Journal

Since forever, I've tried to use paper over and over again. It makes good environmental sense, and financial sense. I'm not entirely sure where I picked up the habit, but I remember having a lot of used-once-use-again paper in the house, as well as the GOOSE (Good-On-One-SidE) paper tray next to the photocopier when I worked in an office. In the studio, reusing paper means printing on a sheet as many times as possible when doing test prints. The test prints all live in a drawer so that I can grab from the bottom of the pile and get new,...

The notebooks I've been making with our stapler are possibly the most perfectly imperfect things that we make. Their covers are decorated with the excess ink from print jobs. They can take as long as 3-4 months for the ink to dry completely. We don't always have them in stock, but when we do, they come in threes.

Moveable type is nothing short of magical. Every single letter started as a shape that someone designed, engraved, and then, for metal type, filled with molten metal in order to make a tiny new shape that can be combined with other tiny shapes to make words and paragraphs and pages and books. Above, there is a close-up of the lockup from this year's new year cards. Printers will immediately have noticed what was wrong. The experienced printers will have noticed more than one wrong thing. Did you see it? Bang in the middle, there's a bit of metal looks like...

In the great irony of life, I've rewritten the intro to this email about eleventy million times. I know the middle bit, and how it ends, I just keep getting stuck on the beginning. Now, this is ironic, because what I want to tell you about is how, in the studio, I love to just get started. I love to futz with physical things that I can see and touch. This very thing that's happening to me right now is exactly the reason why I love print. Print is real. You can hold it, touch it, and smell it.When I...