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I pulled the blanket off the press this morning and noticed the maker's plate on the side. Glaser, West Berlin, 1962. My father died when I was twenty, so he was alive when this press was bolted together in a city that no longer exists. And now it sits in my studio in Berlin, which is basically the same street, a few kilometers from where it was built. My father was not a printmaker. He was a surgeon. I don't know why I keep doing this arithmetic with the dates. But I've been pulling proofs all week and I keep stopping to touch that plate like it's a relic. There is something about objects that outlive the people who made them. That's probably the whole reason I fell into this medium in the first place. The plate, the proof, the edition. You make a thing and it just keeps going, indifferent to whether you're still around to say anything about it. Anyway. I pulled a good proof of the new aquatint today. The first one that actually feels like something. So the press and I are on good terms right now.

The studio finally replaced the old nipping press. Thirty years of family-owned bones, and it's gone. The new one is clean, calibrated, German, everything the manual promised. And I keep double-checking every board I pull out of it because the old one had a rhythm, you know. A certain give at exactly this spot on the wheel. This one is too smooth and it makes me suspicious. I know that's ridiculous. It's actually better. But there's something about working with a machine that has someone else's wear worn into it. The old press had taken the shape of every hand that used it before mine. Anyway. My collages are flatter now. Technically. I'm trying to decide if that's an improvement or if I just miss the argument.

I scorched a whole stack of pieces this week. Not burned to ash, just pressed with the iron turned up too high because I was hurrying, and now that sheen is on the cloth and I can feel it every time I run my hand across. The pattern's still there. The color's still there. But the life went out of it, and I can't unfeel it. My grandmother would've made me rip it all out and start over. She had a rule about never rushing the pressing. I broke it and I know better. I keep going back and forth on whether to scrap them and cut new pieces, or leave it and let the mistake be part of the work. Honest to goodness I don't know which is the bigger lesson. Part of me says the dull spots are just the truth of that day, and part of me says no, honey, you knew better, the cloth will tell on you. Anybody else ever ruined something small in a way the eye can't catch but the hand knows? What did you do with it?

For three months I have been fighting with the black. The soot I make from the lamp is good but it sits too heavy on the paper, it does not behave like the old black my grandmother used to get. She would not tell me her method fully, only laugh and say the tree knows. So this January I pressed a whole branch of pipal leaves under bricks on the roof. My wife thought I have lost my mind, leaves drying in the sun like that. Yesterday I ground them with a little water and the paste came out a deep green-black, and on the handmade paper it dries to a soft charcoal that takes the fine line beautifully. Not shiny, not flat. Like the leaves are still breathing under the line. I have been painting fish all morning with it. The border work especially looks better than anything I did last year with bought ink. My son says I am being sentimental but he is young, he does not understand that the pigment carries the memory of the tree. The line works because the colour has patience in it. Maybe I will press more leaves before the monsoon. The old methods are slow but they do not disappoint.

ok so I'm at the art supply store today picking out watercolor paper, like actually taking my time because this stuff is expensive and I have a specific feel I'm going for for this piece I'm doing, and this older guy who works there comes up and goes "that stuff's overrated, you should try this" and hands me this cheap cold press that buckles if you breathe on it wrong. I said "oh thanks, I'm looking for the hot press actually" and he goes "no no, cold press is better for beginners, you'll get better results." like sir. I have a BFA. I have been painting with watercolor for eight years. I paint literally every single day. I did not ask for your opinion on my paper. and I just stood there holding my paper and being like "okay thanks" because I'm 26 and I still default to being polite and then I walked away and fumed about it the whole drive home. why do men do this. why is it always at the art store. I have never once had a woman employee at an art store assume I don't know what I'm doing. not once. anyway I bought the hot press and it's beautiful and I'm going to paint something really good on it out of spite. that's the plan.

People think the sewing machine is where a quilt happens. It ain't. It's the ironing board. I got a little Rowenta I bought used off a woman in Irondale maybe fifteen years back, and I keep it right by the window. Press a seam, open it up, look at it, press it again. Half my decisions get made standing right there. A strip'll look like nothing on the table and then you press it flat and all of a sudden that shade of gold is arguing with the red next to it and you know you got to tear it out. My granddaughter came by Sunday and asked why I don't just use the steam setting like everybody else. Baby, steam is for wrinkles. I want heat and a dry board and my own two hands telling the cloth where to lay. I've got a piece on the wall right now, nine blocks in, and I've pulled four apart this week. Every one of them looked fine till I pressed it. Anyhow. That's where I'll be today.

Three weeks without the press. Sent the bearings off to a fella in Clare who said he'd have them done in a week, took three, sure what's the rush in Clare. I was half-convinced I'd get it back and something else would be wrong with it, or I'd forgotten how to print altogether. Stripped it down, cleaned everything I could reach while I was waiting, found a biscuit wrapper the youngest had posted through the roller gap back in February. Reassembled it this afternoon with a spanner I'd left out in the rain and had to dry off on the Aga. Pulled the first proof an hour ago. An old block, a hare I've carved so many times I could do it in my sleep. And it just... worked. Clean. Even pressure. The ink laid down like it was glad to be there. I stood there staring at it for longer than I'd admit. The missus came in and said "is that it" and I said yeah that's it and she said "grand" and went back to putting the kids to bed. Which is exactly the right amount of fuss. If you've got a tool or a machine or a process that's been sitting broken and you're dreading getting back to it, just get the first one done. The second one's easy after that.

I know how that sounds. I'm not about to tell anybody they need to iron. But I have got a red plaid work shirt of my daddy's cut up into twelve pieces right now, and until they go under that iron I cannot tell you what the quilt wants. Flat on the board, seams pressed open, all of a sudden the thing speaks. Before that it's just a pile of cloth and a woman hoping. Same iron since 1979. It's heavy as a brick, no steam to speak of, and my granddaughter keeps trying to order me one of those little new ones that stand up on their own. No ma'am. So yes, the board stays up. It stays up so long I've caught myself eating supper off it. My husband has stopped asking about it. He just walks around it like it's furniture, which I suppose it is now. Ain't nothing wrong with a wrinkled quilt, Lord knows. But there's a difference between a wrinkle that lives in the cloth and a seam you're hiding from yourself.

I've been using the same Saunders Waterford cold-pressed block for years. 300g, the one in the grey wrapper. Bought a new one last week and something's off. The sizing feels different, it's drinking the watercolour wash faster, giving me that rough dry edge I don't want. I went back to an old sheet from the previous block to check, and it's definitely not the same. Could be a bad batch. Could be I'm doing something wrong. But I've been doing this long enough that I trust my hand more than the manufacturer's QA. Anyone else run into this? Or is it just me and I need to adjust.

Thirty-one years. My iron quit on me Wednesday, just cool as could be in the middle of a quilt top, and I stood there looking at that thing like it had betrayed me personally because I guess in a way it had. My granddaughter went online and found me a new one and asked me did I want to look at the reviews and pick something nice. Honey. I said just get me the same one. She said, "Mama, don't you want to see what else is out there?" and I told her no, I want the one that knows how to do what I do. Now I know that's foolish to some. But there's something about a tool you've pressed thousands of seams with. It learns your hand. That old iron knew when to be heavy and when to be light, and it never once scorched my fabric because it understood I don't stand still. The new one come Friday. Same make, same weight, but it don't feel right yet. It's a little too eager, you know. Too much steam. I'm having to teach it, and it's having to teach me, and we're arguing about it. But the quilt in the frame don't care about my feelings. It needs pressing and I need to press it. So we're going to make friends, me and this stiff new iron, one seam at a time. I've still got that old one sitting on the shelf. Can't bring myself to throw it out yet. Some things you just set down for a while.

Fourteen sheets of Arches, the good cold press, ordered in June and waited on for five weeks. I came home from the beach at half past six and the box was standing upright against the gate, in the rain, like it had been asked to wait there politely. The cardboard was so soft it opened with two fingers. The paper inside is not ruined exactly. That is the maddening part. It is a little wavy at the edges and the sizing has that feel to it now, slightly dull under the thumb, and I will spend the next month wondering if the blues are going to come out right or if I am going to be blaming a courier in January for something that was my own fault with an exposure. I did not shout at anyone. I unwrapped it, laid it flat under books, made tea, and then sat looking at the stack for a while feeling something I would rather not name in public. My partner said well, at least it is only paper. He is a good man and he meant it kindly and I have not spoken to him since. Anyway. If anyone knows whether damp paper can be brought back with a long press and patience, I am listening. If not, I am going to keep pressing it and pretending.

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.

Not deliberately. I noticed it this morning about four minutes into a pass of cobalt over a section of leaf, and by then my chest was already tight and I was leaning in far closer than I ought to. I catch myself doing it perhaps three or four times in a working session. The hand is steady, the paper is still damp in the right way, and I have simply stopped breathing, as though the wash were a small animal that might startle. The piece on the board is a study of a single stem of Papaver somniferum, the bristly one, from the garden, which I have been on for nine days and which has already been ruined once and restarted on fresh paper. I am working on Fabriano Artistico, hot pressed, 300 gsm. I have gone back to hot pressed after several years of cold pressed and I am not entirely convinced I made the right decision. The pigment sits on top of the surface rather than sinking in, and every edge you leave is a little more naked for it. It is unforgiving and I am not sure I am a good enough painter this month to deserve it. I do not know whether the breath-holding is concentration or superstition. It is probably superstition. There is no reason a wash would behave differently because I exhaled, and yet I have never once tested it, which tells you something about how much I want to know the answer. Someone in a class last year told me she hums while she paints, one continuous low note, and that when the note stops she knows she has lost the thread and steps away from the board. I thought it was a clever trick. I have not managed to take it up, mostly because I would then have to hear myself.

The edition is 12 and I have been at the same zinc plate since Thursday. The image is fine. The problem is that I keep pulling proofs to check the bite and then keeping the ones that are "nice", and now I have eleven nice prints and no idea which one is the print. My printer friend says this is the whole point of an edition, that the multiplicity is the work, the small differences are the variable. I know the theory. I have read the theory. I have even written about the theory. But at 1am in the studio with a fan going and my hands black to the wrist, the theory feels like something I say to other people. In practice I am standing there choosing between eleven nearly identical sheets like a woman picking tomatoes, and every one of them is a little bit wrong in a different place. The third one has a softer edge on the left where the felt slipped. The eleventh has a cleaner line and less atmosphere. I like the third. I should not like the third, because liking the third is liking a mistake, and then what do I do, print eleven more mistakes on purpose? I am also aware, and this is the part that actually bothers me, that if I frame the third one and call it the definitive state, it becomes the original, and the other ten become copies of it, and I have spent eleven years arguing that this is a lie.

The Vandercook in the corner of the studio makes this heavy click-clack rhythm when I run a proof, and I've stopped noticing it until someone visits and says, what is that noise. And then I notice it and I realize I like it. Like a metronome that doesn't care about tempo. There's something about a machine that just does its one thing, over and over, that calms me down more than any playlist. Repetition is literally my medium and I still get surprised that I find it soothing instead of boring. Today I pulled thirty-one proofs of a copper plate I've been fighting for two weeks. The inking is finally even. The plate is ruined in the sense that I will probably never edition it because I changed the composition three times, so it's just a unique state nobody will ever see. There's a word for that in Italian, stato unico, and I like that a language has a term for the thing that's only ever happened once and will never happen again. Printmaking is supposed to be about multiples. Sometimes the one-off is the honest version. Anyway. The click sound is still going. I think I'd actually miss it on the days I don't print.

Tomorrow I have to deliver an edition of 40 and I've been sitting with them spread across the floor since Tuesday, all of them technically identical, all of them slightly not, and I genuinely cannot tell you which one is the print. There's a smudge on number 17 where the paper slipped, and honestly it's the best thing in the edition, and I'm going to have to pull it because the whole point of an edition is that the 17th is the same as the 3rd. This is the thing I keep coming back to and it never resolves. I make multiples for a living, I believe in the multiple, I teach the multiple, and every time I finish an edition I want to keep the ugly one. The mistake is the only one that's mine. The other 39 belong to the plate. There's a corner of the studio where I stack the rejects, and it's grown into the more interesting pile. I should probably stop calling it the reject pile. I don't have a clean resolution for this. I just want to know if the rest of you who print feel it too, or if I'm romanticizing a slipped sheet of Somerset because I have deadline nerves and no sleep.

Pulling a test sheet off the press yesterday, the third one in a row that came out slightly off, and I had the thought I always have now: I don't want to fix this one. For those who don't print: registration is the alignment of the layers. You build a sheet in passes, and every pass has to land exactly where the last one did. There is a whole apparatus of crosses, pins, mylar, tape. It exists so the reproduction is faithful to the matrix. So the copy disappears into the original. I have a registration sheet from a two-colour etching I made in 2015, and the second plate drifted maybe a millimetre and a half on every one of the forty prints. A hairline of the first colour, all around the edge of the shape, where it should not be. I kept the sheet. Not as a memento, more as an argument I was having with myself. Because a perfect multiple has no author. It has a maker, a press, a process, but the sheet itself is just the matrix arriving. The misalignment is the one thing the plate cannot reproduce. It is where the hand is still visible, in a medium whose entire premise is that the hand gets edited out. There is a whole conversation about the aura and the copy that starts in the 1930s and never quite ends, and I keep finding that the interesting part is not the copy. It is the error. The copy is the system working. The error is the system admitting someone was standing there. I am in the middle of a series now where I am deliberately letting the second colour shift by a fixed offset on every print, the same amount, no variation. Which is its own trap, I know. I have turned the accident into a rule. A rule is reproducible. So I am back to no hand, just a more interesting system. I don't have a neat place to land this. It is just that the sheet on my wall is eleven years old and I am still not sure if I kept it as evidence or as an excuse.

Eleven pulls off the same copper plate since Monday. Same bite, same ink, same pressure on the press, and every single one is different. The eleventh is cleaner than the first, which should feel like progress and instead feels like I've lost the thing I was chasing. There's a plate mark on number three where I leaned too hard on the felt, a small bruise in the paper, and I keep coming back to it. It's the worst one technically. It's also the only one that couldn't have been made by anyone else on any other day. I have a show in April and the curator wants an edition of fifteen. I said yes before I understood what I was agreeing to. An edition promises that the fifteen are the same object. They're not, and pretending they are feels like a small lie I'd have to sign my name under fifteen times. The plate has about four more good prints in it before the lines start to close. So whatever the real one is, it's in the next four, and I have no way to decide which. I put number three on the wall above the press, face out. Partly to look at it. Partly so I stop pretending I don't know which one I actually mean.

Testing a 12-plate edition this week and I've noticed something that bothers me. Pulls 4 and 5 come out of the press effectively identical. Same ink, same pressure, same sheet from the same batch of Somerset. And still, laying them side by side on the drying rack, I choose the 4th every time. I can't articulate why and I resent that a bit, because the whole point of my work is that the multiple is supposed to be a critique of the unique object. I've been telling this to students for years. So now I have a stack of number 4s that are the "good" ones, which is exactly the hierarchy I claim not to believe in. Either the difference is real and my press does something on the fifth pull I haven't identified, or it's pure aesthetic superstition and I've been making fetish objects without noticing. What I actually suspect: it's not the print at all, it's the sequence. The 4th is the one where my hands have stopped thinking and the edition hasn't started to bore me yet. Which would mean the "authentic" impression is just a record of my own attention span, and I should probably stop numbering them. But I won't. Has anyone else caught themselves doing this with an edition? Choosing a favorite pull and then having to build a whole theory around the accident of it.

Small thing, but I put the deposit down for a three day pastel portrait workshop in Katowice in October. It has sat open in my browser since April. I kept telling myself I would decide after the next piece was finished, and then obviously there is always a next piece. The part that made me press send, honestly, is that the tutor uses the same toned paper I do, the grey-blue Canson, and I have wanted for a year to watch someone else handle it live instead of guessing from videos. I have no idea what the level will be like. There is a real chance I am the slowest one in the room and I will spend three days quietly panicking at the back. But I paid, and it is not refundable, so now I go. I have never taken any proper class in my life, only books and the internet and a lot of ruined sheets. If any of you have done one of these, how did you survive the first hour? I am already thinking about what to bring and it is June.