Making Weird Cats Come to Life: Part 1

Weird Cats I've Seen on the Internet is the last publication we got out in 2025 -- but did you know this project has been in progress for nearly two years?

Over the next couple of blog posts, I'm going to drill down into all the work that went into Weird Cats, a 100% block printed zine all about, you guessed it, cats on the internet.

Concept for Weird Cats

In early 2024, before Hammer & Hemlock was even a twinkle in our eyes (indeed, before Rosie and I had met), the idea for Weird Cats came to life. Birthdays being weird for me, and having nothing to do on my birthday, I thought, what is the most random idea for an art project I can start and finish within this one horrid day?

I pulled up my Instagram and realized I had been collecting a folder of cats over the years -- meme cats, famous cats, weirdos, and other likely suspects. My partner, CT, and I regularly send silly cats to each other, and I had amassed quite the collection of freaks. I had a couple extra pieces of gray easycarve that I'd been saving for such an occasion, and so I began designing. In the interest of getting it all done in one day, I did not do as much planning as I usually do on a project like this, and drew the ideas directly onto the block.

Underestimating the time a project will take is my Achilles' heel. Unsurprisingly, I did not finish that project over the course of that one fateful birthday.

The hustle

Earlier this year, as Rosie and I were brainstorming the press and thinking about the type of work we wanted to publish, I remembered something: I had a project in-progress. I had been plinking away at the huge blocks over the year, but I needed motivation from my excellent business partner to actually finish the blocks. While I was finishing carving, we put up a link to pre-order based on nothing more than the following dim-light images. 

We had 13 preorders for Weird Cats. We were blown away--we were only planning on printing a small handful, but with that amount of preorders, we increased our first print run to 30. In October, I broke out the brayer. It wasn't until mid-December that we could call the project done.

 

 

Lessons learned

As we are both art teachers, we like to talk about our process and the bumps and bruises we hit along the way. 

Planning = good

Remember how earlier in this post, I mentioned that I did not plan very much when I started building out the block printed designs?

Yeah. I should have done that.

Even though I've been block printing and making zines/books for many years, it would seem there are still things for me to learn. I know print layout. I know how to reverse block designs for printing. But both at once? 

Because some of the pages were not laid out as I was envisioning, I ended up having to cut a few of the spreads in half so I could move them into the correct order for printing. 

If I had to do this project again, I would take the extra time to design on paper before transferring the designs to the blocks. At the time, it felt like a skippable step, but alas, my brain still can't work backwards.

 

 

Ink happens

In my printing work, I had mostly used the Speedball water-based ink. It's what I use for classes, too (due to easy clean-up). I was hoping that, because of the quick drying time, printing would take a couple days at most. 

Unfortunately, the prints came out weirdly crumbly in the environment and the paper I was printing on. I printed quite a few two-up spreads like in the image above before I realized I was unhappy with how the prints were coming out. I didn't feel good taking people's money for the quality. 

 

 

Instead, I switched to Speedball fabric ink. I knew that, because it was oil-based, it would take longer to dry. However, I felt it was a worthy trade because the prints started coming out much cleaner.

We don't have a block press (yet), so while printing everything by hand, I did some experimenting to get the cleanest prints. It turns out that I didn't like the baren, a common tool used in block printing to add pressure to the back of a page against the block, as much as a good old fashioned wooden spoon I found on the street corner.

 

 

 

 

Of course, the extra dry time meant we kept having to push back our expected publication date. What was October became November, and November became December. This is because we learned:

• It takes me about 2-3 hours to print a spread and a half
• The book has 16 spreads
• The block printing ink we used took 5-7 days to fully dry before we could print on the other side
  

All of this led to several weeks more printing than anticipated, but you know what? One of our tenets of the press is that slow, handmade creation can often be so much more rewarding than mass-production. I'm proud that Weird Cats embodies that idea. In the end, I'm really happy with how they came out.

Assembly

After everything was printing, then came the ever-tedious tasks of folding each page. The backs of each zine are hand-stamped and numbered with the date of the edition and the edition number. We also took the extra step to hand-bind the zines with cord instead of staples to give it that hand-finished quality. 

 

 

What's more is my two cats were happy with their likenesses that made it into the zine. In the end, all that really matters is my cats liked it.

 

 

 

 

About the cats

Wanna know about the specific cats I referenced for this project? Of course you do. Part 2 incoming.