Hatch at the National Folk Festival

Earlier this month, The Hatch crew had the opportunity to participate in the 73rd National Folk Festival. Among the waves of people that visited our tent were students, fellow printers, curious strangers to the process, and a handful of folks with their own stories and memories of the shop. We went in ready to educate others about what we do, but ended up learning a thing or two ourselves. Manager Jim Sherraden reflects on our experience:

I was excited about going to the Folk Festival and having a tent and a demonstration, but in the back of my mind I was thinking about how benign our experience had been in the 80s when we would go do downtown festivals. What I've learned is that as we've accelerated into the 21st century, and live in this screen saturated society, a letterpress demonstration is as fascinating as the gentleman from MTSU who was recording vocals and songs on an Edison wax cylinder recorder. To the casual observer there was no difference between what we were doing with letterpress–in other words, representing the early 20th century as printers– as he was representing early 20th century technology as a sound engineer, and we look forward to next year.

Printing festival show cards

Cards we printed on site

View from inside our tent

Our tent featured a backdrop painted by Jim

Sharing our work

Poster Update

As promised, here are some completed posters which are now safely past the event date (and therefore safe to publish)

The Bluebird Cafe's 2011 poster - on sale now at their website.

Poster for Amy Grant & Vince Gill's Christmas concert at the Ryman

Poster for Lhoist, America's favorite limestone company

Day 51

Jim showed us this great book

WHAT I DID

• Printed my band postcard
• Printed my pangram poster
• Received my internship completion certificate
• Saw a very cool printmaking book for kids

Pangram poster preview

WHAT I LEARNED

• Because it's so thick, cutting chipboard a little shorter can keep it from catching around the cylinder when printing
• Roll posters along the grain of the paper so that they will stay flat later

THE END

This officially concludes my internship, but I will post pictures of waiting-for-the-release-date posters and finished personal Hatch projects as the time comes

Internship complete

Day 50

So many rules

WHAT I DID

• Set postcard designs, the Evil Hatch Clown and a small version of Luana poster
• Sorted out rules (of the tangible, letterpress variety) in search of the perfect one for my postcard
• Finished setting a band postcard for personal project
• Proofed some Christmas card designs for the Country Music Hall of Fame
• Found out my postcard client is going to be having some logo changes, so the job was put on hold indefinitely; I was really excited about this design, but I imagine many good designs never get seen because of situations like this

Part of my postcard which may not actually get printed (but you can see the film blocks I carved in printed form!)

WHAT I LEARNED

• If you want to "stamp" type during the proofing process, it's best to put a piece of foam core or something cushy underneath so that you get a good print; the softness allows the type to print more evenly

Day 49

My poster at the Loveless Barn (mine is on the left, Brad's is on the right)

WHAT I DID

• Printed some retail posters (got to cycle through several colors– so much fun!)
• Worked a little on typesetting a postcard for myself
• Went to see Music City Roots at the Loveless Barn– very cool to actually see it after working on their poster

WHAT I LEARNED

• When cycling colors on the press, it's easy to go to darker values, but much harder to get lighter. Ex: if I tried to print yellow after blue, I'd probably have to clean the rollers or I would just keep getting green.
• Uneven rollers can cause loads of printing problems; if there's obviously nothing wrong with your type and things are printing funny, this could be the cause
• A dirty press bed can also be the mystery cause of printing problems

The aftermath of printing today

Day 48

WHAT I DID

• Trimmed down Grant/Gill posters and bagged them for client
• Called Sunday Morning Films client about postcard, waiting on approval
• Worked a little on personal projects

WHAT I LEARNED

• Always remember to include a Hatch tagline on your projects
• Print your poster a few times before bumping up type; sometimes it takes a few runs for the type to settle correctly
• My Christmas cards are in the Hatch online store now!

NEW PRINTS

Here's some of my favorites from the baby announcements I did this weekend on a variety of makereadies.

Day 47

Trim mark. You can see the grip marks on the edge of the paper, about to be trimmed off.

WHAT I DID

• Trimmed Lhoist posters and bagged them for customer
• Printed 300+ backgrounds for Vince Gill/Amy Grant poster
• Printed 300+ second color for Gill/Grant posters
• Pulled a proof of my pangram side project

WHAT I LEARNED

• Getting better at gauging the right quantity of ink for a job– still not perfect however, I tend to mix too little
• We have a handful of ink colors to start with when mixing a new one. Mixing color with Warm Red vs Rubine Red makes a HUGE difference in color