Babble – Page 121 – BoBo's World

My First Art Project

As most of you know, Mommy is an artist at heart and she wasted no time in getting me started on my first art project. Mommy wanted to preserve my hand and footprints and frame the whole thing with the letterpress announcement.

After much searching online, Mommy found the “right” frame set from Red Envelope for $49.99 plus 15% off. It had all the bells and whistles of what she wanted in the frame at a lower cost than what it would have cost to do this a la carte from buying supplies from Michael’s.

frame

The first thing Mommy did was etch my name and birth date into the glass with Armour Etch. Mommy bought the Armour Etch over 10 years ago and have never used it. It’s good to know that it still works! Mommy cut homemade stencil using “Viner Hand” 100 point font on an old vinyl bumper sticker. This way, Mommy didn’t have go out to buy vinyl masking just for this purpose.

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Applying the Armour Etch to the stencil. It etches after only one minute!

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See the final etched glass.

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The middle opening of the mat was a big small, so Mommy bought a mat cutter to make the opening bigger to fit the announcement. Mommy also thought the plain off-white mat was a bit boring, so she used a Pearl-Ex and gum arabic mixture to paint the mat in this pearly glaze color.

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Then comes the part where I come in! After PoPo gave me a bath, Mommy stamped my foot and hand. We had to try a couple of times because I wasn’t sure what I stepping into. Was it my own poop? Was it Mommy’s mushy tummy? Whatever it was, Mommy was pleased with the results of the print. The mold had to dry at room temperature for a couple of days.

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Mommy then assembled the print molds onto the frame and put the whole thing together. See the final product!

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Maybe I’ll make Mommy proud and be a talented artist (as a side job) in the future!

Announcing ME.

This may look familiar to most of you.

Mommy and Daddy had my birth announcement custom printed by letterpress at Hijirik Studios in Brooklyn, NYC by a local artist there named Hijiri Shepherd. Mommy actually designed the whole thing and asked Hijiri to print them. If Mommy had access to a letterpress press, she would have printed these herself! “Why letterpress?” you ask. Well, there are two reasons: 1. Mommy likes the 3-D nature of how letterpress printing looks and 2. Mommy has an obsession with paper. So, for all it’s worth, Mommy’s quirky obsessions cost $220 for 60 announcements. To Mommy, it’s well worth the money, but to those of you who may not understand what the big fuss is (like Daddy), it’s probably a tad over-kill.

Hijiri keeps a blog of her work and the following was her entry on the printing process for my announcement. This was directly copied from her blog at: http://heartfish.com/2009/08/07/cadens-birth-announcements/

I worked on another lovely custom birth announcements for Vivia and Calvin’s first beautiful boy, Caden. It was my pleasure designing and printing them, I think it is so wonderful to get to work on one’s special occasion! I feel so great.

Here is the making-of… Hope you enjoy!

Setting plates on the base. This part is going to be light blue.

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Mixing light blue ink:

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Matching colors…

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Put the ink on the press, ink the plates, and ready to print.

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Pretty close… Hand mixing ink is fun, but sometimes it’s hard to match it exactly… the color looks different on press and paper, it comes out differently every print, too.

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