The drop seats continue

I have finished the first drop seat to calico! Yay! Here is it is in situ. My friend still needs to pick her fabric and then i will finish it off by covering in that, but the calico will do till then. I quite like it plain. So how did it get to this stage? Well here is where we left off. 

I had finished the webbing and filled the wooden frame.

The underside of the frame.

I covered the webbing in hessian.

Then i sewed the rubberised horsehair in place...

before covering with wadding...

and finally stretching the calico over the lot.

Trimmed and neatened.

And back where it should be!

Letterpress Galley Trays for sale on eBay

In case any letterpressers read my blog, I am selling five galley trays on eBay and wanted to let any interested parties know! They are from the massive pile of letterpress goodies I recently acquired and are all in pretty good shape, if in need of a bit of a cleanup.

The auctions end on Sunday, 6 November 2011 and all start at £0.99. Am happy to post overseas too.

Check the listings for more detail. You can find them here.

Letterpress luck

Recently, I have been the recipient of some amazing letterpress luck.

I received a call from a stranger offering me a 'shed load' of letterpress equipment that otherwise was going to the tip. To me, this call was akin to getting a call from the lotto people. I couldn't believe my luck. Particularly when i had been asking around about moving lead type myself and what this would cost to get started. Lets just say there was a bit of a financial barrier.

I am going to need to make a few trips to get all of this stuff home, but basically, so far i have another Adana 8x5 press, that i have cleaned up and looks like it should be in good working order, as well as boxes and boxes of lead type, wood type and other printing miscellany.

I am going to document here things i find as i go because i need some way of remembering everything i come across. And perhaps even to get a bit of help identifying some bits, as there are already a few pieces i am uncertain about. So you all better get your letterpress hats on cause here we go!

The back of the car packed up with the first load. My little car struggled with the weight of all that lead!

Cleaning up the Adana 8x5

Sitting in its new home next to my first press. They make a cute pair. It just needs some new rollers and i would prefer if is had a gripper for when i print. Lucky for me it is almost exactly the same as my first press so i have had something i can compare it to. 

Anyone know what these are?? 

Or what these are used for??

A bag of wood type that i need to sort.

Bags...

and bags...

and bags of lead type that i need to sort and identify.

Who knows what these blocks are used for? The base of each is dirty with ink from type from the look of it. 

Loads of quoins.

I think these are galleys?

Not sure what these bits are actually called, but they are for tightening and loosening the quoins and there are some tweezers in here for my eyebrows. No just kidding, i presume these are for moving the type around. I haven't come across a composing stick yet, which i think is a fairly vital bit of kit from what i understand, but hopefully there are a few kicking around in some of the boxes i have yet to unpack!

There is even some lino to make my own lino blocks with.

And finally some spacing blocks.

This will do for now - if anyone has any light to shed on any of the items i am unsure of, i would very much appreciate it, so please, shine away!

Kewpies

I am in love with Kewpie dolls and treated myself to a few of them recently. They remind me of the Easter Show when i was little. Did anyone else used to come home with a Kewpie on a stick? They usually wore a little ballet tutu with glitter instead of hair. They sat for years on my dresser.

Here are my new (but old), slightly larger Kewpies. Photographed with my iPhone 4, using a suitably retro filter from Instagram.

Too cute.