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Thursday 21 August, 2008

The final product

This was my first proof. It took about 5 hours to set and then, behold! I had a forme with perfect tension (tension is very important in letterpress printing. In fact there is so much talk about taut formes and tensions it's downright erotic sometimes. Or perhaps that's just me). Anyway, I had a perfect forme but there were, as you can see, typos. Quite a few of them. (Did you know the phrase mind your p's and q's came from letterpress?). So then I had to go back in and fix them and alas, my spacing slackened in some imperceptible way and when I tied everything back up it was either too tense because I overlocked, or not tense enough. This might be why I struggled to get the inking on the final product even enough. There was also a patch in the centre which was fainter - though we built that up with tissue. See below - the k's were a particular problem. It could have been fixed in the end but it was a workshop and we'd been working on it for 20 hours, so it was time to go home.

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