Happy Hour 4.18.11

Some photos of last week's fun happy hour!

Here's a shot of everyone plugging away at their various projects:

Steve experimented with hand inking some wood type:

Kathryn printed more of her awesome business cards:

And Jim re-set the Robert Graves poem he'd printed during the Intro to Tabletop class earlier this month. He printed it onto some wonderful handmade paper:

And unfortunately, I forgot to get photos of what Melanie and I were working on! Hope to see you next time!

In the studio...

Melissa and Anna, Pyramid's winter interns, were tasked with making some thank you cards. They made the paper and then printed the cards on the Vandercooks. Here's what they came up with:

This one will be sewn at the top. The back of this one (and most of the others) reads "printed with love by pyramid atlantic interns winter 2011":  

I think they turned out great, and I really admire their ambitious typesetting!

Become a member and you'll most likely be thanked with one of these!

Members Only Workshop

On January 28, we held our first Members Only letterpress workshop! This workshop was a part of a series of monthly workshops that are free to a limited number of Pyramid Atlantic members (registration is on a first-come, first-served basis). For our workshop, Leslie had the idea to have people scratch designs into negatives to create their own homemade polymer plate for printing on the Vandercooks.

Unfortunately, I was a little busy during the first half of the workshop and forgot to take pictures. Here are the few action shots that I did get!

I love Leslie's expression in this photo as she's making rounds checking on people scrubbing their exposed polymers:

And here are some photos of the prints that were made. We inked up the presses with Pantone Warm Red and Process Blue and had a variety of papers available to choose from.

A lovely heart design made by Melissa Livingston, printed on handmade paper:

Dawn Hershberger's design, printed on wheat-colored Canson Edition:

A really interesting design, also printed on wheat Canson Edition. I didn't catch the name of the artist:

Clare Winslow's space-inspired print, on handmade paper:

Gary Arlen's print on champagne Canford card:

Bonnie Lee Holland's print on French Muscletone Kraft paper next to her scratched negative:

A photo showing the three stages of Juraj Mihalik's design:

Marj Hollis's turtle. Originally, two of the flippers didn't show up because the lines were scratched too thinly on the negative. Luckily, Marj had time to go back and scratch a little more into the negative and make a second plate:

Morgan Ward's self-portrait on Stonehenge:

Here's the same plate printed on bright red Canford cardstock (though the photo doesn't really do it justice!)

Unfortunately, I wasn't quick enough to get everyone's prints before they left. But overall, I think everyone had a great time and came away with some pretty amazing prints!

More workshops:

• To be attend these free monthly workshops, you must be a Pyramid Atlantic member. Sign up here! The next Members Only workshop will be on Friday, February 25 (topic TBA).

• Check out the schedule of our other letterpress workshops here!