Still chasin'

I had my penultimate letterpress class this week. I felt confident that I could print on the press and looked forward to having something in hand as I left that night.

However, given that even the most simple designs can become complicated, I spent the entire class wedging small pieces of paper and metal between the arrow heads of my type in order to "lock it up" in the chase for printing.

The -->-->-->-->--> pattern on my design was made with m-dashes and the letter 'v' on its side. Because the m-dash is a hair bigger than a 'v' on its side, I had to fill in that space so none of the type would rattle around or (horrific thought) fall out while in the press. It seemed manageable until it came time to lift up the chase and poke around at the letters. That's when my arrow heads would slide around.

My instructor suggested using tracing paper to fill in the gaps. So I cut tiny pieces of paper and fit them in with a tweezers, a task that took a ton of time and even more patience. Locked up the quoins (metal pieces with springs in them to apply even pressure to the type on two sides), and tested again. More wobbling. I did it all again. Wobble. The instructor tried. Wobble. We tried it with copy paper, cutting, tweezing out the other paper and tweezing in the new. Then tweezing in the metal pieces that fell out. Locked. Wobbled. Instructor tried. Locked. Wobbled.

Ugh.

It was so frustrating to spend the three hours in the studio just trying to squeeze metal letters together. When I left my neck was all tight and my head hurt. I can't go to open studio this Friday to try again because we're going out of town, so I have to wait until our last class to get this thing locked and loaded for printing. And I WILL. THOSE ARROW HEADS WILL BE MINE.-->-->-->-->