Thursdays are printing days here at PRESS and this past Thursday was my first time using the Vandercook! Jonas came in to help me (and practice his teaching skills for an upcoming workshop). Under his guidance, I picked out a quote, font, and some shapes from the woodtype and then sketched out a design for my print.  What I thought would be a pretty basic design with circles proved to be more challenging to set than I could ever have imagined,

since to secure everything on the press you have to create a rectangle. The first run was pretty simple with just one circle block in a light yellow color, but the second run with type and 8 smaller pieces set in a circle around it was more complicated. Thanks to Jonas’s expertise we ended up being able to make it work… And promptly ran in to the problem of dirty type! Since the type is older not all of it is clean and even pieces from the same set can be worn down differently. After several rounds of  cleaning and testing we finally
got a satisfactory product! I was initially shocked that I would be making so many prints (over 20) for just my first time but after all the work that went in to setting the type on the press I understood the saying Jonas introduced me to “If you’re going to make 10 you might as well make 100.”