Better late than never

Finally this past week, I made my 2016 Calendar and Day Planner.
Originally I wanted to use the leather bound mock up I'd made for a different project:

But figuring out how exactly to do that was baffling me.  The mock up was just to see how the boards would attach and so I didn't pare the leather the way I should have and I just couldn't get past that.

I wanted to use the case in the same way I've been making my magic travel journals:

 The elastic holds everything in place - but if you want the case to have the raised cords, well... you have to do some internal engineering that I just wasn't interested in spending the time on.
So while my students were making a regular case bound book - I used the inbetween-demonstration-time to work out a longstitch pattern.

 

It didn't quite work out the way I had intended but I'm actually happier with it. 

 

I used two different color threads and sewed them in two different directions - one across the spine, the other along the spine.  

And now, I am able to schedule all kinds of thing!  Ooooeeee! Watch out everybody. :) 

 

 Okay - time to confess - I finished this project last week.
This weekend I was occupied with all things letterpress.

On Thursday an intrepid former student asked to come learn to print letterpress so that she could print her business cards for her thesis exhibition. Well she is a fabulous, self-reliant, student so of course I said yes.

While she was printing and rounding corners, I was catching the printing bug myself. I had several drawers of type, already sorted, that needed better labeling. So I set type from the drawer with the name of the font (when I knew what it was) and the point size. 

 

I printed it and was able to label almost two dozen drawers this weekend! 

I was so excited about the results I binge-watched Game of Thrones, Seasons 3 - 5 (Thank you Free Library!) and sorted about six more drawers and printed them. I've got some great fonts to work with and I can't wait to finish them all now.  

A lot of them are an absolute mess:

For some drawers it was easiest to stack everything into the job stick, vacuum the drawer of all the dust, and then redistribute the whole lot.

For others it was simpler to dumped the whole mess on the table and start from the beginning.

 The Supervisor came and checked on things periodically. But it was so cold on Friday he was content to be glued to the heating vents. 

 Or sunbeams when nature provided.

 Printing was fun. I learned a lot about my little press that will help when Sarah comes to print her business cards (part 2).
And today my new purchase came in the mail!
Can you tell what that is?
That is the @ symbol as lead type! yippee!  Most (actually I think almost no) type faces didn't include this symbol, which makes setting business cards with an email address a little difficult. I am now the proud owner of @s sizes 5pt - 12pt. I can't wait! I think I might need to set my own new cards. :)

The Jr. Supervisor wasn't as excited as I was: balancing on the banister was more his speed.