May 1, 10 am – 2 pm & May 8, 10 am – 3 pm
Location: 1246 Folsom St.
Registration: $95 (includes cost of all materials)

This is a hands-on workshop for novice screen printers. Learn the basics of screen printing on all media and the complete screen printing process from artwork preparation to image burning to ink application. Make your own DIY notecards, business cards, or even a handy tote bag! After two Saturdays, you’ll be equipped with the savvy to screen print future projects on your own. Screen printing has been a tool for social and political change, and was one of the earliest classes offered by KSW. Workshop instructor Scott Louie will give you the historical context to appreciate this art form.

Day 1: Print Gocco with Debbie Yee
Learn how to use the Print Gocco, an all-in-one tabletop screenprinting machine from Japan. Produce your own small art prints, notecards, business cards and other small paper goods from images sized up to 3 1/2″ x 5″.

Day 2: Traditional Screen Printing and Yudu with Scott Louie
Screen print one artwork onto your choice of substrates (paper, cloth, wood, etc.) Then take your screen home to continue printing on your own. In addition to traditional screen printing, this session includes a tutorial on modern screen printing with the Yudu.

Registration fee is $95. To register by check, please send check or money order to: Kearny Street Workshop, P.O. Box 14545, San Francisco, CA 94114-0545. Register online. Please include your full name and contact info.

Some of our DIY collaborations for the wedding included the following:

Save-The-Date flat cards and envelopes designed by Billy and me on Adobe Fireworks/Illustrator and printed on Gocco. The return address was printed on the envelope flap and the barn illustration on the card was repeated on the upper left corner of the envelope. Cardstock and envelopes supply from Paper Source. Fellow crafty-lawyer-bride Jess at Fig and Plum recounts the pros and cons, do’s and don’ts of committing to Gocco craft for one’s wedding here at her blog.

Out-of-Town bags for our travelling guests. However, since all but a few were out-of-towners, we made extras for the locals as well! The bags had a wedding logo co-opted from the Made-In- China novelty item, Fortune Teller Miracle Fish. In place of “Fortune Teller” and “Miracle Fish”, Billy re-designed it with our names and wedding date on Illustrator. The logos were done using inkjet iron-in transfer paper. In each bag, we included a few helpful items (tissue, sunscreen, water), local goodies (cookies from Cowboy Cookie N’ Grub of San Luis Obispo) and a zine called “Debbie & Billy’s Guide To The Coast”.

Fan-style wedding programs. This had been a conundrum for me years ago when a friend asked me how to make these for her wedding. I had a grommet punch that I kept for fabric uses that would fix an eyelet or grommet in place, but I didn’t know how to create the mechanics of movable paper that was bound by a metal eyelet. Flash forward a few years, a landslide of scrapbooking enthusiasm, stores and tools are now readily accessible. I was looking into the products at Eyelet Outlet, and learned that the trick to making paper held by an eyelet move is to also use an eyelet washer. The scrapbooking world also revealed more efficient ways to affix eyelets beyond eyelet setters and hammers, like the Crop-A-Dile I used to bind the leaves to form the fan. The scrapbooking world has a thing for aquatic reptiles, it seems, because another tool I used to create the fan programs was a corner rounder made by the company Paper Gator.

Our wedding was held at an apple farm. To go with the country orchard theme, instead of numbered table cards, the guests’ names were printed on reproductions of vintage fruit crate labels and each table was assigned a fruit crate label instead of a number. While often no longer copyrighted, it seems (from my brief internet research) that fruit crate labels are highly collectible and borrowing (ahem) the images are hard to come by. Luckily, we found a Dover publication that contained a whole book of full-color crate labels and–biggest score of all–came with a CD of the crate labels as TIFF files! We resized them to uniformly fit on a square card and, at the reception, they were waiting on a clothesline and small clothespins for the guests.

We wanted to share in our word-loving and game-playing and decorated the wedding cake with Scrabble tiles that spelled out “Debbie Loves Billy”. Turns out there are only two B’s in each game set, so we had to borrow from two sets!

Finally, guest favors included a CD in a chipboard sleeve printed on Gocco and packages of red Swedish Fish, both containing the Fortune Teller Miracle Fish novelty.

We’re not sure just what’s next, whether another zine, silkscreen t-shirts or more Gocco prints, but we’re excited that it will be something we do together.

Before: After:

So, basically I feel really very prepared for some upcoming chapbook construction challenges, and am meandering (in a more directed way) into growing { bee + spool } press. Additional I-want-thats still include a saddle stapler.

In chapbook news, I’ve made some great swaps with Logan Ryan Smith and Transmission Press, Juliet Cook and Blood Pudding Press, and Jen Tynes and horse less press with my DIY chap. I’ve just received Hossannah‘s small chap Lorem Ipsum printed on bright white cardstock and clipped at the corner with a silver binder clip filled with poetry and patent illustrations. I’m looking forward to the read. Upcoming, a chap trade with Michaela A. Gabriel in Austria, whose chapbook The Secret Meanings of Greek Letters was published by dancing girl press.

Interested in a chapbook swap? Email me (replace the (at)). Alternatively, order mine here and know that the proceeds of the sale will be donated to Asian American Women Artists Association, a non-profit organization here in San Francisco.

After months of mulling it over, conceiving of it and mostly just not getting around to it, I charged forward last weekend by visiting SCRAP, hoping to find some different papers or envelopes at rock-bottom, re-use prices. The warehouse had several reams of textured cover stock in a beige-type color. Not sexy, but I thought it’d contrast well with the ream of turquoise copy paper I got at Staples a few months back for the purposes of chapbook-making and paper projects in general.

Fast forward one weekend later. I layed out and edited the interior of the booklet on Adobe Pagemaker on Saturday night, went to OfficeMax for double-sided copying Sunday morning. (Tip: OfficeMax offered color paper at the self-service copiers for the same price as regular white copy paper, but I did not partake as I’d already brought my turquoise paper). Sunday afternoon I created the Gocco-ready cover image, then flashed the screen with these Gocco bulbs pictured here as glistening still-life in the Sunday afternoon light.

The covers were printed on the Gocco using brown and pearlescent aqua inks.  Sunday night, albeit with an interlude at The Fillmore (Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks), I completed binding, with brown linen thread, an edition of 40 baby chapbooks for contributors, postcard writers and Kundiman-related folk. Other helpful project materials included a Stella.

The product specs for this little chappy, “Postcard Poems by Kundiman poets” ({bee + spool} press 2008): Dimensions 4.25″ (w) x 5.5″ (h). 16 pages.  Edition of 40.

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