marbling

Legitimately, I won't be offended if six of you comment to say, Corinne, stop writing about your boring printing class! For one thing, it would mean that six people had read my blog post; it would also be the most comments I'd ever gotten. In addition, I know in my head that this can't possibly be as interesting to everyone else as it is to me. But this is so cool and I therefore want you to hear about it anyway.

So when we last left our printing heroine, she had set, proofed, and printed bunches of copies of her poem, alongside the poems chosen by everyone else. The time has come to finish it all up: to make an actual book. A pretty book, with pretty paper on the outside. Fortunately, this is actually quite easy: step one involves a simple bath of water and some oil paints. Here (above left) I've squirted some blue and some gold into a water bath. The oil floats on the top.
The next step is to lay down a piece of paper, large enough that it'll wrap all the way 'round our finished product, into the water. The gold splotches have soaked through a bit.

Then all that's left is to (gingerly!) pull it out and hang it up with clothespins on the line to dry. This is one of my first attempts, though it's serviceably good as a cover page. The paper will have soaked up most, if not all, of the oil paint in the water, so there's generally no cleanup to do before squirting more paint and going crazy with another piece of paper. Once we got the hang of it, we started using straws and combs and pointy things to move the oil around, and we can blow on it before putting a paper in for a different effect.

Here, some of our creations hang to dry. The blue and purple one on the right is one of mine; it's also the first in which we used our spanky new purple colour. Below, some mostly-dry beauties (this must be late in the day--these are rather good) chill out on the cases of type.

Next week: binding! Same bat-time, same bat-place. THIS IS THE COOLEST CLASS EVER.