I keep a small dish by the press for rings and things and today one of my mother's earrings went missing. Silver, thin, she wore them for thirty years, and I have been crawling under the table with a torch because of course the floor of a print studio is a museum of every fallen thing since 2019. Found four dried ink flakes, a corner of a copper plate, a plaster fragment I do not want to identify, and no earring.

The earring turned up in the felt blanket. Of course it did. Everything goes into the felt eventually. I have pulled a scraper out of it before.

What gets me is that I did not even notice it was gone for a week. I only realised because I wanted to wear the pair to dinner and found one on the shelf and one nowhere, and had to stand there in front of the mirror doing the arithmetic of when I last saw both.

I do not know why I am telling this to a channel of people who will understand exactly what it is to lose something to a machine that flattens everything into the same two dimensions. Maybe that's the point. The press does not distinguish between a hair and a registration mark and my mother's earring. It presses them all equally. I have spent a lot of years making prints about exactly this. And I still put the jewelry in a dish next to it like an idiot.