catherine jepson: Skylab Letterpress Internship: Week 6

Day 17
First thing I loaded ink into a press, packaged up a run of business cards for shipment, and reprinted a sign that I made for a reminder when making plates. I got a plate put on the press to be printed with chipboard, and adjusted the pressure and impression. We had a bride come in to okay the progress on her wedding invitations. After lunch I worked on my project designs on illustrator which included cleaning up my hand drawn and scanned art and designed the logo of one of the business cards.

The labels I made taped onto the tins.

My reminder when making plates...

Illustrator in action.

The wedding invites.

Day 18
I made a plate for Bob then spent the rest of the day on the computer finishing the designs for my two business cards and greeting card. I also got the formatting and fonts figured out.

Day 19
I made the three plates for my projects as Bob was able to print out the film the night before. I selected the stock and got it all cut down to the appropriate size. I called a client in regards to her job and clamped a different run of business cards that would get edge painting.

Day 20
I started with getting the press prepped for the first color on my business cards. This included making sure the guides were straight, loading in, inking the rollers, loading the paper, getting the plate onto the chase, and making adjustments so that the plate would print on the paper straight. Bob was in the office working while I was running extra paper (a.k.a. 'make ready') through the press as I adjusted the ink to get it consistent as well as get the paper to feed without it feeding wrong and stopping the press. Two hours of tweaking and being slightly stressed, I finally figured out how to make the minute tweaks that Bob has down. After lunch, I got both sides of the cards printed. Afterwords, I cleaned up both presses for the next jobs, then worked on packaging up the recently edged cards. The last 30 minutes were spent blocking out parts of film the make a plate.Bob said it sounded like I was having issues in the shop in the morning and asked if I learned anything from being alone with the press. I said that it was indeed frustrating trying to figure it out; however, I learned valuable lessons that probably wouldn't have been learned any other way. It was hard! He said it's a learning moment for him as well as he now knows how valuable it is to let the intern have some time to be frustrated and figure it out.

Here are the designs for the business cards!