It took me a little while to find this sequence of photos, but here is Lily making paper in October 2012 (she was 5 years old at the time) and jabbering away as she does it. In the third frame she is kissing off a bad sheet and just loves saying so!
The paper Lily is making is about the size of a business card, using a mould made by Brian Queen and a deckle I made to match. The pulp was what we used for the keepsakes for the Watermarks 2012 Conference in Cleveland.
For the Watermarks 2012 Conference held in Cleveland in October 2012, we made a keepsake to be included in the bundle given out to all contributors. This conference was held jointly by Friends of Dard Hunter (FDH) and the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists (IAPMA).
The keepsakes are 5×7” handmade sheets letterpress-printed on both sides. The pulp consists of raw hemp fibres rinsed clean and beaten two hours in our Valley Beater blended with some cotton linters pulp. Printing was done on our C&P press using handset type.
We have the luxury of staying with relatives while in Ottawa, so we ended up driving home Sunday (the day after the fair). Between the traffic around Toronto, Lily wanting to stop either for food or a bathroom break, and me feeling too sleepy to drive for a while, it was a long drive home. Audrey drove for a couple of hours so I could snooze for a while, but as my truck is a lot bigger than the VW Golf she usually drives, she was not enjoying the 401. It was a nice (20°C) sunny day with the A/C on the truck not working, making for a rather hot drive.
We bumped into George and Michelle Walker, also heading home from the fair, at one of our many rest stops so we sat and talked for a while, a nice respite from all that driving.
Anyway, we made it home fine around 7:30pm, got our personal belongings unpacked from the truck, and made sure we had everything ready to get Lily to school the next morning. We will unpack the merchandise from the truck and return it all to its shelves sometime today.
Well, here we are at the Book Arts Fair organized by the Ottawa Valley chapter of CBBAG. If you read this early enough we’re open until 4pm today at the National Archives building at 395 Wellington Street in uptown Ottawa.
Last year at the American Typecasting Fellowshsip Conference Jason Dewinetz mentioned that he had a Ludlow Supersurfacer with a broken clamp spring.
The Supersurfacer is used to smooth off the surface of slugs cast on a Ludlow, which is essentially a manual linecaster: You put together a row of mats and cast an entire line of type as a single piece. If you are casting large sizes the cooling and hardening of the metal produces faint lines on the face of the type, which in turn show up on the printed page particularly if you are using kiss impression. The Supersurfacer is essentially a surface mill with a carriage specially made for holding the Ludlow slugs and removing a tiny amount of metal, leaving a perfectly smooth surface.
There is a torsion spring which helps hold the slug clamped in the carriage, and the one on Jason’s machine was broken. I have a Supersurfacer (even though I have no Ludlow) so I offered to try to make him some replacement springs using the spring from mine as a model.
This is the spring from my Supersurfacer with most of the grease and grime cleaned off. Overall the spring is about 1” diameter by 3.5” long.
After some experimentation I made an arbor and determined a winding pitch that would produce a similar spring. I wound them on my Myford ML7 lathe and had to play some tricks with the carriage feed gearing to get the pitch I needed. A wire bending jig was used to form the eyes at each end of the spring. Finally I plated the springs with nickel to match the apparent finish on the original spring.
The bottom one was the first try. Some hesitation in winding made the spacing come out uneven.
They don`t look identical to the original but they fit and work in my Supersurfacer, and I`ll be sending them off to Jason in the next few days.
Most of the dirt on our Thompson platen press is a mix of dust, lint, and oil which can be removed with a soft brush and a vacuum cleaner.
However, the ink fountain suffers from years of encrustation of dried ink. Although in normal operation the ink should stay in its reservoir, sometimes some of it creeps over the edge of the doctor blade and gets on the adjusting screws, where it eventually hardens making it next to impossible to adjust the screws to get the desired ink flow rate. It does not help that they have knurled heads with no provision for using any sort of wrench on them.
I have disassembled most of the ink fountain as much as I can, but was only able to remove one of the adjusting screws. I will now soak the body and adjusting screws in paint remover, which I have also found to be very effective on dried ink. I will have to repaint the fountain when I am done but it should not be difficult to match the rest of the press, which is pretty much a flat black.
I find it interesting that a press made so soon after WWII should have the occasional aluminum part in it. In particular, the delivery table (but not the feed table) and the cover for the ink fountain are aluminum. I would have expected aluminum to be in short supply compared to cast iron…
Now that the Anthology is out I can show you our contribution without spoiling the surprise. Overall it turned out nice, although I have 3 or 4 private critiques of my work. There were 135 copies of the Anthology produced, and each one would have unique marbled paper and various colours of paper for the inner leaf. By the way, the page size is 5.5×8.5”.
Over the weekend and up until sometime today we have been having trouble with the e-mail server that handles @papertrail.ca and @thinkage.ca e-mail addresses. Anyone who tried to e-mail us might have received a warning about delayed delivery or a rejection due to failed delivery. Things should be fixed now, so if you got a rejected mail message, please try sending it again.
We had great weather and a good crowd showing up, so altogether it was a wonderful day.
We actually drove to Grimsby the afternoon before the show, and stayed at the Beamer Falls B&B so we could be fresh and rested for the show. Before dinner we took a walk along a branch of the Bruce Trail which leads to the edge of the Niagara Escarpment overlooking the entire town of Grimsby. I finally identified a bird call I had been hearing for years as a type of woodpecker. We drove back into town to an excellent dinner at the Elm Street Café, after which I retired for the evening while Audrey lounged in the hot tub for a while. Lily, who finds Wayzgoose “boring,” stayed for a sleepover at a friend’s.
After a good breakfast at the B&B we drove to the Grimsby Public Library and Art Gallery to get our stuff set up. Unfortunately we were in the Carnegie Commons building (Grimsby’s original Carnegie Library) so we had to drag all our stuff up a flight of stairs, but the fair had plenty of volunteers to help. We got things set up and then the crowds came; business was pretty steady through most of the day, tapering off in the last hour.
After packing up, we had appetizers and a dinner as part of the fair, drove home, picked up Lily, and finally got some rest after a long day.
Audrey watching over our table at Wayzgoose.
The hot seller this year was our paper, particularly the marbled paper.
This is a slightly belated post, since Wayzgoose was yesterday, but I was missing one piece of electronica and could not retrieve the photos I had.
Starting to fill the crates. Each one contains a photo of what should be there.
For most of what we bring, we pack it in flip-top plastic crates. We chose these ones because they are the ideal height to fit the back of the pickup truck under the tonneau cover, and they stack well. The heaviest things we bring are books, and in order to avoid having one hernia-inducing crate we spread these out amongst all the crates, mixing them with other lighter items. To keep things organized, we took photos of a well-packed set of crates, and now use these as guides when packing.
We still have some optimizing to do, particularly regarding the books, as these fall into three categories. There are the used books for sale, new books for sale, and well-thumbed display copies of the new books for sale. The former and latter are placed in display racks on the sale table, while the stock of new books stays in the crate until someone buys one.
The crates are all filled now, ready to be closed up and put in the truck.
Similarly other goods we bring are only partly on display with the remainder used to replenish the table after a sale. As a result some crates have to stay open and accessible while other empty ones can be stacked to save space. By better arranging the books we would like to minimize the number of crates that have to stay open.
In addition to all these crates, we also have several boxes of paper and a couple other odd items, including a free-standing gridwall display stand.
Since we have another show next weekend, on our return home we will only be unpacking these enough to replenish what was sold.
