Before starting in on the quilting of the other squares I laid all of them out in sequence to see how they would look all lined up:

This was the most complicated printing job that I’ve undertaken to date. I used the cold composition techniques that I learned in the workshop that I took earlier this year with David A. Clark. I won’t go into the techniques here since they aren’t mine, they are David’s, but if you are a printmaker I highly recommend his workshops.

To get the prints to line up correctly I had to develop registration methods to get them to line up correctly and printed them in pairs. Registration in printmaking is used to get multi-pass prints, when a paper is run through a press or printing process more than once to achieve the final product, lined up properly. These prints were printed on 5 times each (or 45 passes for the set of 9 prints).

I freaked out slightly about a third of the way through the whole process as I was lining up print 4 and 5 to print the overlapping circle, making sure that they lined up ok with the potential 7 and 8 prints, when I realized that due to the overlapping nature of the prints that I would have to start the whole thing over if I made a mistake with a single print. Fortunately I did not (ok, there are a few minor mistakes but none worth trashing the whole set for). Now I have to guard them with my life, no easy redos with this one…