A quick update: ordered on the 9th and shipment notification on the 11th! I think it is 3-5 days to arrive by Purolator Courier, but it may be less. Stay tuned.
Artisans on Main Street
This Summer an effort is underway to promote art in Montague, PEI, going by the title of this post. A lot could be said, but I want to focus on recent developments that impact me.
I had volunteered to fill two half-day shifts at ‘The Artisans Gallery’ (there are two other venues for consignment and for a ‘Production Studio’). I assumed they needed warm bodies to welcome people and to take payments. But Thursday evening I discover I misunderstood and I am down to, as I see it, do something ‘artsy’. Since my focus is on publishing and photo-products, all I could think of was to sit there on a computer editing or manipulating photos. How dull and non-interactive with visitors!
But wait, I discovered that my small matted photo prints are not wanted at the consignment shop, so I had decided to call them fine art and have them on display in the gallery. Since tourists in gift shops avoided them like the plague for years, maybe they will sell in a more ‘fine’ atmosphere (surrounded by original paintings selling for hundreds of dollars). In that atmosphere my products look like a fire sale. But, since they didn’t sell well, I have been letting my stock decline. I especially need more 8″ x 10″ pictures. I have a pile of mat blanks already cut, but I am not about to try to resurrect my ink-jet printer which has misbehaved despite a new head.
So yesterday I priced 5″ x 7″ enlargements locally…$1.99. Off to the web…no one is giving away 8″ x 10″ prints but I discovered that Blacks will make 6″ x 8″ prints for $0.29 plus shipping! Wow! I got busy in Photoshop Elements and made up a batch of layouts set to that size with a simulated inner mat as part of the print. I just sent off an order for 114 prints and even with tax and shipping it comes in well below $50. When these arrive in a week or two, I have something to do in the Artisan Gallery…I can pick mats and cut them for these photo prints. 6″ x 8″ allows a 1″ mat all around (and the cutouts can easily be used for the smaller 5″ x 7″ mats that go with the 4″ x 6″ prints).
So now visitors can enter in to the process of choosing coordinating colours to go with the prints, and I can produce more 8″ x 10″ product for sale!
Books and Sailing Dreams
The Dream
Reading can be dangerous! The more I read of nautical achievements (and most mariners seem to write books to pay their way around the world), the more I wanted to try it myself. Usually such cruising involves going between continents—off to Europe from the east coast or across to Hawaii from the west coast, for example. Even beyond that are the round-the-world circumnavigations and the single-handed trips that are the subject of many books. I recommend Tinkerbelle, an account of a single-handed trip to England from Massachusetts in a 13’ sailboat, or Slocum’s classic, Sailing Alone Around the World. I recently encountered a blog on the web posted by a 16-year-old girl sailing single-handed around the world from Australia in a 26’ pink sailboat.
I could imagine sailing around PEI or on down to the south shoreof Nova Scotia. Why not sail on down to visit my brother near Plymouth, Massachusetts? It should not be difficult to sail to Newfoundland or even up the coast of Labrador. After that, why not go on down to Bermuda or the Bahamas? It brings me to mind of Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings,
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.[1]
My “door” is the WoodIslands harbour, about two miles from our house. Just think! With the right preparations, I could sail to any coast in the world from there. With a sailboat, the fuel costs would be minimal. About then I began to see the need to divide my nautical travel and boat recommendation books into categories:
- Tiny racing boats (tip them over and right them by yourself)
- Daysailing (out and back to the same place within a few hours)
- Weekending (short trip with one or two overnights)
- Coastal cruising (for perhaps a week or two)
- Bluewater cruising (far away from land)
- Circumnavigation (around the world in a year or two)
When you dream, dream big! Then learn Wisdom and appreciate your limitations. Continue reading “Books and Sailing Dreams”
Colour book looks good!
Just this afternoon I got to see the proof of Tom Rath’s new book. The initial impression is good, although in the 8 1/2″ x 11″ size with few pages makes it feel like an expensive magazine. The cover that was so much trouble looks fine (except I went back one too many iterations when re-doing the background colour to fit inside the bleed boundaries and missed a text re-arrangement.
I see that I should have put more white space in the interior. While the poem text doesn’t run off the page, using a very dark font and going out to fairly narrow margins makes it seem a bit too packed. A smaller font size and wider margins would have been better.
The positive bit about the colour interior is that the colors seem nice and bright. I had purposely increased the saturation to avoid the washed-out look of a sample book, but Tom R had said the pictures looked ‘a bit flat.’ I now understand that he meant with non-glossy paper the pictures do not look like in a glossy magazine.
Anyway, Tom is an extremely reasonable client and is in a hurry to have books to sell, so we went ahead and ordered without changes (not all clients are that reasonable and some have quite impossible expectations).
Tom R showed me the proof at the writers guild meeting, and the presentation was about the Espresso Book Machine at the University of Prince Edward Island. It was fascinating to hear him quietly bemoan the amount of support time he spends with authors to get the manuscripts into a printable file format. I walked away with a sense of restored confidence that Wood Islands Prints is providing a valuable service interfacing authors to a printer.
Epoxy takes many steps
The weather here on PEI has begun to think Spring at last and that means it is often warm enough to have Epoxy set before the next day. I included my ‘to do list’ in the post What to do in cold weather, and now I am finally getting to it.
The first projects were to do with the below-water parts. I ground off paint around the various holes that should not be there. I find an angle-grinder is the best tool. Unlike a sander, it takes off anything. The trick is not to go too far (I almost always use ear and eye protection) since it will take off paint, fiberglass, Epoxy, and wood with no regard for my intentions.
I decided to replace the depth transducer and remove the original non-functioning depth and speed (paddle-wheel) sensors at the same time. The secret to installing these new sensors below the waterline is to drill the holes and Epoxy coat them inside and out before installing the sensor. (Incidentally, it is a good idea when setting screws into the deck to put them in, remove them, coat them with epoxy, and then re-set them–that gives a waterproof seal against the wood so the hole does not become an inlet for water to degrade the wood. I KNOW this but I know this because I removed some screws and discovered some wet beginning.) I now use silicone for the actual sensor installations. Be pre-coating the edges of the wood, any water that might later get in could not get into the plywood and cause eventual rot. Continue reading “Epoxy takes many steps”
What colour space?
Lightning Source has stricter requirements for covers on colour interior books and Tom Rath has just completed a new colour edition of his KittenCat book. As I’ve recently mentioned, it was frustrating that the communication back to me of a problem was delayed by a good two weeks and even more frustrating to find that Photoshop Elements apparently will not produce the specifically required flavour of PDF file.
My guess is that the format requirement buries the insistence on the CMYK colour space common to printing rather than RGB which is the space commonly used on the web and on computer screens. CMYK relates to the way light is subtracted as it is absorbed on a piece of paper. C (Cyan) is a sort of light blue, M (Magenta) is a sort of reddish purple, Y (Yellow) is as you would expect and K (blacK) is the absorbing of everything (used in printing so they don’t have to try to mix the other three inks to get black). Even my inkjet printer has 4 ink cartridges…each with one of those colours. Another approach to ptinting is ‘spot colours’ where the printer makes print passes with specific ink colours for specific purposes (like a 2 or 3 colour flyer that does not need to reproduce full colour pictures). Even some of the fancier home ink-jet printers add extra colours like a light cyan to enable them to do a better job on skies and skin tones. Anyway, the world of print is a very complicated one and ‘speaks’ CMYK. Continue reading “What colour space?”
Hull repair
- Cut for repair
As I said recently, there is no hurry getting the boat into the water. The water is cold and all the Spring projects shout for attention. Still, I have a set of pre launch projects for the boat. The first is hull repair. The trailer rebuild last Summer was about 4″ too narrow and the guide posts crushed the bottom of the outer hulls (its a trimaran).
A few days ago I started by cutting out the damaged bottom plywood about 6″ up and covering the span between bulkheads (about 24″). I had known the hull cover is thin but It was surprising to actually see that the sheathing is 3/8″ plywood with glass only on the outside (but Epoxy coating over everything both inside and out). This boat would not do for the Arctic North since the ice would probably puncture it quickly. Still, in more temperate waters it has lasted 16 years.
Repair of plywood/epoxy/glass hulls is much simpler than fiberglass-only hulls. Having cut away enough of the damaged hull to reach side-to-side and lap over the bulkheads, I will replace the V-shaped frame piece on the bottom edge, and Epoxy on some plywood strips on the inside tops of the cutout area to support the top edge. With support now on all edges of the cutout and the Epoxy having set, I will Epoxy the panels (pre-coated on the inside) against the supports and use a few (drywall) screws to hold hold them in place. Once the Epoxy has set, pull the screws, do a bit of smoothing with an angle grinder, and I can Epoxy a fiber-glass layer on over the raw wood. I do want to add a drain plug on each side in case water gets into the hulls in the Winter (somehow the snow plies up on deck and runs up over the lip of the access hatches in the Spring thaw). The final steps are to smooth the glass/epoxy and paint the outside. Since the damaged area is below the water line, it will be bottom paint. Since the repair will be under water, aesthetics are not very important and a perfectly smooth surface is irrelevant. I might add another coat of Epoxy on the inside for good measure since the repair areas are accessible through the hatches. The entire process will take a couple days due to the set times but is not actually much working time. It would have been impossible in the Winter since the set times would have been much longer.
Did I mention another delay may be a bird having already nested and laid eggs in the radar reflector on the top of the (presently horizontal) mast? Oh well, it will give me time to really get the boat in prime condition.
Cold water
Garden projects seem to demand time now in the Spring because the new plants need to get started, etc. etc. There is not much hurry to get the boat in the water since the water is so cold. I was amazed to see 6 small sailboats out on Charlottetown harbour yesterday; I suppose they might have been a class…or possibly a race. I have seen tem other years and they are open boats which hold two or three…perhaps including an instructor. They are the sort of boats that could go over and the passengers would cling to the sides while the rescue speedboat would quickly come aside. Still the water would be very cold.
Incidentally I ran across some information about hypothermia and drowning. Apparently the effect takes quite some time and most people who go over in cold water (say 40F)drown because there is an immediate paralysis action and inability to breathe. Without a lifejacket even a strong swimmer can go down in the first couple minutes, while hypothermia would probably take at least hour. So much for, ” I’m a good swimmer; I don’t need to wear a life jacket.” Even when rescued, victims of hypothermia should stay laid down and avoid moving–aparently when the victim tries to move around the heart can ‘flutter instead of pump’ and that is the end.
In conclusion:
- WEAR FLOTATION
- Get a life ring to the peerson first…make sure it is handy
- Wear Flotation on deck
Hire an interface person?
I have just completed a frustrating process of getting files to my primary print contractor, Lightning Source. My primary publishing role is to take client’s WORD draft and lay it out with page numbers, headings and table of contents as well as positioning and processing photos for best printing. That is enough of a job, but all of that can be done in WORD (and Photoshop). The latest challenge is in getting the cover in the right format. My printer has always required a PDF-format file with all the fonts embedded…something that WORD does not always do when you tell that program to save as a PDF.
The frustration has arisen because Lightning Source has established stiffer specifications for covers of books with colour interiors. 1) They MUST be laid out on their template. This allows the automatic generation of the bar code for the ISBN, but it also specifies a very large sheet with the actual cover fitting on that page. My failure to understand was that this huge sheet cannot have the cover colour outside of the bleed edge (but must be that larger size) 2) In addition the PDF must be in PDF/X-1a (2001) format. Wouldn’t you know, Photoshop Elements does not produce this. I suspect the need relates to color being mot in RGB but in CMYK, but there may be other issues. Buying full-blown Photoshop is expensive beyond imagination, but I have Adobe Acrobat Professional which includes Acrobat Distiller. Following a circuitous route I am able to get the cover to the required form!
Why am I saying all this? Basically I am suggesting that paying $100-200 for the services of someone, who has gone through all this pain, to do the interface to the printer is not a bad price if you don’t own the expensive software packages or have the computer experience required. Having someone who has been through it can save a lot of grief. Just a thought.
Racks and local sales
If I supply Postcards and photo-magnets to local gift shops, should I provide display racks? This has been a question for several years, but the cost of new display racks compared to the tiny profit from such sales made such purchases ill advised. Would enough extra sales result from better displays to pay for the racks in a year or two?
Since the postcards cost about $0.15 to buy from VistaPrint and wholesale for $0.25 or $0.30, if a new display rack cost $15 (a simple 7-card wall rack) I would need to sell 100-150 cards to break even and table-top rotating units cost at least $30 (200-300 cards needed to be sold). Short of building something of my own, it looked hopeless.
I was recently made aware of a program sponsored by the Eastern PEI Chamber of Commerce and Southern Kings Arts Council called “Artisans on Main Street.” It is renting the vacant storefronts along the main street in Montague and promoting ‘the arts’ in most any form. One of their 3 stores is to carry consignment, which might include my postcards. But the fascinating thing is that one of the ladies there indicated that she had seen used display racks at Habitat for Humanity. I guess businesses that fold sometimes give their equipment to charities. A visit revealed two LARGE racks–4-sided, chest height, free standing–for $20 each. One was quite unsuitable but the other could suffice for postcards and books. With a little innovation its 4 pieces could be adapted for multiple uses. Even better, one of the people there said they had gotten more suitable ones in before and expected to get more in soon. So I have re-entered the display hardware market!