GET HUBBIED

click here for their website. Utilize their genius, and keep the art form alive. I don't want to give away the artist's final plans, but Cary and Brooks, the owners of Aardvark, and Bill, the very tall master of the press (with a pocket brimming and stacked with pens and tools) are all enthused about this idea and process. The letterpress text was challenging on the kind of paper I provided. They made it work, though it was no simple plan. The die cut part of the plan comes next.

The paper was complex to sort out. I've been working with this lovely gal Martha in the mid-west for over a year to make the kind of paper that Ruscha described wanting for his idea, the wedding favor. As of this moment, I've gathered about 100 sheets of her paper. It doesn't feel quite right to call it paper, since each sheet is an object in itself, and ten of them took a couple of weeks to make, dry and send. Ed wanted it as thick as you could get 'paper' and as homemade and recycled as is possible. I sampled a lot of artists who made paper until I found the right person. If you search for the company: Pulpart, at the www.etsy.com site, you'll find Martha's store.

And then the description of the order once I told her exactly what we were looking for, which has a certain poetry:

Extra thick white handmade paper - CUSTOM ORDER FOR HUBBYCO from PulpArt. Extra thick white handmade paper - CUSTOM ORDER FOR HUBBYCO. You will receive 10 pieces of extremely thick paper for your die cut project. Each sheet of paper is individually made by hand using an art form created by the Chinese over 1,000 years ago. I sift through my junk mail, old bills, letters and the like to find the highest quality paper. (You have to start with good paper to end up with good paper!) I do not use bleaches or dyes to color my paper. The color is determined from the scraps I use. I shred the recycled paper, combine it with water to make a pulp. A frame with a screen is pulled through the water to catch the pulp, which forms a sheet of paper that I air dry.