![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2782\/4521524855_1190dbd000.jpg\" "\\"platemaker\\"")
<\/p>\nYesterday, I made photopolymer plates of the artwork for my letterpress project in class. I had no idea what was involved with that process (I thought you just sent out Illustrator files and they’d send you the plates – which you can, it’s just way more expensive), so I was very excited to learn all about the magic involved. It happens here:<\/p>\n
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Notice the middle section glowing alluringly? That’s where you vacuum your plates and film onto a board and expose it to UV light for 3 minutes. Then you put it in the washer on top, which is full of water and brushes, and wash your plates for 4 minutes and 40 seconds (exactly, or else). Then you rinse the plates, dry them completely with a blowdryer (if you’re me, you’ll burn yourself 20 times), put them in the EZ-Bake oven on the bottom for 10 minutes, then re-expose them to UV for another 5 minutes. After that, slap some adhesive on the back, and you’ve got yourself some plates to print from.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4050\/4522249980_b508e946d6.jpg\" "\\"plates\\"")
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I had some time to set type last night, too, after a prolonged search through the type guide to find a font that came in both 14 point and 60 point (later revised to 48 point), and that had more than 6 o’s. Goudy Bold, I’m looking at you here.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4059\/4522774225_904ee5c4c8.jpg\" "\\"goudy\\"")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday, I made photopolymer plates of the artwork for my letterpress project in class. I had no idea what was involved with that process (I thought you just sent out Illustrator files and they’d send you the plates – which you can, it’s just way more expensive), so I was very excited to learn all …read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letterpress"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9qt-vS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}