thursday

28 Jun 2007 in journal

hi there ~

i just finished taking a three-day workshop taught by the people of yee-haw industries from tennessee, hosted at pyramid, and it was great. we had three days to produce a three-color print, using a combination of type and linoleum blocks and just generally exploring a bit the world of letterpress and its’ possibilities.

the hours were hectic – class started at 9:30, we usually worked through lunch, and all three nights i stayed until 9, 9:30, even 10 pm one night. but i learned a lot and managed not to cut off any of my fingers, hooray. i was the only bleeder at all in the group, twelve students total, which was kinda surprising considering we were cutting linoleum blocks every day for hours, but i’m not surprised i was that one, if there had to be just one.

most of the people in the workshop came with an arts background or were graphic designers, and so they had pretty good ideas of what to carve and how to do it, but i was brand new at all this. i’d done some stamp-making with erasers, and that helped, but still that first day i was mumbling a lot and sucking on my cut finger. such a whiner!

at the end of the workshop, we had enough prints that we were able to exchange them with each other, plus a copy for the teachers and a copy for pyramid. in total, i carved three blocks, set a whole song to type in 12 pt. font, mixed up my own colors, set up the vandercook press, making sure the registration was correct, and even managed to not get inky fingerprints over all of the prints – just most. !

in retrospect, i wish i’d squished all my work together a little more, so that some more stuff overlapped on each other and just had a lot less white space. also, i’d like to have a border or a nice background color or something to kind of define it all a little bit better, but all in all, i’m really proud of what i did. the song is jonathan richman’s ‘don’t let our youth go to waste’, the baby-flower image – one i’ve loved for years now – is from the farm’s midwives, and the uterii (!) images are from an old 70s copy of ‘our bodies, our selves’. ..i can’t believe i carved uteruses! but once i thought of the idea, it just wouldn’t leave my head alone until i’d done them already. and don’t you think they look a lot like steers’ skulls?! ha. anyhow, i love it all.

happy thursday ~ ~

p.s. i’ve finally started on my quilt – strips and squares are cut, now i need 41 circles. ack.