Collating Craziness

The Just Add Ink team, along with a few volunteers, got together at Altered Esthetics last night to put the books together.

We set up a bunch of tables and utilized the counter at Ae to spread out all the awesome submissions in book order.

Lance, featured artist, poses with the very first collated book. He won’t be smiling like that in four hours when we’re still collating!

A box o’ books. Blurred in photoshop, because I’m sneaky like that.

For hours we sorted, sorted – until we discovered something horrible. One of the submissions was short 100 copies. Printing companies can’t be perfect! So… we did what we thought would be best: rather than lose 100 books or go through the past 200 books to pull the submission out, we raced over to the copy center to make an emergency set of copies. Thank god it was only one artist that was shorted! Note to everybody for next time: apparently that ginormous stack might not be as ginormous as you think it is – double check the page count.

While we were sorting, I also cut artist checks for the mini-grants. Now THAT was fun to do! Another note to self: work on more opportunities to re-grant money to artists doing amazing things, because that’s wayyyyy more fun than cutting checks for bills. 😉

We finally finished at almost 10 o’clock.

The collating team after four hours of grueling page-sorting (minus a few members that had to scoot.) Actually Lance is smiling in this picture even more. Lance, is there something you’re not telling us about your love of monotonous, repetitive organizational tasks?

The trunk and backseat of my car are now full of books to be dropped off at the bindery today. YOWSA!

Big thanks to Danno and his skillz on how to do this as efficiently as possible and to Kevin for putting so much of the initial work into getting the dividers prepped among a slew of other helpful stuffs. Thank you Anna and for getting everything pulled for us to get started sorting right away. To everybody on the collating team – thanks for making last night go smoothly and efficiently – even in the emergency! To the artists who participated – thanks for making this a truly amazing, one-of-a-kind project. Gonna change the name to Just Add Awesome.

---