handmade T-shirts |
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| Detail of the educational tags that come with each Boston Handmade T-shirt |
On November 28th the best holiday gift arrived to our family - our new baby Naomi. About a week later the best new baby gift arrived from two classrooms of 2nd graders at St. Peter's School in Philadelphia courtesy of my dear childhood friend, and amazing teacher, Jessica Kulick.
Every 2nd grader handmade a beautiful card and wrote a heartfelt letter of "advice for a good life" to our new baby daughter. I am so grateful for all the letters we received and for the great advice (in fantastic handwriting!) such as:
If you didn't see the wedding proposal live on The Martha Stewart Show, and you didn't see our blog post, or our many tweets, let me be the "first" to tell you: Crystal Hanehan is getting married! That's the good news. The news that's sad for all of us here at Boston Handmade is that she is leaving us and moving to New York state this spring.
The paper garland coming together.
Jessica and Crystal folding up the garland as an accordion.
I'm a big fan of tediously cutting patterns out of paper by hand with an exact-o knife. My business cards are tiny hand-cut envelopes that hold stickers. I cut all my note cards with an exact-o knife as well- I've never even owned a paper cutter. But I have come across a great little machine called the Silhouette SD- a digital cutting tool that is so precise, and so easy to use.
Although it won't replace my exact-o knife, I find playing around with it pretty fun. What it does is connect to your computer like a printer, but instead of ink cartridges, it has a little blade that cuts text, or silhouetted images or patterns, cleanly out of your sheet of paper. It
even cuts into cardstock. The great thing about the Silhouette machine is that it's a lot like a
die cutter, but it doesn't require the physical die- which are expensive and hard to store. Because it's digital, you have an endless supply of shapes to cut- whatever you can imagine up. The machine works with it's own computer program which grants you the ability to
use drawing tools (although not on par with Adobe programs) to make shapes. Even better, you can drag in your own images and vectorize them right in the program.
I've been having a lot of fun having the chance to play with the positive/negative space in cut paper. Here are some of the first things I cut out and photographed:
I found the machine at the PaperSource but most of the components, like replacement blades and cutting mats, are available online at the Silhouette web site. They even sell vinyl with adhesive backing! I recommend checking this tool out if you're crafty with paper and want to try out something new.
gift tags set by a little hut
Oh Tannenbaum by crackeddesigns
Twist is a fresh kind of fair, showcasing original goods and art from 60+ talented vendors. Twist is held twice a year, in May and November. Save the dates for an exciting feast of shopping and fun!
Location
Northampton Center for the Arts
17 New South Street
Northampton, MA USA
When
Friday November 12, 2010
VIP Reception 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Gen Admission 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Saturday November 13, 2010
10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Admission
Adults $4.00
Kids (6-12) $2.00
5 and under FREE
First I had to cut down paper. I chose to print the images on sheets of Revere Suede 100% cotton paper which comes in 22 x 30 inch sheets. I had to cut each down to 4 x 22 inch strips on a giant slide trimmer. This took about 45 minutes.
Next I had to set up the form in the press-bed. This is usually the most time consuming part of the process and takes some planning, measuring, and troubleshooting. You start with an empty press (above) and must arrange everything between "furniture" which are varying sized pieces of wood and metal to "lock" the form in tightly so nothing moves when printing.
After an hour or so the form was "locked" in. Then I mixed red ink and put it on the large metal roller which disperses the ink to rubber rollers beneath called the form rollers.
I aligned my first sheet of paper into the grippers (those big circles) and the image was inked onto the paper. But I still needed to do more adjusting.
My image printed too light. Which meant I needed to add another layer of "packing" to the tympan, which is the yellowish paper on the feed cylinder. After some tweaking I managed to get a decent print and ran all 80 sheets of paper in red.
Then the ink needed to be cleaned from the press so I could switch to printing in brown and blue. Cleaning the press is my least favorite part. It takes about 20 minutes and a solvent must be used because the inks are rubber based. We use Citrus Solv which is slightly less toxic then the more standard California Wash.
Then the process is repeated for both blue and brown inks. Though the form basically can stay the same with different plates being switched out in the new colors.
In the end this took about 6 hours to complete, with a short break for lunch mixed in. That was about 2 more hours than I thought it would take. But letterpress is full of surprises and challenges so I always take longer than what I anticipate.
