A print shop for Spokane WA with a mission to educate and provide access to letter press and screen printing.
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here. We are a brand-new community print shop starting up just outside of Spokane, Washington. Our mission is to provide Spokane with printing presses & equipment, knowledgeable teachers, opportunities to print and attend classes and a facility in which to do so. We are so excited to invite you to join us on this journey!
We found that…
Spokane has a long history with fine art printmaking, but in the recent past has had few opportunities to be involved with production letterpress. But with the resurgence of hand-made artisan crafts, interest in letterpress has grown as well. Even still, there has been no place to learn about the techniques and processes involved, much less to practice them. Everyone we talk to gets excited about the possibilities Millwood Print Works will afford the community to learn these hands-on skills, and about how Millwood will develop the text-based arts in the region. As Spokane continues to develop its art community, it is essential to have knowledgeable instructors and access to facilities in the print media.
Screenprint and Letterpress printing have developed over hundreds of years. While digital graphic design might end once you press command-P, learning these techniques will allow the printer to keep their hands on the product through every stage of the design, right through to printing and finishing. These hands-on processes allow the printer a level of artisanal craftsmanship that isn’t possible in digital production. Everything you’ll produce in our shop will have a touch of you in every small detail, and you’ll learn to love those beautiful, natural inconsistencies.
is to gather people and teach them letterpress printmaking and screenprinting, and for the people who already know how, we provide them a place to do it. Simple right?
Our Mission is Access and Education Printmaking is messy, expensive, and takes up a TON of space. So what happens when you want to give it a try, but don’t have a few thousand dollars and a free garage? Oh and someone to teach you? You give up on that dream and move on to something else. No longer! Enter Millwood Print Works.
At Millwood, anybody can sign up for classes, attend workshops, and become members of our community space. We’re going to be the beating heart at the center of Spokane’s printmaking scene. All are welcome.
Classes. Right out the gate we will be offering classes in both Screenprinting and Letterpress. Classes run 4 weeks, have a maximum size of 6, and are $225. During this campaign you can sign up for a class for $50 off. Ridiculous!
Memberships. For a low fee, members have access to our presses, some materials, open studio hours, and can take on clients for printing in our shop.
Prints. Millwood will always be selling prints, and print subscriptions featuring the work of our printmakers and students. Buy one! They rock.
The Millwood Print Works is in historic Millwood, WA, ten minutes from Spokane, between the railroad tracks and the Inland Paper Company, a perfect location for a turn-of-the-(last)-century print shop. Our 900-square foot space has been a home, a doctor’s office, a junk store, and a taxidermy shop. We have four rooms: the largest is the letterpress room, which houses all our presses, ink, type, the book press, a small display area, and the classroom space. We also have the screen printing room with exposure unit, three-station vacuum table, a dark room, the washout room, and a finishing room (paper cutting, binding, folding, paper storage).
Over the past six months, we took this empty, messy old building and turned it into a print shop. We’ve renovated the floors, painted the walls, and cleaned every room until we wanted to be there. We’ve built shelves, thrifted furniture, and started acquiring the beastly equipment that we’ll be printing with. We’ve been all over the greater northwest chasing down and picking up thousand pound presses from 1890, buckets of type, and even an old air hockey table we’re turning into our screenprinting workstation.
In order for Millwood Print Works to open its doors and begin offering classes as soon as possible, we need some financial assistance. We are hoping to buy a few more key pieces of equipment, finish building out our screenprinting room, and set ourselves to serve our community members more. Help us help you!
Additionally, we are hoping to offering our first classes by the end of summer, and if funded we can hit that goal no problem. We are opening this community arts space whether we are funded or not, it’s just a matter of when! Fundraising takes a lot of time and energy, and while we have the energy, the experience, and the drive to get our shop funded and off the ground, it will take months more to make that happen without your help. This is where you come in! Back us today and get rewarded handsomely.
Every single person who donates even a dollar to our campaign will have their name emblazoned on the shop walls. If you donate early and live in Spokane, you may even be able to write it yourself!
This level is also great for people who aren’t sure which level they want to back. Throw us a dollar and be notified when we announce things like stretch goals, and then decide on your time.
Get a pack of our ridiculously awesome stickers. These are exclusive to this campaign. You can’t buy them anywhere else!
Choose from either of our excellent shirts. Soft to the touch and extremely well printed, these shirts hold ink stains remarkably well. Perfect for wearing to the shop. Our shirt options are as follows:
**Make sure to look for and fill out our survey at the end of the campaign to tell us your shirt size & preference**
This is the one we’re most excited about. We have exclusive prints from two of the most talented local artists we know! This vintage-style Chris Bovey print has a unique color scheme, exclusive to this campaign.
Both prints are on 11×17 gallery quality paper, and will make a fantastic addition to your walls. Support local art!
Starting in October 2017, will be sending our subscribers a monthly mailer of things that have been hand-printed in the shop by our artists and students. Every mailer will be valued at $30, so it could be one nice print, signed and numbered by the artist, a combo of smaller prints, greeting cards, or a surprise!
A one quarter subscription will go for $80 after the campaign ends, so make sure to grab your subscription now!
This is a seriously good deal on some excellent prints, and a great way to help sustain our organization.
We’re really excited about this one. Come to our studio, inspect the machines, and pull your own print! Every attendee takes home two prints, one screened, one letter-pressed. Get a great crash-course in screen print and letterpress, and have a lot of fun doing it! We’ll be doing this event a few times in the coming year, but only our Kickstarter backers can snag it for this low price. This event is 21+ obviously.
Our initial class offerings will be in screenprinting and letterpress. These will be intensive, one month classes that will meet weekly starting this September. You will take one project from idea to completion with guidance from our expert instructors, learning fundamentals along the way, as well as tricks of the trade. All supplies are included.
After completing the course, students will be certified to enjoy open studio time, if they choose to become a member. Membership is $225 per year, or $35 monthly. During open studio time, students will be accompanied by a studio manager who will be available to help them execute their projects. All supplies are included in the membership, and there will be a discounted members rate for our one day workshops.
All that, and you’ll basically be a much cooler person in general.
LETTERPRESS CLASS
In addition to operating her own Interpunct Press, our letterpress instructor Bethany Taylor has been teaching letter press for going on a decade (yeah, she’s that cool). She was first trained at the legendary Hatch Show Print a living letterpress museum in Nashville that has been an operating printshop since 1890. They liked her so much they pretty much invited her to stay forever, which she almost did. Bethany stayed with Hatch for half a dozen years where she revitalized their intern program and trained hundreds of young printmakers in the finer points of letterpress. Also, she has the best hair in the group.
In letterpress classes students will take one project from start to finish. They will learn to typeset words using antique type and then operate one of our three letterpress printing presses to pull their prints.
SCREENPRINTING CLASS
Our screenprinting instructor Derek Landers is a working graphic designer, and has been practicing his craft for over 20 years. In the past he has taught dozens of graphic design classes at North Idaho College, and is also one the founders of Dumbgun, a graphic design/gig poster studio started in 2003.
In screenprinting classes, students will develop one concept and take their idea to completion. They will learn the ins and outs of generating images on silkscreens through several different methods and then print their images on paper.
This reward level is geared towards businesses. Want us to make an invite mailer to your next fundraising event? Or a sweet event poster? What about business cards? For one time only, hire us to design and print a custom product for you or your business! $500 is a baseline, and final price will vary with product. Millwood won’t be for hire like this during normal operations, so grab it while you can! Let’s talk.
Sling us a grand and we’ll give you everything we have. You get both classes, two invites to the prints and pints night, one of each shirt, print, and sticker we make, and a year subscription to Millwood Prints. On top of that, free entry to 3 Millwood workshops, and a year membership to the shop. You’ll be our very first member! Claim that title for your own!
“There’s plenty of money out there. They print more every day. But this ticket, there’s only five of them in the whole world, and that’s all there’s ever going to be.”
– Grandpa George
Stretch Goals are coming! – TBA
We earned an awesome grant from the Spokane Arts Grant Awards which has allowed us to open our doors with more ease, and set our initial goal fairly low. But we’ve got big plans for this place, so when we meet our first funding goal, we’ll still have more to do! We have some pretty awesome things in the works, so keep an eye out.
Almost every penny from this campaign will go to providing more equipment, better equipment, and more materials for our students and members to use. Starting a non-profit is not cheap, and neither are the machines we’re hosting in our space, but we believe that we have something truly unique and important to offer the arts community of our city, and we hope you do too. We’ve invested a lot of personal time and money into this venture, and will continue to do so because we believe deeply in the mission of our organisation. Spokane is hungry for this, and we’re pulling it off no matter what.
We believe Spokane is on the cusp of an arts renaissance, and we want to be a part of the rising tide of local artists who are reinvesting back into their community.
BETHANY TAYLOR · It is my goal to share production printmaking with a wide audience through collaboration with my colleagues, Derek and Thom, who share their love of poetry and digital design. Together, we offer a broad spectrum of skill and a passion for sharing those skills with the greater Spokane community.”
DEREK LANDERS · Over 20 years, I’ve worked for and with most design agencies in Spokane, and also taught design at North Idaho College for several years. I’ve made a lot of like-minded friends and colleagues. The number of people that approach me about Millwood Print Works, some that I don’t even know, asking when we’ll be open is so exciting! The Spokane art scene is ready for something like this, hungry for it. My dream is to make a place available for people to come learn and experience this amazing art form, and also to illuminate the public about the beauty, artistry, and skill that goes into creating this type of art. It’s so much more than hitting “command-p” on a keyboard.
THOM CARAWAY · Having a letterpress shop in Spokane where interested artists can come learn and work serves not only the reading and viewing public interested in artistic and literary artwork, but the artistic community as well. I envision a collaborative and aesthetic hub where artists, writers, and public work side-by-side to create beautiful text productions in the form of chapbooks, broadsides, and serves to strengthen the entire community. In the Millwood organization, I serve as the organizational director.
We were honored by Spokane Arts as the recipient of the largest amount from their first ever Spokane Arts Grant Award, and that’s brought us a long way forward. It’s allowed us to keep the minimum amount for this campaign low, and given us a lot of confidence in our mission, that the City of Spokane saw what we had planned and stood behind us in that way.
If you’r reading this then it means that you’ve given a lot of your time in order to really consider what we’re hoping to offer our community. Thank you for spending time here, and thank you for donating to our campaign. We’re excited to see you in the shop!
Creating an arts organization comes with plenty of risk. However, our principal founders are thoroughly experienced with creating and running successful organizations, and we have already laid the groundwork to make MPW a successful, sustainable organization.
We’re already a licensed 501c3 non-profit, which is no small task. But we did it because we’re interested in the long term. This isn’t a one-and-done activity. We plan to be around for a while, and that registration will be a huge help along the way.
A lot of our equipment is OLD. Old equipment is hard to fix, and expensive. Unless you’ve got a trained repairwoman on deck! Bethany has already brought all of our equipment from busted hunks of metal to functional pieces of art. She’s retrofitted things that weren’t designed to be used for screenprinting and made them better than something you can buy for double what we spent. She’s the pro. She’s our ace in the hole when it comes to repairs.
Most arts-based nonprofits run into issues paying the rent. Thanks to the generosity of Millwood Presbyterian Church, we won’t have to worry about rent for 5 years. The space we have is owned by the congregation, who offered it to us under the condition that we fill it with artists, and give back to the community. We got this.