When we were looking for a studio space we wanted there to be plenty of
space for letterpress printing AND plenty of workshop space. One of the
things we would love to be actively involved in is running workshops for
younger people to both get them interested in books, but also to help
develop hand skills which we think are disappearing with the computer.
So, on Thursday, March 27, 2008 we did a bookmaking workshop with 3
tensomethings to see if we could keep them interested and how well we
could communicate.
This is Jill setting up to make pastepapers. We weren't sure how much
we could accomplish between 9:00 and 5:30 but we wanted to give the whole
process a try. The first two hours were devoted to pastepaper so we could
have something to wrap the bookboards with for the final casing in of
the books.
We have a pretty nice supply of acrylics so each of us got to mix
up two colors that we liked.
This is about two-thirds of the way through the pastepaper part.
We were trying a new mechanism to let them dry by laying them over PVC
pipe which worked great. One of the things that is fun working with a
young crowd is that they tend to be pretty fearless and just jump in.
There even got to be a bit of painting, in this instance by Lucie,
which could make a killer set of book covers. It is easy to imagine having
each do a painting of a historical figure which might be part of something
they were doing in school to connect school work with real things. We
will give this a run sometime soon to try it out.
Once we got the boards for the cover finished Emma figured out which
would work best for the front and the back.
An Oreo break got the creative juices flowing.
Karlene was really paying attention to Jill showing how to get the
text block centered between the covers.
Emma working on glueing her endsheets to the bookboard.
Lucie had her endsheet technique down quite nicely.
Once they were all glued they were pressed for about 30 seconds
to get the architecture around the spine nice and tight.
Emma goofing around with one of Lucie's paintings.
Karlene got everyone involved to sign the opening page of her book so
she should be able to remember the day for years into the future.
The three with their finely crafted books.
The opening page of Karlene's book showing the colophon we printed for
each book. The nicest element is in the upper left of the page which says,
"This is not machine made."
