Unquotable

Thanks to the great press in the Boston Globe, coupled with fabulous timing of post-holiday engagements and prep for June weddings, I've been very busy lately with quotes and proposal writing. This is just about my least favorite task (even less than accounting) and sadly, doesn't even lend well to blogging (no interesting photos).

Luckily, all of this work will hopefully lead to many really interesting new designs to print, which I always look forward to.



I just finished up printing some beautiful envelope liners for a couple getting married in Jamaica. The green World Notes pattern is such a lush, welcome surprise upon opening the envelope. Now to cut and assemble 299 more...

Let it snow

It's been some week.

The print count is hovering around 3,000 (not counting two-color runs, which puts it closer to 5000, or the 1000 business cards that I'll be printing tomorrow) all of which have been folded and packaged for selling at the fairs, which begin this weekend.

The shop is also undergoing a huge transformation (read, cleaning), painting frames and hanging things, organizing, tossing out scraps too small to use, hefting tables into new arrangements, and hiding everything else. All in prep for Paper & Chocolate. I wish I'd taken "before" pictures, but I'll certainly have "after" ones on Sunday.

There has also been busy-ness sewing a new table covering for fairs (bright sunshiny golden yellow), painting a new banner, and staining new display boxes.

Plus the regular ongoing design work (some exciting projects in the pipeline).

Oh, and in all the spare time allowed by 14 hour days I designed and printed some new coasters. So, while I swore left and right and up and down that I'd leave the Paper & Chocolate promo first on the blog for the rest of the week, I just loved them so much I was motivated to post anyway.







Though printed as coasters, just punch a hole and hang them as ornaments.

Packs of a dozen, four of each design. Get 'em while they're hot! Or while it's cold.

Miles of piles

My digital camera is broken, which is one of many reasons I haven't been posting much lately.

Rather, the camera's LCD screen is cracked, so I *can* take pictures, I just have no idea what they're of. Last week I finished reprinting nearly 2000 of the paper cut coasters and I just loved the way they looked all lined up and ready for packaging. So I took my chances (and about fifty pictures) and managed to get one decent, if not catalog-worthy photo.



Voila.

Time to sell some coasters so momma can get a new camera...

Arrrgh!

My apologies to anyone who has recently tried to access the website. The server has crashed, and various parties are in the process of both fixing the problem and figuring out what to do in the meantime. All intentions are to have the site up and running (somewhere) by the end of the weekend.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Secret Codes

After much hemming and hawing I've finally redesigned the website (I wanted to go sleek, chic and with some serious cheek). Okay, rhyming aside, web-geek friends have convinced me of the virtues of CSS (cascading style sheets) as opposed to bulky tabular html, and in hopes of a more streamlined site I've decided to take a bite out of the CSS apple.

Now, I'm a fairly proficient hand-coder (for non-webdesign people that means I write out the code for my website in text edit with no help from dreamweaver or any other webdesign software), so I figure, sure, I can learn this CSS stuff, right?

Right...

The concepts and theories I understand, but spending late evenings (after long days of printing and general business-ing) trying to make things look "just so" has me exhausted and totally flummuxed, and less convinced than ever that this is the perfect solution to all of my problems.

So, here are some snapshots of the site (as composed in InDesign) as I would love it to be. Yes, I can make this with tables, etc., but I'm still willing to give this accessibility/flexibility thing a chance. If there are any CSS whizzes out there who'd be interested in a little one-on-one tutorial, or perhaps a little barter for your expertise (letterpress printed business cards, anyone?), please please please: save me.



The home page. Left column a mini "Hot off the Press" with all the latest news.



The page highlighting the greeting card designs.



And of course, most importantly, where you can find our fabulous wares!

The rest of the pages are also "designed", but I don't want to give away everything before it's done.

I'm sure it goes without saying that all designs above are (c) 2007 Albertine Press. Steal the site and I'll hunt you down and sic upon you very very bad things.

bubble bubble toil and trouble

There is very little so satisfying as standing back and having hundreds of finished cards, cards you designed and finally printed, laid out just ready to be folded and sent off to stores.

It was almost the only redeeming thing to the horrors of last week, which was one of those weeks where just nothing seemed to go right. What follows is a list of the most major problems.

Iggy (aka the Warthog) was being a real beast. The platen took ages to adjust evenly, and then once it was, I couldn't shake a worrying clanking noise. The folks at Briarpress alternately think it's nothing and something awful. I've been instructed to listen with a screwdriver.

A locked up chase exploded while printing, spraying furniture into the press. You'd never imagine that a little piece of wood could bend a half inch thick piece of metal so dramatically. Luckily it's just the gripper bars, which I don't use anyway, so I can take my time getting it fixed/replaced.

Then, frazzled, I put the chase back in upside down. This lead to the destruction of two of my favorite guides and some irreparable dents in my favorite Boxcar Base. Doh! In my defense I would like to point out that it was a symmetrical polymer plate centered on the base which was neatly centered in the chase. This chase has now been painted on one side, clearly indicating BOTTOM.

Frustrated beyond belief, all printing switched to the Vandercook for the remainder of the week. She was far more compliant.

Still not finished - a set of wedding invitations I printed Friday and Saturday came out delightfully. Then I caught the date typo. The client had signed off on the design, but nevertheless it will need to be reprinted. On the bright side, I've got a nice addition of samples to my collection.

Those were only the PRINTING problems.

• our phone lines went down, and perhaps had been having problems for several weeks (verizon came and fixed it)
  
• the flood a few weeks back left a lingering mustiness in the carpets (carpet cleaners finally came, only evicting us for about three hours and leaving a whole new kind of wet carpet smell)
  
• I stepped out of my car into six inches of water in the parking lot (luckily I had one spare sock in the shop - I have no idea where it came from, or why there was only one, except that it was definitely mine, and it was dry)

Thank goodness for neat rows of finished cards.

Woes of Bad (property) Management

I was scheduled to have the presses moved over to the new shop tomorrow. I say "was" because at about four thirty this afternoon the state elevator commission shut down the freight elevator in the old shop's building for a code violation.

Evidently it only lifts 4000 pounds, when it should lift 5000 pounds.

Now what happens? We wait until some red tape is unwound and a variance is administered on that particular elevator to "re-certify" it as a 4000 pound elevator. I may be able to have a state elevator inspector come and supervise the move but who knows when one of these guys will be available on the same day as the movers.

I don't know what to do but sigh deeply and try to stop the pounding headache this has caused.