MiT book, we have a cover!

Yes, the cover is printed. I thought this day would just about never come. But it wasn't without some back-breaking labor. I'll blame it on the change in the season, but the screen did not flash very cleanly today, I had several holes. It can be a little hard to tell what was a hole in the screen itself and what was a gap caused by the unevenness of the very lumpy handmade paper (Nepal Heavyweight). Lumpy paper, I could live with, but the obvious holes in the screens, I always touch up.

And touch-up jobs are definitely back-breaking.

So today's lesson is touching-up your gocco print

Before and after I touched up the missing spot in the scroll close to the bottom, and also at the corner:





Before and after I touched up the missing spot in the right leg of the 'H':





Before and after I touched up the obvious hole in the line at the bottom:



And here, well, I had some coffee after lunch, and I had a bit of a jiggle, you can see the result inside the outer most of the concentric circles (compare that to the picture above). I decided to live with it:



A shot of the cover:



The tools of the trade. I use a 12/0 acrylic/oil brush. And very little ink, if any at all. Usually, there's enough ink on the print itself and I just use the brush to spread it around to cover up the hole. But if I do need more ink, I dab up the tiniest bit of ink I can, then I wipe as much off as possible on the plastic lid (what I use for a palette):



Here are the 7 books I've finished; they're going to Esther and her family.



And on other fronts:

I'm starting work for the collaboration my critique group is doing for our show next March at Cedar Crest College. I picked up the fabric yesterday (100% cotton, white, 3 and half yards of it); laundered it, and today stained it with a big bucket of coffee grounds I picked up at the local coffee shop.

I wish I had gotten a shot of it while it was in its coffee bath, it was pretty disgusting looking. But anyhow, here I'm rinsing out the coffee. I think it's stained a bit darker than I'd like, so I'll probably run it through the washing machine again.



And whoa, Relay Replay blog got tagged as a spam blog!

I got a note from blogger today saying that the blog (http://relayreplaypress.blogspot.com/) had been tagged as a spam site, and therefore had been blocked! After looking at the long headers, I decided it was legit and so followed the link it said to follow in order to unblock it.

I don't know why google's software tagged it as a spam blog, but I have one guess—all the posts are titled with a woman's name, I wonder if they thought I was posting nudie photos or something?