I want to tell you about my workshop yesterday, but first I must give you a little background story.

Once upon a time there were these two printers, Harry and Sandra, a husband and wife. They were trying to come up with a way of printing interesting looking textures for backgrounds on books and broadsides using stuff that printers, and non printers, have around the house. They weren’t making a lot of progress in their effort. One day, after working tirelessly at their experiments, Sandra went up stairs to take a nap. While she was napping, Harry had a moment of inspiration and created a plate using acrylic gel medium, plywood, muslin, and odds and ends of stuff from around the house. When Sandra woke up and discovered that Harry had made a great breakthrough, she was furious at had having missed out on the moment of brilliance. As a tribute to his wife and muse, and to keep her from killing him, he named the process the Sandragraph. That is what I learned yesterday and it is awesome.

First off, I have to say that working with Steve Miller was a real treat. The man knows his shit and somehow manages to be very humble about it. For being so incredibly able and confident around a print shop, he still manages to be incredibly patient and helpful to the totally letterpress unfamiliar. I felt very grateful and honored to get the chance to learn from him.

I won’t go into too much detail about the process, so as to not bore you to death, any more than I already do, so I’ll be brief. The long and short of it is that you coat a pice of birch plywood with acrylic gel medium and stick objects that are thinner than a dime to it. Once your items are placed, you coat them with a bit more medium and lay a piece of muslin over the whole thing and stick that down to the front and sides of your plywood. You can add more medium for texture if you want. Then you let that dry.

I used a bit of string, some crinkled paper trimmings, and half of an old 45rpm. Here it is in all of its glory:

While my plate was drying in the sun, we went about setting some type. We were told to set 1-3 words that were important in our lives right now. The words “work” and “cookies” immediately popped into my head, so that’s what I set. Once our type was set, we took a 20 minute lunch break, and then started printing our backgrounds.

When you start out making your plate, you think it is going to look one way. When you print it, it looks totally different than you had expected it. 99% of the time, it’s better than you could have dreamed it would be. The goal of the workshop was to print an edition. I ended up with two editions. One large and one small. My large edition is of 14:

My small edition I ended up printing twice and only did 4 of those:

Overall, I felt very pleased with myself. It was a very unusual, productive, and generally, good day. It didn’t hurt that everyone agreed, including Steve, that my print turned out the best. For him to say that about my print made me feel like I actually do know a thing or two about printing. Sort of confirmation of my abilities at using an archaic printing technique. Not bad for a potter who’s studying biology, right?

Well, today isn’t looking like it is going to throw me anymore life affirmations, but it can’t rain everyday. On my plate today is writing an article and doing laundry. Maybe some leftover pasta and a little reading time later this afternoon. Maybe record a Date Night with Zaxxon. We shall see.

I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend. More soon. ~SC