This was our 3rd year working with Winterthur’s “Terrific Tuesdays,” directed toward an experience aimed at kids aged 3 to 10. On the surface, you can think, “Letterpress for KIDS.” Yep. And it can work quite nicely. We’ll show the nature of the experience in the previous two times we’ve worked with them.

For 2022 the sub-heading was “Fabulous Flora.”

We have a pretty lovely Beech tree along our yard, so we grabbed a bunch of leaves. We broke them up into various groupings. We would ask the kids as they walked up how old they were and then if they wanted to use that many leaves. Most did. Every once in a while, they would pick something like 15, which was also OK with us.

I (Ray) was the inker and would hand-roll the leaves, and Jill would work with the kids to arrange them. They could pick from 3 colors of paper (the two shown here or white). Typically I would only re-roll half of the leaves to help us keep up the pace and not have the kids standing in line. The image above shows everything inked. Below are prints with ghost-printed leaves (reprinted without inking).