National Letter Writing Week

Dear Reader,

Has anyone else heard of this? National Letter Writing Week? I just caught a tweet from Wordnik claiming that this is so (and, presumably, started this Monday), followed by a cool little link to a page listing various writing-related terms, a word-list called Penmanship.

But I can't find the source for this declared observation. There's an eHow article that corrects my presumption and puts "Universal Letter Writing Week" at Jan. 8-14 (or was that last year?) and offers suggestions of recipients for various letters, if you can't come up with any on your own. For me, the problem has never been sitting down and writing a letter: it has wholly revolved around coercing, tricking, or forcing anyone else to write back.

Awareness for this week seems to have exploded in 2008, according to my cursory and undisciplined research. A women's website, BellaOnline, also offers suggestions for types of letters to write as well as a short inspirational bibliography in the same vein. Here's an especially vacuous blog post about the event, courtesy About.com. The author collects stamps but the imagination he expends on this article rings a little limp. By accident I found a dead-fascinating article on letter writing under Japanese Etiquette in Wikipedia--otherwise, Wikipedia seems to have never heard of this week-long observation.

• Int'l Society for Friendship and Good Will says they "sponsor and promote" this Week in their list of yearly Observances. Did they create it? No idea, but I've never heard of any of their other Observations, either, so... maybe!
• The Smithsonian Institute's National Postal Museum features a vintage art deco post that places the Week at October 17.
• Without citing a source, the DermaNetwork (for Clinical Dermatology) brings up the Week as something to observe while sitting in the waiting room for your dermatology appointment. Their topic suggestions are equally surprising ("Write a letter to someone you know who has great skin").
• Holidays for Everyday, a preschool educators resource, refers to "National" Letter Writing Week as early as 2007. No source.
• At least one stamp collector is looking for a 1980 Thai commemorative stamp for International Letter Writing Week, but this source does not say which week that was. If you don't believe in 1980, you can buy a later version of this stamp from 2008. It would help to speak Spanish, in this case.

Does anyone reading this know anything more about it? I'd love to hear from you.

Your pal,
Christian

P.S.: A bunch of sites claim it's actually in October. From the contexts I've glossed over, it looks like it used to be in October maybe a century ago, but now someone's started it up again and placed it in January. Can anyone clear this up?

Ms. Clapsaddle of the New York Clapsaddles

How many of us know the name of Ellen Clapsaddle?

It's a lovely name. Good Lord, I don't know of many others as evocative of an era, of many others that so bespeak of a time and place as well as that of "Clapsaddle." It sounds comical, yes, but it also definitely sounds like it comes from somewhere, there's definitely a story behind it. There's some Old West to it, or maybe even some British tincture; there's definitely a career or two in the story of this surname.

I don't know that story.

I do know the craft of this Ellen Hattie Clapsaddle, however, and I'm sure you do too. If you've ever seen a cloyingly sweet, Victorian-era holiday greeting card or Valentine postcard, you've almost certainly seen Ellen's artwork. Every article about her describes her as "prolific," defining an era with her work. One entry even insists that she took the old, demonic-looking (by our contemporary standards) image of Santa Claus and made him the sweet, jolly old man we know him to be. This might not make any sense unless you've actually managed to get your hands on an old newspaper from the early 1900s and have seen their rendition of Santa Claus: far from jolly, he looked lecherous, murderous, and at the very least down on his luck, and if he were to break into someone's house in the middle of the night, leaving gifts under the tree would not be what the newspapers would have to report the next morning.

But certainly, this silly-sounding name was the signature behind an astonishing body of work, not just in how it characterized a span of time, like the Currier and Ives prints, but the sheer volume of produced work. It's important to bear in mind the names of the artists who shaped our culture, and Ms. Clapsaddle's pen truly originated much of how we perceive our modern holidays to appear.

Print Gocco and Holiday Cards 5

This is a clothes-rack of printed holiday cards drying, waiting for use. We have big plans for these, and we purposely made too many because I suspect that will not even be enough. Having collaborated on a fairly intricate and involved project like this, we're going to want to share the results with as many people as possible.

Personally, I was exceedingly pleased with how clean this print came out, how precisely the black print went upon the colored background without skootching over to the side or anything. I aligned both templates to the lower right corner of the foam waffle-surfaced pad of the Print Gocco, and that proved (in this instance, at least) a sufficient guide to line up the two prints. You can see how it could've gone wrong, right? The colors slightly to the right, the black lines slightly to the left, and it looks like a factory over-run. Bracing ourselves for that kind of disaster, we simply insisted that it would add to the homespun appeal of an amateur, homemade project.

"Homespun!" was my rallying cry throughout, every time a blob of ink smeared on the back of a card, or when colors of ink found ways to transgress their borders or when ink ran dry in an area. "Homespun!" represented the quaint, one-of-a-kind quality that a mass-production factory would throw out and chalk up to losses. Not so with us: some lucky recipient will come into possession of a flawed, sloppy (read: homespun) printing.

But actually, the cards came out great. I was impressed with how well they lined up and how clear the illustration came out. Even the worst of the batch still looked great! And I'd like to point out my wife's experiments with non-white backgrounds. Green paper wasn't ideal, and black paper was of course completely useless, but the grey cardstock is an interesting relief from the monotony of white. My favorite was the off-beige paper, like cheap elementary school drawing paper, and if I'd known how affectionate I would be for this effect I might have done the entire run with that paper. It creates a humble yet precious atmosphere with the image.

Oh, but we're not done yet.

Print Gocco and Holiday Cards 4

Here you can see what the first print looks like: large, amorphic shapes of color on a white background. You get the general suggestion of what the finished image is going to look like, which will really come to life once the black outlines are printed. Oh yes, I'm going to outline everything in black. That's something I haven't tried before.

The question there is, how thick should the outline be? Thick enough to cover the broad white gutters between the colored shapes? I opted not to do that but just to encapsulate the brown fur of the sock monkey ("fur" used in its loosest sense, of course) and draw eyes and mouth over the face, literally superimposing these over those features heretofore represented by large, vague colored areas.




Note this triptych: it is the progression of experience, application, and discovery.

When I printed the large colored shapes, ink ran over the entire stencil (between the protective layer and the mesh screen), going far beyond the areas I'd designated. That sprawl didn't print onto the paper, of course, but it represented a hell of a lot of wasted ink. "Gunk it up with lots of ink" is fine advice, but within reason: you're also throwing a lot of ink away unless you take pains to contain it.

And I did, as shown in the first photo. I readily availed myself of that adhesive grey foam and built narrow chambers for almost every single black line on the stencil. That ink was going to stay put and serve me only to goosh out through the mesh and onto the paper--no more of this broad spread of wasted resources!

The second picture shows you what I mean, and this is what it looked right before printing. Every tortuous alley is fully loaded with black ink. And it's not a lot of ink, either: a thin distribution proved sufficient for 20 prints before reloading!

The third photo reveals what I couldn't have foreseen. The broad spread of ink in the lower left is where the ink actually gooshed up over the foam wall and into terra incognito. That was doubtlessly the result of too much ink in one area, so a thinner strip would have served me. You can also see a couple joints bleeding with black ink where the seal wasn't secure. That's fine, it was still minimal spread and most of the ink stayed where I wanted it. Bonus: I only needed to refill the stencil once in the whole run, and when the cards were done I printed eight sheets of stationery with the black sock monkey outline as well as a stack of cards leftover from our wedding invitations. Now we have a supply of all-purpose sock monkey greeting cards waiting to be colored in.

Next: the finished product.

Print Gocco and Holiday Cards 3

With the foam barriers in place, it was time to start inking the stencil. The red lips and brown fur would be easy because the colors those inks came in were suitable entirely on their own, but the blue was way too dark for the sky, unless the image was to represent night. That was not how we planned it.

Having worked with this blue Gocco ink in the past, I was quite prepared to mix it up. Adding white to blue ink was a complete failure and resulted in a not-noticeably less-dark night sky, so this time I drew out ten lines of white ink and one line of blue ink. This turned out to be a very good ratio, and when I mixed up the ink it produced a nice light blue sky color. But this mixture had to be manually spread onto the stencil. Lacking a thin, flexible paint knife with a narrow edge, I had to improvise. I tried a chopstick, which was fine for blending the ink but terrible for precise placement. Rebecca got me a plastic spoon which worked much better, especially when it broke: the handle was thin enough to daub the ink in tight turns and narrow areas.

Spreading the brown and red ink were no problem whatsoever. The thing to remember with the Gocco is to use a lot of ink: gunk it up. Really. If you're going to print a lot, of course you know you'll need a lot of ink, but even the instructional video suggests being wasteful. This is because the ink will not distribute itself evenly, despite your best efforts, and one area will become thin and then barren while everywhere else is still going strong. You can certainly refill the template while you're printing, but that is such precarious business! You peel back the protective plastic layer that's holding the ink down and the ink has of course applied itself to the underside of that. So you've got two goopy, inky surfaces facing you like a book of malign intent, into which you must delve and reapply the ink. That's not so bad if you're refilling a solid color, but if you have to blend and reapply a custom color--such as I had to, three times--you're asking for trouble the longer you're meddling with it.

I was disappointed to see the waffle-print in the stencil. I've seen it before and forgotten about it, but it showed up prominently in this run of cards so I'm going to document how to preclude this (probably).

That waffle-print comes from the foam cushion inside the Print Gocco. When you're making a stencil, you have a foam platform with a thin coat of plastic and that waffle-print surface, and upon that you place the image (carbon-black lines on a white background) and the blank template. The flash bulbs quickly build heat in the black ink which burns an impression into the template, and it's through that impression the ink must flow. But the waffle-print comes into play if you don't put a thicker card behind the white sheet with the blank ink on it. Place a thicker card back there, or a few sheets of regular paper, to mitigate the channels formed in the waffly foam surface and the paper with the black image will be nice and flat for the template. I won't make that mistake again.

Loaded with ink, the template slides securely into the lid of the Print Gocco and locks into place. It really is a cunning device: having forgotten the instructions (and not being able to read Japanese), I was still able to figure out how to place the stencil because there truly is only one way it can go in. And once it was in the rest of the process came flooding back to active memory, and I knew how to load the ink and everything else.

You can see the loaded stencil in place, and the white sheet below it would be replaced by 50 folded pieces of cardstock in succession. This is the fun part of the whole thing, notable for a project that is fun all the way through. I want to save the Gocco for special occasions, but once I get going on it I don't want to stop. Using this device is simplicity itself: drawing the design in Photoshop is harder than transferring it to the stencil and loading it with ink. Printing is so easy, more thought is required in strategizing where the printed items will be arrange to allow them to dry. And once the cards were done, I literally glanced around the room to see if there were anything else that needed printing on...

Print Gocco and Holiday Cards 2

Now that the printing of the holiday cards actually seemed real and within reach, we moved swiftly on the next steps: printing the color background.

Most of the cards we're working with are of white cardstock, which is an easy and generous canvas on which to paint. All colors will show true and with some clever negative-space design, you don't need to use any white ink at all. I used that concept for the snow-covered tree in my holiday cards of a few years ago. But as Rebecca showed me, it pays to experiment with different colors of paper... to be seen shortly.

Photoshop goes a long way towards covering the bulk of the work that's required to create a template. I freehanded a prototype card and kept every element of the illustration separate in its own layer. I knew that for printing the card I would want to do the black outline last, so ultimately the sky, monkey's fur, and monkey's lips would go on one stencil. Three different colors, but the ink couldn't be allowed to run, which it assuredly would if I didn't set up any barriers.

The Gocco comes with foam pads that you cut up into narrow strips. One side has an adhesive that mounts onto the stencil, so you can create little walls to hold areas of ink separate from each other. I'd never played with this before and was looking forward to trying it out. It was easier than I'd thought, as the foam was very forgiving, bending in all directions or trimming easily for sharp corners. The adhesive formed a strong bond but, upon pressing, you had a short grace period in which to reapply the barrier if it didn't go where you wanted. It was pretty much an ideal substance to work with.

As seen in the second photo, I walled off the sock monkey's head from the sky (the large dark blob surrounding him) and sealed off a little chamber for the red mouth. It was important to think of this image in two forms: the detailed black lines and the large geometric shapes behind it. Photoshop allowed me to reveal or hide any aspect of the image so, in the course of drawing, I could also plan how much room would be needed by the foam barriers--or, in other words, how close areas of color would be allowed to lie next to each other.

I could have narrowed the space between the colored shapes, of course, by giving each color its own stencil, but that would have been two extra stencils and four more flash bulbs (part of the stencil-making process) down the drain. I'm trying to conserve Gocco resources because it's a deadstock item and no one's making more/new supplies for it anymore. That forces me to get creative with how I'm going to print.

Print Gocco and Holiday Cards

We're actually doing holiday cards this year! I've done them in years previous when I was single, and then my wife bought me a Print Gocco--which I'd never heard of before and was thrilled with... thrilled to the point of possession. I hold the Gocco very dear, especially as its supplies are increasingly scarce and not cheap to replenish, consequently.

I've used the Gocco for holiday cards one year and also for printing T-shirts for our wedding party. I'm reluctant to whip it out for any small project, preferring to wait for something elaborate requiring many, many prints.

One night, Rebecca entered a certain state of consciousness and delineated several creative ideas for holiday cards, some of which surprised her the next morning. We drew up some prototypes, argued about how to attack this project, and then nailed down a final iteration. When we were absolutely ready, we pulled out the Gocco and started making stencils. The photo here shows, essentially, the main face of the card without giving everything away. This will be my first print with four colors and I'm... insecure! I'm not sure I can pull this off but I'm behaving as though I absolutely can. The print will involve setting up boundaries for the ink, as well as mixing the ink prior to application.

I'm not doing a very good job of keeping these cards a secret. I had to reupload the photo with a crystalizing filter to distort and disguise the images we're working with. I'm very excited to get to work on this project and send it out, but I've been documenting the process and actually have four entries written and ready to go online... but I've been forbidden from posting them until the cards are actually in the mail.

I'll have to find something else to talk about in the meantime.