Paper – Page 11 – Green Chair Press Blog

Washi paper

I’ve sold a lot of these “mini haiku” books made out of Japanese paper (or chiyogami). But I’ve had a hard time finding more paper with the same pattern when it’s time to make more books. I’ve been buying small sheets from a scrapbook supply store I found on the web, but there’s a lot of wasted paper. I’ve found many other stores that sell Japanese paper, but not this cherry blossom pattern. But today I found Paper Mojo. They have a huge selection and sell whole and 1/2 sheets.

By the way, my haiku book is constructed using a techinque I learned from Hedi Kyle, called the blizzard book. Japanese paper is perfect for this binding because it folds very crisply so the folds aren’t bulky.

These books are on sale in my shop. Also available are instructions and a kit for making this book.

Paper for laser printing and letterpress

I’m always trying to find paper that I can print on a laser or ink jet printer and then letterpress. Lots of paper for ink jet and laser printers isn’t cotton or archival or it’s coated. Text weight letterpress paper for books is often expensive per sheet and usually (at least for where I live) has to be mail ordered.

For this book I did of a friend’s poems, he wanted to include both photographs and letterpress. After some experiments, I found that the photos reproduced well on Mohawk Superfine using a color laser printer. I’ve used Mohawk Superfine for other letterpressed books, and it’s reasonably priced. Plus, I could get parent sheets from a local Kelly Paper, rather than mail order.

Making a hard bound book was going to be too expensive, so to make the binding special and affordable, we decided to sew the sections through the cover onto tapes and then weave the tapes into the front & back.

Spine showing sewing

Front cover

Coasters

A pile of coaster blanks My friends Cathy & Glen have a bi-annual bash for their bookish friends every winter as part of the Antiquarian Book Fair. For quite some time I’ve been thinking about printing coasters but couldn’t invent a reason. So for Christmas, I gave them an IOU for coasters for their party. Cathy is meant to tell me what they should look like & I’ll design and print them.

I bought coaster blanks from Katz Americas (used to be American Coaster) and they arrived today (I live in California, American Coaster is in NY. I had to buy 1000 coasters for about $18. The shipping was $18! Even with the shipping it’s a great deal). The blanks are 4×4 and about 1/8″ thick — so wonderfully pulpy and chewy! They’ll take a good bite from the letterpress. [You can see the resulting coasters here.]