Wish : Process |
In the beginning, there was rag and ink and type.
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It starts with paper, made from linen and cotton. This is the most satisfying kind of recycling, taking clothes I'd never wear and making them into useful stuff again. The process of papermaking requires a release of control freak tendencies, because no matter how many times you've done it, the fiber can surprise you. Pulp fresh out of the beater is soft and wonderful, and it's still not entirely clear exactly what kind of paper it'll make. |
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Then it gets dumped into the vat, and the moulds come out, and the dance begins. (Papermaking is, among other things, like a dance. It's the shake, which is unique to the person and the sheet.) This is what you end up with, the post of paper drying under weights, while you watch anxiously and hope it doesn't curl too much. |
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The next thing is setting the type and prepping the press. This is 24pt Caslon set up in a Washington handpress. Setting up the handpress is an adventure, but well worth the occasional missed meal. |
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The handpress might look like a large, threatening bit of iron machinery, but it's refreshingly simple. After all, it's pretty much the original. |
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I did the printing 4-up, for a whole bunch of reasons that basically boiled down to laziness translating into efficiency. The problem here was that there were four upper-case Ws in this font and two of them were worn down too far to print. As you can see, I decided that I wanted to use this font and print 4-up badly enough to deal with a couple of wonky bits of type. |
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Once all the printing was done, and all the pages were cut to size, the stack became ... monumental. At least from the right angle. The white paper has two poems on it, and the other paper is all "wish." |
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Folding a thousand cranes is, surprisingly, kind of a major undertaking. Even with help. It looks pretty impressive in photos, though, which makes it all worthwhile. |
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For a little while, the strings of cranes were decorating the press - I probably should have left them there. |
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It wasn't all printing, though. I went through a couple of drafts for keepsake books, which was necessary for the program's graduation requirements. This one, which is a mock-up in newsprint, has two kinds of fold-out pages with text and image. It came out around two inches square. It was definitely my favorite, and if I was to return to the original form of the wish project, this would be the book I'd make. It got discarded for the thesis project, though, because it was "too complicated." |
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I turned to another kind of fold-out, this star concertina with hard covers. |
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I also tried a flag book, which would have been the final product for the thesis. This is the original mockup, which has some major flaws that were mostly addressed in the final version. |
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Accordion books are incredibly hard to get right. Seriously. |
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