Our visiting expert says John Dunlap set the Declaration in 3 to 5 hours on July 4, 1776. We are 1/3 of the way done after the first day of our 12 hour typesetting event!
Find someone who looks at you the way @southernletterpress is looking at our new ink balls at Common Press, with many thanks to Sara Karpinski of the Franklin Printing Office for sharing her expertise.
Cloth collected from the community to beautiful handmade paper sheets in one day, with our new mould and deckle and our new vat. Undoable without @ericahonson genius and @southernletterpress chaos. 250 more sheets to go.
Join Historic RittenhouseTown Sunday April 18th at our barn for a free outdoor celebration as we mark the changing of the season with spring themed activities. The mini festival combines Earth Day, spring welcome & International Day of Monuments and Sites is a family-friendly event in the heart of nature, offering a variety of free programming and tours that celebrate both renewal and sustainability.
• Birding Hike with Troy Bynum 8-10
• Tours of the Homestead 11-3
• Hand paper making with the Common Press 11-4
• Print and Paint Natural Dye 11-4
• Construction of mini water wheels 11-4
• Flax weaving with the PA Flax Project 12-4
• Sidewalk Art 11-4
Event Partners: Historic Germantown; PA Flax Project, Global Philadelphia, TB_Wildlife_Photography, Historic RittenhouseTown, Philadelphia Dye Club
210 Lincoln Drive Philadelphia PA 19144
1: cut fabric soaked overnight going into the pot to cook in soda ash / 2: fabric after cooking for 2 hours / 3: after 30 minutes in the beater / 4: after 1 hour / 5: after 2.5 hours / 6: checking pulp in glass cup / 7: the studio / 8: the paper, light grey! (a little test sheet) / 9: the second batch, purple!
@ericahonson cooked and beat the first 2 batches of fiber this weekend for the @typeofindependence project! We collected 156lbs of cotton and linen fabric from people around Philadelphia between September and December. Here’s the breakdown:
~ 27lbs w/ synthetic content (not suitable for paper)
~ 10lbs set aside for type cleaning
~ 25lbs removed (seams, hems, zippers, buttons, etc.)
~ 94lbs cotton/linen fiber (lots of tees and bits from sewing projects, some bedsheets, some underwear, thread, yarn, etc.) remaining for making paper!
We’ll be making paper through mid-April during our residency @historicrittenhousetown where there’s a 2lb Reina beater. It could easily take over a hundred hours to beat all the fabric / textiles to a pulp. We’re planning to beat 28lbs to start; the batches of pulp will be mixed together so that all ~500 (hopefully) sheets of paper are the same color.
We got the keys to start our month-long residency to make paper for our Declaration replicas at the studio (the yellow building behind the magnolia tree) at @historicrittenhousetown . We'll be using the rags we collected to make paper pulp and pull sheets of 16 x 20 inch paper to print on over the summer. This location is beautiful and historical... It is the first location of papermaking in the United States (they used the water power of the creek seen here!). Join us on Saturday 3/14 from 2 to 4 p.m. for an open house! Link in the bio.
We had a mould and deckle made for our Declaration of Independence project, and it arrived from WI today. We will use this beautiful tool to make sheets the size of the original Declaration, using pulp from our community rag collection
And the papermaking begins! We are sorting the rags we collected to figure out which are 100% cotton. A fashion design grad student dropped by to tell us how to tell what is cotton!
Catch the evolution of the typos! For Professor Friedman's English class, Shakespeare in Love, students set the prologue to Romeo and Juliet and experienced first hand how metal type setting can change the transmission of language. #letterpress #upenn
