Shift Happens

It's that time of year when One Must Print a Card, if you have the means to do so. When my studio was in storage, I'd make cards using Letraset, like this one (how good is that vintage card stock!):

I don't make Xmas cards because I loathe Xmas. I think I've covered the reason why in my 'Enough' post. 

I make 'not-Xmas' cards, and this year I had fun using an italic wood type font inherited from the Wayzgoose press, silver ink, and three different paper stocks: thick white European paper, mustard-yellow textured cardstock, and thin handmade Bemboka Paper Mill stock in a salmon colour. Here's the variants:

A lovely thick paper that I only had in a few sheets -- an end-of-pack from a Wayzgoose Press (WP) book production, I think, because it was folded into landscape pages

Same silver ink on the Bemboka Mill handmade paper. Is shinier than it seems here. 

Single-printed on this great WP textured card stock, again, with only a few sheets left. 

Double printing, with a small shift to make an echo. (See what I did there?)

You'd think that I'd have done that double-print on all of them, but because I'm a bit buggered from a big year of Everything Happening All the Time, I only hit upon it by accident towards the end, and because it was metallic ink, it only really worked if the 'shadow' (or ghost-print, because it's achieved by not re-inking the type) was printed first and the inked print was then added on top. So there was a bit of shuffling things around, printing a batch of shadows, then inking up and printing the top layer in a batch. Yeah, stick with me kids, I'll give you all the tips. 

I was doing this all by hand-rolling, by the way, because I haven't spent any time getting the various presses set up. They really need a good day of aligning rollers and checking the press beds. In fact, I printed my whole October Gallery M16 exhibition work* using handrolling (I'll probably write up that experience on Boxing Day when all the kerfuffle is over). It's laborious but I quite enjoy the rhythm of hand-inking. 

The Bemboka Paper Mill paper is a new thing in my life -- Bemboka is a small country town just up the road from my town, and at one point it had the paper mill AND the Indian Head Press, a private press run by legend Richard Jermyn. Now it has neither (although RJ is still printing not far from me, further south), and the paper was hard to get for ages. Suddenly now I have quite a lot of it, gifted by a lovely old cartographer in Canberra, so I'm planning some projects. It comes in four colours: salmon, grey, a pale blue and a pale apricot. It's a bit variable in thickness and quality but by gum, it's local paper and I'm a local printer so I'll do something with it. 

Anyhoo, it's dinner time, so have a lovely seasonal season, and I'll be back soon to write about fun seasonal things like Gun Control and Australian Political History. Because that shift needs to happen. 

* Corridors of Power, at M16 Canberra in October 2025: a collaboration between myself and poet extraordinare Melinda Smith