Task 4- Potato Printing

It took me roughly 45 mins to carve out all my letters with the “G” taking up the most time. That was the most intricate and challenging letter where some specialized tools would have served me better than a paring knife. I tried to use potatoes that were all similar in size so that my letters would be more uniform. When it came to carving them out, letters that had fewer lines could be kept smaller but letters with more curves and swooped lines came out larger.

My real blunder was in glancing at the materials for the week, getting excited about doing a craft as an activity and then launching straight into the stamp making. I finished creating my stamps and it wasn’t until I had printed out my five-letter word once that I realized I should have carved letters backwards. I enjoyed the short film assigned this week on letterpress technology and can’t help but think that had I watched that before attempting the activity, I would have remembered to reverse my letters in seeing the clips of the technician setting up to print out a page.

With the amount of time it took me to set up and execute the printing of a single word with stamps, I am very thankful that mechanized writing has evolved even further from the days of the printing press. Having the freedom to write electronically allows me to type and save as much as I want. I can go back with ease to erase a word or an entire section and alter my text in any way I choose right up until the moment I hit the print button. I feel for those monks stuck in a scriptorium who might have a day’s worth of work ruined by one spelling error.