International Coffee Day
If there are three things that I like in particular it’s: printing, coffee and tinkering, and this slightly mad experiment combines all three! I think the idea came from somewhere between testing out some new inks I’d recently acquired from Hawthorn Printmaker Supplies, experimental home-made ice cream recipes and a pub chat about memories of scratch-n-sniff cards from the 80s. All of which led to me attempting to print with coffee.
After a fair bit of trial and error, I managed to make a curious mix of fine, Turkish ground coffee, several other binding agents and mediums and make something stiff enough to be rolled out and adhere to the type whilst not damaging the rollers themselves. A nice aspect of it is that some of the coffee has dissolved in the mixture, tinting it brown whilst the rest remained in various states of bits and clumps. Thankfully, it all cleaned off just fine, after a little more scrubbing than usual.
Once I’ve found a more consistent way of producing the coffee / ink I’ll do a short, limited edition print run of these for sale, along with the first round of Print & Ephemera products that will be available before the end of the year.
Oh and yes it does actually smell of coffee.