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It's that time of year again: football is back! And fall is just around the corner meaning that it's time to evaluate my sweatshirt collection, get some leaf peeping on the calendar, and enjoy the perfect September weather. As if September wasn't awesome enough, it's also National Guacamole Day tomorrow!

Here at the office we welcomed September with a tortilla chip taste test. Each of us have tried and true favorites we love to pair with salsa, hummus, and of course guacamole! My favorite guacamole recipe, courtesy of Alton Brown, boasts wonderful flavor (thank you, cumin!) and quite the kick (use a whole jalapeno for extra spice!). I whipped up a batch and we put it to the test against a range of chips.

Among the offerings we had the usual suspects, some more exotic offerings as well as blue, flax sprinkled mystery chip randomly chosen from the snack aisle at Target. After much (blind) snacking and deliberating we each cast three votes for our favorites.

Here are the results: La Niña was the winner which maybe shouldn't be a surprise, considering that it's the most authentic tortilla chip and complimented the guacamole perfectly! But then Tostitos Hint of Lime and Garden of Eatin' Red Hot Blues were the other favorites, proving that we love flavor and spice! 

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Zoárd's been a little quiet on the blog but that doesn't mean he hasn't been busy doing what he does best—making prints, paintings, posters, and zines (check out his work here)! He was recently part of a local zine, art, and comics festival, and we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to tell us more about the world of zines and feature some other talented artists. Read on for Zoárd's recap of the event ...

(image: bought and traded at the New Zineland Zine Fest)

Last week I had the pleasure of slingin’ zines and trading printer advice with fellow artists and local publishers and freaks at the New Zineland, a zine and independent publisher’s fair, over in the theater of the Central Square YMCA. This party was thrown by local community organizers, Seek and Find, bringing together scores of comic book artists, activist publications, self- published literature and poetry, art books, photography books, handmade books, and more. Seek and Find, run by Caitlin, organizes two main semi-regular events including the JP Flea Market and now New Zineland Zine Fest.

Zines in some form have existed for hundreds of years, technically speaking! By the time the Heidelberg “high speed printing machine” letterpress machines (which we utilize here at Smudge Ink) were gaining popularity in the 1930s, there were already many ways to get your message out to the public. However, the speed with these machines could help you propagate information (or unpopular opinions) was at an all-time high! The internet was beginning taking shape ... sort of.

The zine as we know it was brought to fruition with the serendipitous timing of advances in printing technology and the rise of punk rock and hardcore music culture of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Homemade, hand stapled and folded fanzines ranging topics from music scene coverage, record reviews, social theory, travel journals, cookbooks, and of course comics were shaping how these counter-cultures communicated internally but also globally. Thirty plus years out, zine’s today can be an expression of just about anything. There are no rules so long as you Do It Yourself.

(image: Jimmy of Wing Club Press)

This year’s zinefest had a little bit of everything but I was particularly drawn to the all the Risograph Digital Duplicator representation in the house! Jimmy of Wing Club Press had some amazing new prints hot off the presses. Wing Club is a risograph and silkscreen studio out of Portland, ME. He also told me all about the upcoming New England Art Book Fair which will bring together over 45 vendors from across the NE.

Risograph prints are created by Risograph machines which are fully automated, high-speed printing machines similar to a Xerox. What printmakers and book dorks love about the Riso is the quality of the prints it produces; there’s something spellbinding about how the machine throws down its individual layers of color ink. The final result looks a lot like if a serigraph print (or silkscreen print) and a photocopy made a beautiful child. It’s a pretty amazing tool to make some really pretty zines, and Jimmy has a couple named Smudge and Smudge 2, wouldentchaknowit.

(image: Mikey of Garbage Press demos Risograph)

I also met Mikey from Garbage Press based out of Connecticut. He self publishes rad comics and books and prints. He also lugged his TR1510 Risograph over to give us a printing demo. In this image he has the machine opened up and pulled out the printing drum on which is a screen (seen in blue) which is used to print on part of a two-color image.

(image: Sophie Page and Jia Sung of Plum Illustration)

I was also drawn to the art zines at Sophie Page and Jia Sung’s table. Together as Plum Illustration they drove out from New York to hang out. Their zines are of really awesome illustrations of poetry and stories that inspired them. I was impressed by their very imaginative and poignant work!

(image: Jerel Dye)

Jerel Dye had some really cool comics but also some amazing original work that were part abstraction and part sci-fi landscape studies. Also, he’s a super nice dude.

(image: me!)

I was tabling this event as well. I recently finished up a new silkscreen book and photocopy zine entitled Cold Shape and Hideg Alak, respectively. I explore themes similar to previous books and printing projects of mine like communication and our common ancestry and how our histories are reinterpreted. I like to put zines out in pairs, one’s title being the Hungarian translation of the other. By doing that I feel I make a direct connection to my own ancestry by using a simple form of communication. I think books are an amazing vehicle to show your art. There is something very intimate about viewing art that you are holding in your hands, and it is a surprisingly different experience then the walking into an all-too-often-stuffy gallery with white walls telling you to “do not touch.” 

All in all, the zine fair was a great success. I made a couple bucks, sure, but these events are all about meeting the artists and talking to them about their work. I took home a great haul of zines, postcards, prints, stickers etc. Next up, I’ll be tabling at the Northampton Print & Book Fair on October 2nd which is part of a larger city-wide printmaking festival called Print Works 2016 including Big Ink and Print Fair North hosted by Zea Mays Printmaking. It should be a pretty amazing day! See you guys there.

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It was about five years ago—geesh, has it really been that long?—when I ran my first marathon with Team in Training in Nashville, Tennessee. For those of you who aren't familiar, Team In Training is a branch of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's (LLS) efforts to raise awareness and funds for blood cancer research and treatment for patients. It's a great cause, and I had an unforgettable experience both training and running thanks to all of the support from friends, family, and acquaintances. 

So I've signed up for Team In Training (TNT) again but this time to run the Chicago marathon. As part of my fundraising effort this year, I really want to reach a broader audience and decided to create something (other than that warm fuzzy do good feeling) as a way to raise funds. I thought back to my original Team In Training endeavor and immediately was inspired by my obsession with Hatch Show Print, a historic letterpress shop I had visited during that same trip to Nashville. Of course, a letterpress print poster! Funny how things always come full circle.

So about the poster: It's an 11"x17" poster letterpress printed here at Smudge Ink on a 300 gsm piece of paper that fits nicely in any store-bought 11" x 17" frame. No custom framing required! The design, though modern and abstract, alludes to the bottom of a running shoe and inconspicuously features the LLS blood drop emblem; pretty much the two tenets of what Team In Training stands for really. And as a selling point, it's abstract enough to go with most home decor! I would like to think that it's a poster that would make both Hatch Show Print and Massimo Vignelli proud (not to mention LLS, of course).

So here's the deal! I'm asking for a minimum of $15 donation in exchange for a poster ($20 if shipping is required). My fundraising goal is $2,400. As members of the team, we have all put down the first $100 of our fundraising goal. So I still have $2,300 more to go! But fundraising doesn't have to stop there; the more the better in this scenario. That's where spreading the word and making a donation comes in.

Go to my fundraising page and make a donation electronically and share the link and this blog post with others! The donation goes directly to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society!

If you make a donation and I know you, there's no need for shipping; I can deliver it or find a way to mail in bulk to family and friends in a consolidated geographical location where disbursal can easily ensue. If I don't know you, please leave a comment or send an email (through my fundraising page) with your name and a mailing address. Or if you're in the Boston area, come on down to Charlestown and pick up your poster at Smudge Ink!

ALSO, starting September 6, posters can be found at Marathon Sports (Brookline), Black Ink (Cambridge) and hopefully soon at Forge Baking Company, Loyal Supply Company, and Brooklyn Boulders (all in Somerville).

One more ALSO, should there be any paper companies, paper stores, paper blogs, or paper enthusiasts reading this and want to really go big and sponsor me, I'll put your company name on my jersey! 

In sum, donate to this cause to help stomp out blood cancer. Stay tuned for updates on a follow up blog post, post October 9th when fundraising and marathon running have both culminated to hopefully an uplifting end!

P.S. to Emily and Margaret, you will be happy to know that I have been taking care of good 'ole Cookie (vandercook printer) while you gals have been out of the print room.

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To my excitement (and humbling surprise), I was given free rein to design a creative art installation for our trade show booth. The initial idea was to adapt one of our floral note card designs into a 3-dimensional piece made entirely out of paper. In the end I needed to build three pieces: one would go on the front of our counter and the other two would be mounted on the short wall extensions (called returns in trade show booth speak). I borrowed inspiration and know-how from Anthropology windows, restaurant signage, and Deb's to-scale architectural renderings. For the end concept, I envisioned multiple layers of floral and botanical shapes within shadow-box-like frames.

To start, I made digital compositions of all of the artwork’s shapes in Adobe Illustrator. Luckily, Illustrator has this handy window called "layers" which really helped to organize the process. I was able to place each of the shapes in various layers that coincided with where they would be placed in the installation frames. The shapes were labeled according to frame, paper color, and intended layer. Because I just had our office printer, I scaled everything down to print on legal sized paper. Then it was off to good 'ole FedEx Office and Print for a couple hours of oversized Xerox copying (scaled up 500% to be exact).

These black and white copies would be applied to paper and then serve as our stencils. But first, we found large cover sheets to match the design’s color palette and laminated them together with spray mount. Armed with Easy-Tack (what I aptly refer to as miracle stencil glue), we then applied rough sections of the oversized copies onto the nice and sturdy double-thick sheets. From there, it was time to cut out each of the shapes using the stencil as our guide. Basically, this required several days of intense X-Acto cutting time. If only Sabrina and I had known about the ergonomic Kiwi X-Acto blade holder before this project ensued.

After tending to our callused hands, we were ready to move onto the next stage. We needed spacers to create the depth between all of the shapes we had just cut out. So how does one make spacers? Using the leftover paper, we cut a wide array of colors and widths with the handy shop guillotine in 1/8" increments and then rolled the strips of paper into cylinders with PVC glue. This maaaaayyyy have been just as time consuming (if not more) as the X-Acto-ing—Can that be a verb? Well, it is now.

We glued the hand-rolled spacers onto the backs of every shape, being very careful to select the appropriate spacer according to each shape’s assigned layer. For example, the first layer of shapes received 1/8" spacers. Shapes on the second layer received 1/4" spacers and so on and so forth. And sooooo on and sooooo forth, for a very long time until all of the spacers had been applied to the backs of each of the cut-out shapes. 

Finally, we began to assemble the cut-out floral and botanical shapes within the frame. I had outlines of the composition printed to-scale on large sheets of paper to serve as our “map.” I laid this down and temporarily placed the shapes in their respective places on top. Sabrina may add that this led to many head scratching moments as she tried to follow this map that apparently only made sense to me. With everything in place, I removed the map, channeling the magician who rips a table cloth from underneath a table setting albeit a bit more gently. I then peeled off the stencil paper we had temporarily adhered with the aforementioned miracle Easy-Tack.

And AT LAST, we were able to permanently glue all of the spacers and their adjoining shapes to the installation frame and their neighboring layers. To make sure nothing would come apart during transport, we boarded and shrink wrapped each of the frames and then shrink wrapped them again for extra measure. April, Eric, and Deb did an awesome job setting them up in the booth. I joined them later in the show, and I must say everything came together looking pretty darn spiffy. Had I known this would take a solid month and a half of work and leave us with temporarily arthritis-ized—again I realize not a word—hands? Nope. Would I ever take on another paper installation project? Absolutely.

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One of the best parts of the National Stationery Show is getting to meet the other exhibitors and seeing what’s new. I already had my list of must-visit booths (which I shared over here on The Paper Chronicles), and I was not disappointed. Here’s a roundup of my favorites!

RICHIE DESIGNS

Richele's sense of humor is spot on! I should just carry that yoga pants card around and show it to every other person on the street. You know what I'm talking about! Check out the coordinating mugs and notepads and more awesome goodies over here.

E. FRANCES PAPER


E. Frances Paper’s watercolors are the prettiest. I love how their cards are perfectly sentimental without being sappy. Who knew an ordinary little glue bottle could tug at your heartstrings? Find more beautiful cards from this sweet little company here.

YELLOW OWL WORKSHOP 

Yellow Owl Workshop’s booth was just as bright and playful as I was expecting! I couldn't pass this card without smiling, and I appreciated the memories that this card brought to mind. Food and puns – what’s not to love? Don’t miss their fun cards, diy kits, and stamps here.

SAPLING PRESS


Even if you have the shortest attention span, you will not be able to tear yourself away from reading every single card by Sapling Press like I did. It's like Lisa knows what we’re thinking (adult coloring books) and then injects them with a refreshing hilarity and sarcasm that makes us laugh at ourselves. Get more laughs over here.

THIMBLEPRESS


The Thimblepress booth was bold and beautiful! I'm a sucker for everything confetti. Put said confetti and a card together, you’ve got a party in the mail. So clever! Kristen also pointed out her new stand-up cards. They come up with small enclosure cards that go right onto the “plant.” Get yours here (you know you want one!).

Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 of our recaps!

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