Bad Shoe co-editors Elly Herget and Erin Wiles stopped by Jill Bieker’s storefront residence/studio on Cherokee Street last Monday to check out the making of the cover of the latest issue. For the first time, Bad Shoe(always assembled by human fingers and hand-stitched) will feature a hand-printed cover. Using a simple, elegant design of an ear she carved in a woodblock, Jill produced almost 100 covers for our 8th issue (Vol. 3, Iss. 1 2012).  Each cover is unique, due both to the inherent inconsistencies of such a manual process and Jill’s process of  blending different hues of ink gradually as she printed each color.

Jill uses a simple framing technique to ensure the image is centered on each cover.

Manual printmaking and letterpress printing often bring to mind the gigantic, iron, clunky antique press. While Jill has worked with such presses (she was recently employed by The Firecracker Press) and could have produced our covers on such a beast, she is also able to work with the simplest of tools. She framed the woodblock on the backside of a canvas and mixed the ink on a plastic clipboard with a roller.

Using the edge of the canvas frame as a guide, she pressed each cover to the woodblock and employed a wooden spoon to evenly distribute pressure over the entire design so that the ink would transfer smoothly. Occasionally she would miss a tiny spot, leaving a distinctive “fingerprint” on each cover–places in the design where the ink is fainter or missing. Occasionally too much pressure would be applied in the roughly-hewn negative space of the woodblock. This would result in visual noise surrounding the ear on the cover. Much as in poetry, such happy accidents as these only increase the attractiveness of each individual issue.

Also intriguing are the parallels between Jill’s manual process of printing and our production of book on standard office printers. Although our books are digitally designed and printed before being hand-assembled and -bound, such office printers often produce similar inconsistencies in graphic quality. Jill received several covers (pre-printed by us with the journal title and issue number) that already featured the same noise and negative space quirks as her woodblock prints.

The journal title and issue number were printed in advance on 7 different colors of cardstock.

Jill Bieker and her cutting-edge printing equipment.

MEDIUM: ink, spoon, woodblock, paper, hands

Jill's storefront is best described as antique and esoteric. Perfect for a printmaker.

Some of the best things about editing Bad Shoe  are meeting new writers and artists, exploring new performance venues, and discovering new processes in making art, books, and texts. Having met Jill through poetry readings at Firecracker, Elly and I are both really pleased that she joined us in the process of making our 8th issue. She is a prime example of the kind of self-motivated, ambitious, multi-talented female artist that drove us to found this journal almost 3 years ago.