Custom Greeting Cards -The Finished Product

With training and work I've not had time to post a blog about the finished greeting cards that I made for auction - but I have a moment before my long bike ride today to show you how they turned out.

The printing process went quite smoothly. I only had to print 5 of each card and they were all one color, so all I needed was an inking plate, black (oil-based Speedball) block printing ink, and a small 2.5 inch soft rubber brayer (Speedball). The inking plate is a cheap marble slab that I bought years ago at Home Depot in the tile area. You could just as simply use a pane of glass, it just has to be a non-porous flat surface:

I created a template out of a scrap piece of paper/newsprint with pencil lines drawn on it for lining up the block along two adjacent edges so that I have the correct margin. The block is placed with its edge on the pencil lines and the paper is placed to line up along the same two adjacent edges of the template border itself. The only tricky part of this step is to make sure that the card will fold with the image on the correct side. Here are some shots of how I line everything up:

And finally, I run it through my small etching press, with its roller adjusted to the height of the block with the paper on it. I do a dry run - a non-inked plate with paper on top - to adjust the height of the roller. You want pressure to offset the ink onto the paper, but not so much pressure to get ink to spread outside the lines or to damage the linoleum block:

You can see the finished cards in the first photo at the top of the page. I started the bidding at $5, in $1 minium increments and by day 2, the bidding was up to $12. Don't know how much they sold for, but I got requests by workshop attendees to do another edition of cards.