In August I made this watercolour sketch of a coffee cup at Receiver Coffee Brass Shop (it was a good cup of coffee!):

When we arrived at the relief printing workshop in Maria Doering’s studio a week ago, I pulled the sketch out of my notebook as a starting point for my first experiment with carving and printing.

To begin, I placed a piece of tracing paper over the sketch, and traced the cup, the saucer, the spoon, and the sugar packet:

Using carbon paper, I then transferred this trace onto a piece of Marmoleum (a 4”x6” piece of regular everyday linoleum floor tile), and started carving:

As I was carving, I’d occasionally take a pencil rubbing, using newsprint, to get a sense of my progress:

Once I’d finished carving, I laid the finished block on Maria’s flatbed press, and pulled a proof on newsprint:

(You would think, after more than a decade of letterpress printing, I’d remember that relief printing always flips the image right-to-left!).

After some cleanup of the edges, I pulled four prints onto Fabriano paper:

Along the way I learned a lot about inking, cleanup, pressure, registration, and working to avoid extraneous impressions on the paper (which you can see plenty of in the prints here).

If you look carefully at the image of the carved block above, you’ll see that it actually has more carved from it than in the prints I made on Monday; that’s because on Thursday, the final day of the workshop, we focused on multi-block printing — combining more than one block, using different colours of ink, to produce a multi-colour image.

I decided to use the same coffee cup block as the starting point for the multi-block print, and to start I carved out some of the centre of the cup (to make room for coffee, to be printed in brown), and of the sugar packet (to be printed in red). I also planned to add a pencil in the background, and as a guide to all this I made a sketch:

Once I’d finished upgrading the original block, I transferred that image to a second piece of Marmoleum by pulling a print onto newsprint, and then laying the inky newsprint on a fresh piece and running it through the press again, resulting in this:

With this ghostly image of the original on the second block, I was ready to carve away everything that I didn’t want to print, which is to say, what was left would be only the areas I wanted to add to the black and white. It was a lot of carving, and when I was done the second block looked like this:

Notice that there are different colours of ink on this second block: red for the sugar and the eraser on the pencil, yellow for the pencil, brown for the coffee in the cup (and, as an additional flourish, some coffee on the spoon and spilled on the “table” beside). This was done by “spot inking” the block, using small precision ink rollers, something I had to do before each print pulled (along with all the “cleaning the ink I mistakenly rolled onto places there should be no ink”).

After printing four prints in black, I let these dry, and then printed the colour layer, to produce this:

There’s all sorts of dissatisfying fiddly bits in that final result, due a combination of inaccurate registration, impressions of the non-printing parts of the block onto the paper, and a less-vibrant-then-desired pencil yellow, but, from several days on, and with fresher eyes, I’m proud of the result inasmuch as this was my first go.

Maria is a patient teacher, and her workshop, in her cozy home-based studio, was well-resourced, with a small group of 5 nascent relief printers gathered around her dining room table carving blocks together. 

The experience was a lovely gift from Lisa to me, an artistic portal through which to pass from wage-earning into sabbatical; that I got to carve and print along side her (and, for two of the days, with young L. joining us), and to see her own beautiful creations, and flowering creativity, made it all the better.

We’re clearing space in the letterpress shop for some continuing experiments in relief printing: we bought up a set of carving tools at Lee Valley, ordered a sample pack of Akua inks for delivery, and picked up a collection of lino blocks at Deserres before heading home.

Stay tuned for more!

I read Want To Upgrade Your Brain? Stop Doing These 7 Things Immediately. 

Item № 1 is Starting Your Day Too Slow, with a bulleted list of guidance:

Do you want to train your brain to be fast, in a flow state? Here’s how:

• Wake up
• Get out of bed
• Make your bed
• Get hydrated
• Move on to your #1 task AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE

We woke up at 6:09 a.m. this morning after a better-than-normal sleep (№ 5, Failing to Rest, “If you want really, really good focus, and really, really good sleep…”). I was less groggy than normal, and mindful that, to succeed in life (I learned), I needed to not start my day too slowly.

Fortunately, Lisa got up to do yoga (№ 7, Not Engaging in Physical Activity, “You have to get your body running at a high level to support your brain…”), which removed my opportunity to remain in languid cuddle.

And so I woke up.

I got out of bed.

I made the bed (I did not make the bed).

I got hydrated.

(I set the coffee maker to run).

Have I moved on to my #1 task AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE?

When I say your #1 task, I mean important work that can change your life. Train your brain that you are capable of doing that task first. Because you are!

No, I have not. 

Or maybe I have. Writing is important. It does change my life. And I’m doing it before I’ve done anything other than wake up, get out of bed, not make the bed, get hydrated (and make the coffee).

I made the coffee with coffee from Costco. Because, as of Friday, I’m a Costco Gold Star member, a level of societal achievement I never ever thought I’d reach (yes, the Costco system has been relentlessly sending agents to convert me for years, but I’m speaking of a larger “oh, I have access to all the same tools and programs that normal people do” achievement). 

I was near a Costco because we decamped to Dartmouth for a week, to learn the basics of relief printing from Maria Doering. Which meant that, a week ago, I was doing things like this all day:

Lisa’s yoga is done. It’s 6:53. The coffee is ready. L. is being awoken above me. It’s time to make breakfast (from № 7, “Eat better nutrition. Put whole foods into your body. Get your nutrition dialed in.”).

The day is about to start. Or it already has.

Publish.

There’s a new development in downtown Halifax, The Press Block, that will incorporate the facades of the building it replaces. The facades are currently being held in place by an impressive exoskeleton.

I requested an update from the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, Highway Safety on the latest electric vehicle statistics for Prince Edward Island, and they kindly provided a breakdown for the last six years:

While there has been growth over these years in the proportion of total vehicles registered that are electric or hybrid (when I bought my Kia Soul EV in 2019, it alone represented 2.4% of the electric vehicle fleet on PEI, it’s now only 0.13%), it’s still a relative pittance.

Prince Edward Island’s Net Zero Framework calls for “Transition to Zero-Emission Vehicles and other Non-emitting Fuel Sources” as a key lever in the path forward to net zero by 2040, with specific goals of  zero-emission vehicles accounting for 100% of light-duty dealership sales by 2035, and zero-emission vehicles accounting for greater than 60% of PEI’s registered passenger vehicles by 2040.

For $5.00, L.L. Bean in Halifax will make you shoelaces in the colour and length of your choice. It takes about 5 minutes.

Two years ago I reported that this photo that I took in April 2017, of Clover Food Lab in Burlington, MA, had been seen on Google Maps 1.5 million times:

Google Maps emailed me today to tell me the count is now up to 2.3 million:

I was curious enough about this to try to ask Clover Food Labs about the photo — do they know that I’ve helped to promote them 2.3 million times? — and so I looked up their Contact Us page, and read:

Clover is headquartered in Boston, MA. We have no phone number, no landline phones in our company and are paper-free. While this might frustrate some, it helps us keep focused on what matters the most: making food you dream about. Our Locations page contains links to our daily menus – click on any menu item to learn more about it. Our restaurants are staffed with really friendly people who would love to get to know you and answer any questions you might have – face-to-face is our preferred mode of communication.

I love that.

And it reminds me of my own company voicemail:

Hello!

You’ve received the offices of Reinvented in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

Our company is small. So small we don’t answer the phone. So small that if this phone number didn’t have sentimental value, we wouldn’t have a phone at all.

We’re not taking on new clients at present, and we never respond to commercial solicitations.

If you need to get in touch for other reasons, you’re welcome to leave a message here, or to send email to Peter at Rukavina.net — Peter at R U K A V I N A dot net.

Have a good day.

My brother used to have a colleague, let’s call him Phil, who, on the side, was running a business; apparently they’d be out at lunch together, this fellow’s cell phone would ring, and he’d answer “Hello, Phil Spencerton, International Sales…” He was trying to convey an image of grandeur far outstripping the reality of his one-person operation. I’m trying to do the opposite. So is Clover.

I was away,

Since when?

For the longest time I’ve been focused on 2014—the year everything went to hell. And surely crafting a usual story from “partner gets cancer while child enters teenage years” is eminently reasonable. Yes, I went away, gathered the horses, receded, armoured up.

Perhaps 2020, when Catherine died? Briefly untethered from the crush. But then the pandemic. We all went away for awhile.

Recently I’ve been revisiting my deeper history, trying to locate, in the forests of my 20s and 30s, the wellspring for prioritizing containment over aliveness. When did my younger self, shellshocked by challenging human relationships, decide that I should follow the emotional path of the armadillo?

All of those time scales are true.

Where was I?

Mark Rego writes, in a 2022 Psychology Today article, about a question clinicians can ask their patients:

The question applies to any disorder, and everyone immediately knows the answer: “Do you feel like yourself?” After working hard trying to figure out what may be wrong, or if the treatment has had a positive effect, I have asked this countless times. In each instance, both the patient and I knew where things stood.

If the answer is “no,” the follow-up question makes it easy for a patient to focus on what is bothering them. After a “no” answer, the follow-up question is, “If you are not fully yourself, what is missing that would get you back to feeling fully like you?” Because the person’s mindset has already been focused on the universal feeling of being oneself, it becomes easy to say why they are or are not fully at their usual baseline. Things like “I am still very tired,” “I still feel blue very often,” or “I feel better but still have no sex drive,” come immediately to the patient’s mind.

This is as good a description as any of where I was, “not myself.”

Rego continues:

Feeling like yourself is like having a jacket that fits perfectly. Only you can tell that every inch of that jacket conforms to your body, and you know as soon as you put it on. Feeling like yourself is similar in that every inch of internal being feels just right and normal.

I have not felt like I’ve been wearing that jacket for a long long time. Which is not to say that my person has been completely compromised, or even a little compromised, all of the time. But the jacket hasn’t been fitting perfectly for as long as I can remember, longer than death and longer than illness.

Faced with that knowledge, what to do?

Phase one was horseback riding, improv, opening myself up to love, lowering some protective shields, seeing vulnerability as an asset not a liability, starting to take maintenance of my physical body seriously.

Phase two involves a lot of reexamination of what my friend Ton calls “my usual story.” What are the tales I’ve long told about myself (to myself, to others), what are the ways I’ve come up with to describe my choices, the events as they played out, the ways I am. What are the habits that I’ve developed to allow me to live the way I’ve lived? Can I change them? What am I afraid of? Am I actually afraid of the things I say I’m afraid of?

I have help to do this, and it’s been challenging and revealing.

I feel energized. 

And I feel like the jacket is starting to fit a lot better.

—

I was away, was printed on my Golding Jobber № 8 letterpress in 24 point Bodoni Bold with fluorescent pink ink on handmade Papeterie Saint-Armand paper. It’s the first piece I’ve set and printed in seven months, the longest I’ve been away from the press since I acquired it.

The yellow dahlias keep on growing in our front yard.