Rainy Planet Press

I keep getting hung up on blogging about last Sunday’s Print Arts Fair because I can’t decide where to start. So this will just have to be the first in a series.

I’ll start with the two vendors who sat to the left and right of the Rainy Planet booth. Both were new to the fair, and are extremely talented artists.

To our left was Jenn Ski. Her real name is longer, and I can’t spell it without looking, but it’s probably not going to annoy her if I don’t mention it here. I bothered to print it out in full on her vendor name tag, and she said (and this is not an exact quote) “oh, you wrote the whole thing out, nobody calls me that”. So there you go. Just call her Jenn Ski.



Whatever you want to call her, her prints are really nifty, and all my friends who have the mid-20th-century design inclinations would do well to patronize Jenn’s Etsy store, and read her great blog. Which is updated with enviable frequency.

To our right was Paper Breakfast which was Hannah and her beau (whose name I sadly forget… I really should get better at these things… was it Jonathan?). As coincidence would have it, it turns out that Terri and our friend Editrix took a bookbinding class with Hannah last fall (and Terri also took one with Kelly of May Day Studio, also a vendor at the fair). Anyway, we totally loved their stuff, and spent more money at their booth than we made selling our own stuff. We picked up a tiny animal book, two prints, and a card. If we were infinitely wealthy we probably would have gotten more.

I really loved the albino deer etching, but I do think that the digital version is a pale imitation of how great this is in person: it’s all about the blind deboss and the 3-dimensionality. Also check out her handmade, limited-edition book,
The Pie Eaters (pictured at left).

Just a reminder that the Rainy Planeteers will be selling schtuff at the Print Arts fair at the Museum of Printing in North Andover, Mass. this Sunday, June 15, rain or shine.


Other highlights of the fair to make it worth your while:

• An Adams-Washington colonial-era hand press printing a faux “Good News” newspaper
• A 100-year old newspaper press re-printing the last issue of the last letterpress-printed newspaper in Massachusetts
• Demonstrations of bookbinding, papermaking, paper marbling, lithography, typesetting, and letterpress printing
• hands-on printing activities for kids and adults
• over a dozen vendors selling stationery, art books, journals, broadsides, paper goods, and printing equipment
• the museum and library will be open
• it’s across from the picturesque North Andover common.

Here’s my Flickr photoset from last year’s fair.