Potato Printing

I was drawn to this task immediately for two reasons:

1. When my youngest was small, they received a tote bag decorating kit as a birthday present. I was all set to be a crafty mom and whip up some potato stamps for an afternoon playdate. But the morning presented some parenting challenges, and my potato carving plans were dashed. So I let the kids freehand decorate their tote bags, and they still had a great time.
2. This quote from the letterpress video in Module 4.3 really resonated with me:

 “The digital age does remove us from the tactile work, the more hands-on. And I think there is a longing in our soul to get back to that” (Danny Cooke Freelance Filmmaker, 2012).

I do agree with that statement. As my professional life is more and more about being at a computer in a virtual workplace and creating online courses and etexts, I try to find more ways to be away from a screen in my personal life. I think that’s why I really enjoyed this task, even though I found it challenging. While I have crafty aspirations, I am not an exceptionally skilled craftsperson. I chose a word with as many straight-line letters as possible. Because if Squid Game has taught us anything, it’s that curves are more difficult to carve. (Although potatoes are more forgiving than dalgona candy.) Serifs were never part of the plan, and I chose capital letters for ease of reproduction, not ease of reading. Carving the letters took much less time than I thought, and I felt good about my progress.

I decided to test my stamps.

I completely forgot about the need to reverse the letters N and K. Luckily, I could just flip around the K stamp, but the N required a new carving. And since I do not have strong spatial skills (I cannot help my kids with their translations, reflections, and rotations math homework), I had to Google a visual for a backwards “N.”

Once I had my stamps ready to go and chose vermillion as my paint colour, I found the task of the exact duplication of the word THINK to be impossible with the tools I had at hand. While the text was preserved and clearly communicated when printed on the page, I could not duplicate the paint distribution or the kerning. I could not even keep the letters horizontally aligned. But when I was done, I was immediately thinking of how I could improve the process if I had to duplicate the word again: perhaps I could use lined paper, or I could cut off the rounded sides of my stamps so I could space the letters on the page more accurately. Or maybe a different kind of paint would help with the application consistency. I imagine that the mechanization of writing would have evolved the same way: with a desire to improve the technology with tweaks and improvements that added up and changed the world.