Category: Making

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Today is Koppermaandag in the Netherlands, ‘cupping monday’. The first Monday after 6 January, when graphics artists and printers show their skills by making something: a Koppermaandag print.

Traditionally, since the early 1400s, Koppermaandag was the day that members of all guilds would have a festive day for the new year. ‘Kopperen’ (‘cupping’) as a verb comes from kop (cup) and stands for feasting and drinking. The tradition waned in the 18th century with the dissolution of the guilds, and only the printers kept doing it, until that too faded. Since World War II several groups of graphics artists and printers have taken up the tradition again. That is how I know of it: E’s great-uncle was a member of the Groninger group of artists De Ploeg and in 1962 a founder of the Grafisch Centrum Groningen. There they made their Koppermaandag prints. The 1965 print was drawn by him and shows him flattened under the printing press.

Last June during a workshop for Y’s birthday with Roy Scholten in the Grafisch Atelier Hilversum I saw their Koppermaandag prints. The next day I marked Koppermaandag 2026 in my calendar, with the intention of doing something for it by myself.

For me knowledge work has always been artisanal in nature. It is a form of professional work where your tools are personal, where your path is your own. Autonomy within networks, learning in networks, creating in and with networks. This makes personal knowledge plus your approach to maintaining it and learning important (usually dubbed personal knowledge management, or pkm). Having your own system for your personal knowledge is both what allows you to create your professional autonomy (your insights woven into connections that have meaning for you), and what ensures your continued professional autonomy (you take it with you when you go someplace else).

For today I wanted to combine those things. Knowledge work as artisanal profession. This links it back to the original guilds. Second the personal aspect of it, and third making something by hand to print, like the card I made (be)for(e) Christmas. The latter links it to the modern Koppermaandag tradition of graphics printers and artists.

I made a card, with the text (P)KM and the number 26. KM for Koppermaandag as well as for Knowledge Management and the P for personal. My personal koppermaandag, and personal knowledge management. The background is a network. The nodes are concepts, things, actors. The connections between them are the insights that grew from combining them, forming a neighbourhood and context for each node. Something I associate both with Bruno Latour‘s ANT and George Siemens‘ connectivism. The frame around it is not closed, and some connections cross it, because while always defined and bounded in each moment a personal knowledge network is not enclosed nor stagnant.

The design I cut in lino, in what must be the first time since primary school. Then I printed it on our small press. The letters and the lines are wonky. That does make it an accurate demonstration of my capabilities though, as per the tradition of Koppermaandag.

Happy (personal) Koppermaandag!

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I didn’t make a Christmas card, but I did print a card before Christmas.

At the end of October we got ourselves a small lino press, after Y got inspired at an art fair, and E suggested we might make our own Christmas cards. We also arranged for other tools and things we would need.

Ideas are plenty of course, it’s action that counts, and this has not been the year for that much. But I did want to make something by hand.

On December 14th, the three of us sat down around our big tinkering table up in the attic, and started making our own designs. Both E and Y wanted to do a linocut, I opted for what Y used back in October: a stamp made of easy to shape foam.
I started out with some sketches of half formed ideas, some of which turned out to be too difficult immediately. I needed something that could be done in 1 printing step.

Sketches

I chose the sketch of a person reclining against a tree, working on a laptop, while an Obsidian comet blazes in the sky. Not christmassy, as I reckoned it wasn’t certain I would finish it before then, let alone be able to distribute some of the results. But if so inclined you could read Christmas in the shining star and the suggested fir tree, and that I aimed for a snowed upon effect.

Having transferred the sketch into foam, with the alterations that come from the tactile feedback of cutting the foam and moving it around on a piece of paper, I glued everything together in the past few days.

The stamp made of foam cut with scissors

And today it’s Christmas Eve. The fridges are bursting with stuff we will be lucky to finish before the year’s out. The house is quiet, and early evening we will celebrate Christmas with the three of us.
If I wanted to make some first prints before Christmas, it had to be this afternoon.

Bringing out the press, using a piece of plastic (meant for laser cutting years ago) as an inking plate was the first step. And where it gets ‘real’ for the first time. Getting my hands dirty and all that. Luckily, in the spring for Y’s birthday party we did some printing together, and also at the art fair I mentioned above, which lowered the mental threshold for me to get going.

The inking and press set-up

The first print I used too much ink. The second print to soak up the excess had too little because of it. I made a few more, looking at where more ink, and where less was needed, and where to be careful with the inkroller.

First prints

After those first few, I made the first that sort of looks like what I intended.

First more or less ok print

Good enough to tell myself I made a card (be)for(e) Christmas.

Last Saturday Y and I went to the Drukkunst fair, where printers of all stripes and from across Europe presented themselves. We chatted with Roy Scholten and his colleague about the upcoming book on the Hilversum Method, and their crowdfunding action to make it happen (which I since supported). The book will be printed in two separate versions, Dutch and English, so get one if you’re interested!

Y proceeded to make her own print using a A5 sized lino press.


Y’s print inspired by the autumn weather outside

Showing her work back home led to E suggesting we might make our own cards for Christmas. And that in turn meant we needed to get our own little lino-press. So we did.

Today our turquoise Woodzilla was delivered.


the Woodzilla lino press

Favorited 111 Kent by Peter Rukavina

Peter expresses what is the key thing that is fascinating about ‘Making’. The ability to go from an idea to crafting something in a bit of time. I love he’s posting about it, a small thing that gives him joy, and that he intends to give away. Because this is what agency is all about, to have an idea and translate it into an artefact, and have it make a tiny impact in the world, reinforcing local connections. It is what is behind my lifelong use of computers as generic toolkit, my fascination with FabLabs where digital machines allow whole new ways of making things yourself, and behind my notion of Networked Agency where technology and methods are deployed locally in ways that allows full control by the people using them.

When in doubt make something. I should take that to heart more.

This afternoon I went over to the print shop, and tried my best to translate what was in my imagination into type.

Peter Rukavina

Twenty years ago today E and I visited Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. What I wrote a decade ago at the 10th anniversary of that conference still holds true for me.

Over time Reboot 7 became mythical. A myth that can’t return. But one we were part of, participated in and shaped.
Still got the t-shirt.


The yellow t-shirt with red text from the 2005 Reboot 7 conference, on my blue reading chair in my home office 20 years on.

Seventeen years ago today I blogged about a barcamp style event in Amsterdam I co-hosted, called GovCamp_NL. I struck up a conversation there about open government data after having had a similar conversation the week before in Austria. It marked the beginning of my work in this field. We just welcomed the thirteenth team member in the company that over time grew out of that first conversation. Our work at my company is driven by the same thing as the event, something I’ve come to call constructive activism.

These days, the principles and values that drove those events, and have set the tone for the past two decades of everything I’ve done professionally and socially, seem more important than ever. They are elemental in the current geopolitical landscape around everything digital and data. We can look back on our past selves with 20 years hindsight and smile about our one time optimism, because so much exploitation, abuse and surveillance grew out of the platforms and applications that originate in the early 00’s. But not because that optimism was wrong. Naive yes, in thinking that the tech would all take care of itself, by design and by default, and we just needed to nudge it a bit. That optimism in the potential for (networked) agency, for transparency, for inclusion, for diversity, and for global connectedness is still very much warranted, as a celebration of human creativity, of the sense of wonder that wielding complexity for mutual benefit provides, just not singularly attached to the tech involved.
Anything digital is political. The optimism is highly political too.

The time to shape the open web and digital ethics is now, is every day. Time for a reboot.

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Y turned nine at the end of May, which we celebrated with a trip to Lego House and Lego Land in Billund, Denmark as it coincided with Y having a few days off from school. But it wasn’t the only Lego related fun we organised around her birthday party. Yesterday with 5 invited friends we visited Roy Scholten‘s workshop at the Hilversum graphics center, where the group tried their hand on Lego printing.

Using flat Lego pieces you create a design, and then ink them up and put them under a press. Next to the 6 kids we were 3 parents, and we all had a lot of fun. When it was time to stop and clean up (before heading home for a small mountain of pancakes for dinner) no one really wanted to quit. I was impressed with how this little group of 8-9yr olds worked with abstract forms, experimented with colors etc, and stayed focused the full time without needing much aid or prompting.


Roy Scholten providing instructions to the group.


Searching for Lego pieces for our designs


A few iterations I made.

I originally met Roy during the pandemic in a conversation about personal knowledge management, and appreciated his bird prints made using Lego. We since acquired a few. Our friend Peter also uses a letterpress, and after making introductions, to my delight came to visit from Canada with his partner L to work with Roy. Yesterday some of their production together still adorned the walls of Roy’s atelier.


Lining up several iterations of my ‘river’ print.

You can book his workshops (and by other members of their collective) for company / team outings, or for training, as well as birthday parties. E has done a training with Roy, and we also gave her mother a workshop with friends for her 80th earlier this year. See Grafisch Atelier Hilversum’s website.


The two prints I like best. At the top one I retro actively dubbed ‘soccer player heading a ball’, that reminds me of De Zaaier by Theo van Doesburg we recently saw in the Drachten DaDa museum. Below the ‘river’, where I flipped the paper 180 degrees before printing again. The result of a much lighter blue second river course reminds me of how old river meanders stay visible as oxbow lakes in the landscape when the river bed has moved on.