Fruit Trees!
Printmaking continued :D
If you’ve seen my other notes/posts, you may have noticed that I loooove plants. and fruits. and possibly growing plants. Butttttt, what could be even better? FRUIT TREES!!! Accessible? Just to grab? and harvest? Fruit? AHH! (this was literally my reaction the moment I realized there were fruit trees on campus I could harvest :D)
And then I took a printmaking class (link to previous post) and we had a final assignment to make a multi-page booklet! This booklet was supposed to represent something about the university community or campus. At this point, I knew it was time… I had to make this book about the fruit trees.
This has been a very long passion project of mine this past summer, and is a continuation post from the summer shenanigans I posted previously. If you want to check that post out, feel free to see it below!
Printmaking and Hippity to the hoppity~
Hi all! It’s been a while (sorry, conference paper writing took away lots of time 🥲) but we are coming back with some more side quests from this past summer and fall!
First, the reveal:
Cause waiting till the end to show what it looks like is mean 😈
The things inside it consist of the following:
A pretty cover, with a letterpressed title, Edible Stanford (which is kind of a funny name thinking about it now), and riso-based green and black print of line art fruit images we found online
And inside of this cover, a two-tone map of Stanford’s campus (which took me egregiously long to design on Adobe Illustrator) with labels on road names, and fruit icons for where you can find different fruits on campus
There is also a legend of all the fruits on this map, with dates when they usually are ready for harvest and little tidbits about each fruit 🍎
A small booklet with a kind of waterfall cut, tabbed with four different fruits you can learn more about
We chose kumquats, strawberry tree fruits, apples, and peaches!
I actually have tried all four fruits now on campus, and they are very fun to munch 🍽️
And a final popup designed by one of our amazing groupmates (I didn’t realize how hard it was to design a popup until I actually saw how she designed it)
A quick note, this was a full group project (there were 5 of us!) and this would not have at all been possible to make without all of their incredible ideas fusing into this final book 📕 It was so fun getting to work with them!
A Walkthrough :D
I just learned you can put galleries of images on substack now, so heres a little gallery view of the final book! hehe
It definitely was interesting trying to see how we could make these designs work with only the two-tone color print. The design for these books, the printing, and the assembly happened over the course of 3-5ish weeks, and we knew we would heavily complicate the process of making this book if we needed more than two colors. For context, the riso-printer prints out two colors really quickly, as it can hold two color drums each time. But, the more colors you add, the more difficult it gets to align the designs as you need to pass the first two color print through the printer again to get two additional colors added onto it.
Our group didn’t have too many sessions to print and assemble this fully, so we went with the two-tone colors. Looking back at this, it worked pretty well!
In the four pages where we had more in-depth information on the strawberry tree, kumquat, peach, and apples, we added little ratings of how they tasted! There were also a few fun facts and pictures of the bark, in case it helped to identify the tree to have those images too. For the pop-up at the end, we were thinking of it to be like a final sign sticking out of green grass, and I really liked how that came out. If you notice, the grass is all fruit names!
I’m just really proud of this map LOL Here it is in all of its glory:
So… Did you grab some fruits???
I don’t think I’d be doing this post justice if I didn’t actually show you some fruits I’ve been picking! So, here are some of my fruit sightings so far:
Some of the most funky ones I’ve found so far:
Kumquats - a tiny citrus fruit you can just munch on with the skin! kind of sweeter the more you chew on it
Kousa Dogwood fruit - they look spiky and not nice, but they taste like a persimmon!
Strawberry Tree Fruit! - Also known as the arbutus berry, very spikey and you can also just bite into these; they are small, red, and slightly tart (it feels like an apricot vibe but with no seed inside?) One of my favorites on campus!
We also have some of the more typical fruits too:
Avacados - AVACADOSSS! I’m still waiting for it to ripen, haven’t gotten to try it yet; but they are not hass avacados according to my friend
Lemons - Very plentiful on campus, interesting lookin when they get really big and chonky
Oranges - Also very plentiful on campus, I don’t think they’ve fully ripened yet
Peaches! - we took the last three on a tree on campus (hehe they were pretty big)
PERSIMMONN! - My favorite fruit of all time, I haven’t been able to try the Fuyu (the flat one), but I’ve tried the Hachiya (the more acorn-looking one) » it’s sOOO good (but please don’t eat it when it’s not ripe it’s not fun)
So, that’s all I got folks… picking fruit is just so fun, and I’m lucky we have so many on campus to run around and explore (and harvest too!)
You can actually check out this map: https://fallingfruit.org/ to try and find fruit around in your area! Happy picking yall :D