There was a printing marathon at Painted Tongue Press last weekend! Three titles were completely out of stock and two were needed to fill orders. Since red was on the press last, and it’s easier to clean the press and move from a similar color, I started with the magenta layer of the Ice Plant card.

Ice Plant note (without the text) was needed for the order, but the Ice Plant sympathy card is a popular design; I thought we had recently printed them and had a lot left. Just to be sure, before cleaning the magenta off the press, I checked the stock and…nope. Supplies were low! So I gathered more paper and doubled the run of magenta.

Although we recently began offering new releases with unprinted envelopes, we haven’t phased out the printed envelopes on reprints. (We love our printed envelopes! It was a business decision to phase them out, not a fun one to make, but it had to be done.) But reprints have printed envelopes for now, so the Ice Plant envelopes were on the press this weekend too.

Going from magenta to yellow on the press was painful, but had to be done. I cleaned the press, ran it with transparent white ink, and cleaned it again. The rag still came up pink, meaning the rollers still had magenta ink on them, which would mix with yellow if left on the press. I cleaned the press some more, and moved on to yellow.

The yellow was a touch warmer than the previous press run, due to going from magenta to yellow (and maybe I wasn’t the most patient with cleaning the rollers), but the color was only slightly different. It still looked great, and wasn’t different enough to need adjustment.

It was an easy switch from yellow to green for the leaves on the Bleeding Heart card.

I then moved from green to blue, for the Hepatica flowers. (The yellow on the Hepatica had been printed earlier this week, before Ice Plant was needed. If they had been printed together, it would have made life easier.)

I printed the envelopes for the Hepatica card too – the plate was missing, so I had to make a new one.

I finally moved onto black. The Hepatica cards were complete!

But what about Ice Plant?

I ran into a very strange problem. The black around the edges of the centers of the flowers was missing (see previous printing beside the last pull of new printing). This is how printing is sometimes, another problem to solve. But after a long weekend of printing, and considering there was a hungry child in the studio hoping to go home soon, the press was turned off for the day…and tomorrow is another day to figure things out.