Bookluck! Studio process! Lichen! Spectrolite!
Plus some recipes we've been cooking, and pics of new zines and pamphlets.
Hello hello!
First of all: BOOKLUCK!
Seattle friends — on SATURDAY (this weekend: October 2nd) from 1-5pm join us in Ravenna park for Bookluck!
It’s an informal picnic potluck for zine/book/small press/publishing people that Amelia is organizing with Jayme & Tom of Seattle Art Book Fair. Come out, make new friends. Vax cards needed + wear a mask when not eating, outdoors in the park… and the Light Rail opens that day: you could take light rail to Bookluck via the new U District or Roosevelt stops!
Bring any printed matter you want to give away or trade, and food and drink to share.
The full invitation with all the details at https://bit.ly/bookluck, please RSVP if you can make it!
Zines, pamphlets, and late summer in Seattle
We both made zines for the occasion of Olympia zine fest, where we tabled with Living Room Press and which was a lot of fun on a sunny afternoon in the park. Amelia made a Studio Process Journal, 8 pages including cover with black ink on grey paper, envisioned as a recurring stocktaking.
Adam made Lichen the Lichen, a collection of colorful lichen photos from the mountains this summer plus lichen facts. Three color risograph printed in blue, fluorescent pink, and yellow inks, the photos kind of look three-dimensional.
K. says “Please tell Adam I’m so obsessed with his lichen zine. It’s beautifully written and poetic, and also funny and I’m now in love with lichen.” I’m in love with lichen now too, and I also wanted to recommend the book Entangled Life, which has a lichen chapter where I had to keep interrupting Adam from his own reading, to read long sections aloud. (In the vein of transcendent science reading about how incredible our world is, I also recommend The Brilliant Abyss about life in the deep sea.)
Currently making test prints of a sourdough pamphlet, and organizing a pamphlet residency with our friends Champagne Arcade and a group of 10 or so artists — mark your calendars for a pop-up launch on October 30th if you want to get a bundle of all the pamphlets. More details to come.
We’ve also been printing out test prints of collaborators’ zines to publish, planning samples for an upcoming All Well photoshoot, and Amelia’s been sewing lots of bunnies for baby gifts.
Around Seattle, we said a sweet goodbye to the DIY community arts space Soft Spot. And we’re getting excited for Kim Kent’s new Drink Books, a pop-up bookstore + natural wine bottle shop that’s coming to Phinney / Greenwood pretty soon. More on drink-books.com and @wedrinkbooks on instagram.
Spectrolite: square zine template + color palettes
Adam’s been coding some very cool Spectrolite stuff now that the fall weather is here. Two new things that are in Spectrolite now:
Download a Procreate color palette or Adobe swatch with all your risograph inks! (Look for the new buttons on the Inks page.) Handy for making art specifically in riso ink colors (set your layers to multiply, maybe change the opacity) that you then separate in Spectrolite. We also improved RISO-ifying a bit, so that any pixels that are in a specific ink color in your palette, or very close to it should separate out only onto their color layer. Quite nice for fine linework or text, for example.
New 6-up square zine template (and a how-to tutorial) on the Templates page: a nice and thrifty use of 11x17 or A3 paper, and you end up with an interestingly shaped booklet.
And the next big feature is in the works: layout templates!! What kind of templates do you want? Small and big art prints, but in what sizes? Bookmarks? Postcards? Business cards? (Anything from this list?) What trim marks do you like? Cool registration marks, color bars, etc? Please! Send us template sketches if you have ideas to contribute — how do you fill an 11x17” or A3 page efficiently? Write to us!
We’ve been showing some behind-the-scenes process on the @spectrolite.app instagram stories, if you want to see more of what software development as an art project looks like. And as always, you can see our thoughts on what else we want to build in our working document, at https://bit.ly/spectrolite.
We did the first color separations in Python and Jupyter notebook in August 2020 — and October 3rd last year was the first time we had it packaged into an Electron app. So however we mark it: Happy Birthday Spectrolite!!
Feeling very glad, seeing how far it’s come along and to get to be making something that people are find useful. It’s really so much fun: a mix of design problems, reading computer science and math papers, video chatting with people, making quick UX/UI sketches and product management plans… Excited to build more.
Four recipes we’ve cooked lately
That’s about it for now. Onwards to fall: making things in the studio, watching the p-patch garden growing a bit each week, doing lots and lots of sample sewing, writing in google documents, and so on. And cooking too; here are some recent things we cooked, linked for you:
Minestrone — Giuliano Bugialli, as told by Dinner A Love Story (but with canned beans), really excellent with sourdough.
Cobbler with italian plums and peaches and nectarines.
Peperonata from Six Seasons was so oily and so good, we ate it for days on top of rice, eggs, toast, etc. (Inspired by getting the gallon-sized bag of sweet peppers at the restaurant supply store, the last time I stocked up on the 25-lb bag of bread flour.)
More later, just reply to write back to us if you want,
Amelia +Adam
PS — Lots more later, but there’s some Really Big Exciting News about All Well!