Here I come sheepishly back to the blog. I've been terrible about posting, but have not been terrible about working. I come through to the other side having figured a lot out! A couple people commented on the earlier posts and I never saw the comments because I abandoned the blogging for forum searches and desperate research. So sorry. I wish I had seen them, because we printmakers need one another's society! Really, that's where I've been-consorting with printmakers on Inkteraction, on the Graphic Chemical forum (Thanks, Dean Clark!), and taking a great class with Michael Southern at Pacific Northwest College of Art. I was also blessed by a generous correspondence with the great engraver, Evan Lindquist, which has forever changed the way I approach the plate. So, as I've said, I have some solutions, much through the help of these many generous individuals, and some by banging through problems until an answer came.

I turned forty last week, I was born in 1969. I graduated from San Francisco Art Institute in 2004, I think, so it has been five years of struggles and set backs with flashes of sustaining ecstacy. Who am I kidding, though? I am a printmaker, "work is my salvation" as the poet Micheael Hannon said of the mole. I am very happy scraping and burnishing in my hidey hole for hours on end, and so I have.

I hope to share here some of what I learned, because maybe I can help people save some time in setting up the home studio, if only through avoiding some of the same mistakes. I've discovered etching in a college facility is one thing, but setting yourself up to do it by yourself requires a whole new set of skills, ones that aren't necessarily presented in classes.

Now, I still know next to nothing about the marketing aspect of printmaking-that is my next frontier- I hope that the worst of the hazing is through now and I can just work. Already the pace of my work has gone up, but this is not only to do with having figured things out, but life circumstances. The past several years have been chaotic, with several moves, a baby boy (now almost four), and now two salukis. . . and a tree frog I rescued from a pool that was to be drained. Anyway, now we are settled back in the Bay Area (Thank God!) and I am now finally finishing a suite of prints that have been in the works for five years.