Taming the Beast

It's been a crazy week - loads of new custom jobs to print, a half dozen designs to finish, a surprise party to plan, and all before next Wednesday, when, for the first time in probably a year, we're going on Vacation (yes, with a capital "v").

I'm feeling very self-satisfied at the shop's latest experiment - coasters. I fired up the Warthog for the first time in about a month, since all those troubles and clanking clonking noises. A good hour re-adjusting the platen helped and printing was otherwise trouble-free. I had this deep deep eggplant ink mixed, leftover from I-know-not-what, which got slapped on the ink disk and away we went.



I like the color (and the picture doesn't really do it justice) so I've decided to keep it, and have developed a palette of other rich deep muted colors for five more designs in the series (teal, rust, dark olive, ruby). The designs are adapted from some old Chinese paper cut designs I found at a tag sale. I love their delicacy and balance.

(Secretly, I'm just as excited about getting the beastly press properly running.)

There will definitely be more coasters in our future... available soon for mass consumption on our in-progress Etsy site.