I apologize for being so scarce lately

I have a good excuse.

Remember this guy?

The one who helped us move all the letterpresses into our studio–even took the C&P apart for us and reassembled it? Well, we’re getting married–in two and a half weeks! We printed our own announcements and are finally getting them in the mail (eep!). I’m pretty thrilled with how they turned out. Pictures forthcoming.

So much to do! But so much to be grateful for and to look forward to…

In other news, I was recently hired as a “special projects bookbinder” for the LDS church. I start right after my honeymoon. Lots of change and busy times. I haven’t forgotten this blog, but I do apologize for being so scarce. Hopefully things will calm down in a while and I can get back to more regular posts…

Photos from the Studio Opening Celebration

(Click on images to enlarge and launch a slideshow)

We’ve been busy

Grand Opening Celebration is tomorrow evening! (Today, technically). I better get a few hours of sleep… big day tomorrow!

The Frontex is moved

I’m a little late getting to this, but all the presses are in the studio! My table is set up, and today I pared leather in my new studio. It feels great to have a space to work in again!

Here’s some photos of the Frontex-moving operation:

Loaded onto a forklift…

and onto the trailer…

Carefully driven over to the church (studio)…

Sadly, I didn’t get pictures of the most delicate part of the procedure: Getting the press up those five steps and inside the room. (I was too busy biting my nails). We had to get a forklift with a boom. We drove the lift over to the steps, and extended the arm into the room. (It just barely extended far enough… I’ll spare the details of how tricky it actually was). Then we had to move the press with a pallet lift across double boards to support the floor and keep the press at the level of the two boards where it would be placed. Anyway, here it is in its new place, next to the frame of the C&P and the Vandercook (since, then, Michael’s already put the C&P back together again! What a man!)

The studio is slowly coming together. We’re trying to do a lot with a relatively small space, but we’re thrilled to have the presses all together in once place, and as I keep saying, I’m very happy to have a space to work on my books.

I’ll post more as the studio continues to come together…

-Lili

Moving a C&P Letterpress

I have a friend who, over the past year, has acquired three letterpresses: A Vandercook, a Frontex, and a Chandler & Price. They are all in different locations at the moment, and she’s been eager to get them all into one space. She’s recently found a space in the basement of an old church in the Avenues in Salt Lake City. We’re excited about the location.

I have a vested interest in these developments, because I will be sub-letting some of the space so that I will have my own workbench for bookbinding. I’m very excited.

And so begins the moving of the presses. Here’s what we were doing last week:

Here’s the C&P before moving it. It was in a little room of an elderly woman’s basement (her husband had been a master printer and this was his at-home hobby press). There was no way the press was coming out without taking the press apart…

So here it is stripped down.

And here we are hauling the letterpress frame up the stairs.

It fit through the door, literally within millimeters.

Now to just get it into the truck.

We did it! Getting the press into the actual building went quite smoothly. The door was 5 steps up, but it happened to be the exact height of the truck, so we were able to just back the truck up to the threshold and slide the press onto a pallet jack. I don’t have photos yet, but I’ll be sure to check in as the studio continues to come together.

The new studio will be equipped with the three presses, a light exposure unit, a small book press (mine) and a large book press (loaned from a friend), a guillotine loaned from my boyfriend (it’s been sitting unused in a storage unit), a board shear loaned from another friend, as well as three large 4×8 foot community tables (as well as individual work stations). It’s enough to get started. Did I mention I’m excited?

One more book arts (ish) video

Gorgeous: Paper cut pop-ups are brought to life when images are projected onto them:

Commercial Bindery in 1947

I recently discovered a new book arts blog, (I apologize for the name of the blog–I’m really not a fan. It did make me laugh when I learned that the blog author is from Ireland, though. I lived in Ireland for a year, and um… I heard that word a lot).

Anyway, today (confession time) I spent a good hour and a half going through the entire archive. She’s dug up a lot of fun and beautiful stuff, it was inspiring going through it. Maybe I’ll share some of my favorites later. For now, here is a fun video of a commercial bindery in 1947: