As a kid, courtesy of my large box of Crayola crayons, colors were synonymous with words: apricot, almond, goldenrod… (of course wikipedia has a chart with historical information on every Crayola color ever!). As an adult and a letterpress printer the word-names aren’t useful anymore. I mix colors using a Pantone mixing guide, which has no names, only percentages of other colors with no names (well, really code numbers for names!). So when my friend Cathy sent me a link to a color thesaurus, I was immediately transported back to kindergarten, sitting at the kitchen table with paper and my box of Crayolas (and that smell of waxy crayons). Here’s the entry for “goldenrod”:
The other day as I was letterpress printing cards from photopolymer plates, I noticed a small ink mark toward the edge of the paper that shouldn’t have been there. I quickly discovered that the bottom corner of the plate was curled thus picking up ink and printing on my card! My usual remedy for this problem is to tape down the offending corner and if that doesn’t work, to cut off the curled piece of the plate.
But what to do about the already printed cards? I remembered a trick my friend Laura Jane taught me — the errant ink can be removed by gently rubbing the paper with a bit of very fine grain sandpaper (I used 320 grit). Whew, cards saved!
