A quick dispatch from last Friday’s absolutely hoppin’ Open Print Studio:

I was supervising this particular evening, but fellow OPS supervisor, and rockstar intern Meredith Hudson-Redfield was there, too, and she brought her senior projects class from CCA.  She used her OPS press time to give them an introduction to letterpress printing.  They learned how to set type, watched her create a wonderfully complex lockup, and printed themselves some business cards.  They were constantly in motion, and therefore hard to photograph, but here’s their lockup, all set up in Narwhal:

Dorian, who is a stalwart volunteer at SFCB, and also over at Mission Grafica, was making some gorgeous announcements/postcards.

He used his amazing silkscreen skills to create the images you see above, and then brought them here to lay some text on top.  He’d tried printing the text in black, but it didn’t come out the way he wanted, so he was looking for a new color combination.  Silver, perhaps?  We discussed the merits and drawbacks of metallic ink at some length, and in the end, Dorian decided to go for the gold.  I don’t have a picture of the finished products, but they were lovely.

We were also joined by Kathleen Burch (SFCB co-founder) and John McBride, who were printing a quarto in memoriam of Ad Brugger, on behalf of the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco (a bibliophilic society of which they are both members).

Kathleen and John were printing on the Vandercook 219.  They had to negotiate quite a bit with the press to get both image and text printing beautifully.  Just goes to show, even SFCB’s veterans have to spend a little sweat (or a lot) on setting up their jobs.

Brian, another volunteer, was only around for about an hour, but he gave us this great action sequence on the giant board shear:

He was cutting down green mat board, destined for bindings he learned from Dominic Riley, including the Ideal Sketchbook and something with goat leather.  I just wish I could share the sound of the board giving way to that giant blade.

I used the tabletops to print a teeny tiny cowboy on the covers of some small notebooks made out of scraps from previous projects.

(Not actual size! The cowboy’s really about 4 picas square. That’s 2/3 of an inch!)

Last but not least, we were joined by Kathy, who recently completed her Letterpress Certificate.  Kathy was over on Beluga, printing two-color save-the-date posters for her wedding, making great use of our wood type collection.  Funnily enough, Kathy was also there last time I supervised an OPS, back in October… and she was printing the very same thing!  In their previous life, these save-the-date broadsides were printed in four colors (four colors!).  Kathy wasn’t happy with how they turned out, so you know what she did?  She scrapped ’em, redesigned, and printed them all over again.  That’s how you know she’s serious.

And boy are they beautiful.  Three cheers for Kathy & Gilbert.

In case you’re keeping score at home, the winner of Most Popular Typeface that night went to Huxley.  I believe it appeared in 3 of the 5 jobs printed.

Hope to see y’all at another OPS soon!