Jul 20, 2009
This past weekend Elevated Press participated in the Shadow Art Fair, at the Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti Michigan. I brought my Kelsey tabletop press along to give attendees the chance to see, and for some, try out, a letterpress in action. Those that did took home the print that they made.
The place was packed, and we got a good reaction from visitors to our table. Lasting from noon to midnight, I will say it was a bit of a challenge to keep our energy up, but the beer helped get us through! Overall it was a successful day... pretty good for being our first big art fair!
Jan 31, 2009
In mid-January Elevated Press bought a Vandercook #3 press (circe 1937) near Pasadena, CA. We arranged freight shipping for the press to our home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a week later it arrived in front of our house on a full length semi-trailor truck.
Ok, well it wasn't quite that smooth... the press was picked-up 3 days early without record of the pick-up, and was "lost" in a freight shipping warehouse for a weekend before being officially located. Then, I was told that there was a hold-up in Chicago, possibly due to damage to the press. Then when the press finally arrived, I discovered that the legs had punched through a plywood layer on top of the pallet. Needless to say the whole freight shipping process was super stressful. I'll definitely avoid doing anything like that again in the future.
Since the press was going to the small studio shed behind the house, and there was tons of snow on the ground, we devised a ramp system on the driveway out of pieces of plywood to roll the press from the road to the studio on a pallet jack. After literally stopping traffic and a couple of tense moments where the pallet jack broke through the plywood under the 1,200 lbs of the press, we finally got it in place. Yay!!!
Unfortunately, we later discovered that the press suffered a bit of damage to the two front legs when the legs punched through the plywood on the pallet. But we arranged for a fantastic welder to come out on-site to repair the damage and reinforce the legs to make them even stronger than before!
