One of the slightly frustrating things about all this screen printing and letterpress printing is that no matter how imaginative you are, no matter how creative you aspire to be and regardless of how much of a vision you have, the mistakes and happy accidents always turn out to be nicer than what you were actually trying to do. So rather than get all funny about it, why not embrace that? We decided to do an 80 minute music mix made up of cast off records that hadn’t quite made it into the latest series of mix cds and some remixes of those that had, and the covers would be made of all the test prints and off prints that had recently piled up whilst printing those latest covers. Every sleeve would be different and kind of beautiful in its own haphazard kind of way. The final two images here are the double-sided poster produced to accompany the cd mix.

This project has been on-going for some fifteen or more years. During that time – for reasons I won’t go into here – I had recourse to drive up and down the A1 on many occasions. It’s a pretty tedious drive, and even more so when you are familiar with it. Too many roundabouts and a lot of stop start. So I started to play a little game – spot the petrol station that had closed down. You can plot the economic climate by how many are shut. Some of them find new temporary uses – the hand car wash is a favourite, as is the random market and more recently there’s been a few motor homes sales places, which generally last about 6 months. Some lie crumbling for years and you can see how much they have deteriorated each time you drive past, some of them find a new lease of life as a bona fide petrol station under new management. It wasn’t long before I started photographing them, and here’s some of the results of this project which still continues.

So it’s the end of the eighties, and the Berlin wall has just come down. So off we pop with our ideals, long hair and gung-ho spirit to live in what was until very recently East Berlin for a bit to go and see what’s what. An informative time of early techno, randomness and many a story that we will save for a later date, these screenprints were produced during that defining time that is still looked back on with great deal of fondness and not just a little bit of “crikey, what crazy days”.

Those of you who have been friends of iyrie! for some time will be more than familiar with this format. For more years than we care to remember, we’ve been sending out cd mixes in limited editions of about 100 – 150, with handmade letterpress and/or screenprinted cd covers. This poster was made to commemorate an unspecified number of iyrie! mix releases as some sort of arbitrary anniversary. There are several people who claim to have every iyrie! cd mix ever made, which I find astonishing, if not impossible.

Popular as the iyrie! cd mixes thankfully are, inevitably people come and people go, and we try and keep these things as a tight knit type of thing of about a hundred or so recipients. Not wanting to be uncharitable, but things can potentially snowball out of control on a practical level since everything is made by hand and therefore takes a bit of time. So this letterpressed card was sent out with a cd release to try and sort out some of the slackers and find out what people thought. A kind of postal “If your name’s not down, you’re not coming in!”

Following the completion of a round dozen Junk In The Trunk Radio Shows by iyrie! on Space Invader FM, this limited edition A2 poster was produced to commemorate the event. In addition, the ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ USB stick contains all 24 hours of mixes for those too enfeebled to work out how to download them off the internet (www.iyrie.com/radio) and the handmade badges help jazz up any jacket lapel. All this was popped into a little baggie and mounted on a screenprinted card and accompanied by an iyrie! postcard. Then it was off to the post office with a enough nice blue jiffy bags to keep Royal Mail in biscuits for another six months. This edition was limited to just 200, but if you like the look of this little package and would like to receive one of the few mailers left, please us know in the comments box below and we’ll see what we can do.

This book was something I made at the end of the eighties, when people were just starting to get into computers in a creative sense. And whilst this felt like ‘the future’, in its current form the future was terribly flawed. The biggest problem with the 1 megabyte monsters was actually getting anything out of them. Laser printers were all black and white, typefaces were spectacularly limited and devilishly convoluted to load, and the whole process incredibly frustrating, time consuming and generally a let down. Whatever you had actually managed to painstakingly create on screen was trapped in that tiny little black and white box, and the hours watching the little watch tick round wondering if you were victim of a crash were untold. Personally, I preferred the old school (which actually weren’t old then, they were just school) methods of film and screen print and cutting things out and getting your hands dirty which was, above all else, available in any colour you liked, as long as you could be bothered with the faff.

So this is a Good Housekeeping Manual for the young bachelor at large – a lovingly hand screen printed terribly limited edition volume on paper and (er) latex, to which you will time has had one or two adverse effects. It’s not surprising as these were the days before watercolour inks and everything in the print room was filled with anthrax and chemicals which sandpapered your throat, turned your eyes red and made your skin fall off. Which is probably why those colours still look so lovely.

Many moons ago when I was just a whippersnapper (I believe it was the early 1990s) I somehow contrived to be asked to design a series of signage for Waterstones book store (there was drink involved is all I remember). In those days these sorts of things used to tend to be boring black and white photocopies as it was prohibitively expensive to produce anything in colour, particularly in small runs. No one ever really noticed these things. But all was not lost. As luck would have it, I knew that Ilford made a range of what was actually black and white photographic paper but with a red paper base (I’m still unclear why). So I used this to make photograms in the dark room and stuck on relevant bits of collage to create these signs, then simply went round and stuck the originals up in the shops. Now everyone would be able to find their Mills and Boon or Monty Python annuals. Success.

DIY section.

Romance section.

Thriller section.

Cookery section.

Gardening section.

Just before Christmas our old friends at Harriman Steel (www.harrimansteel.co.uk) called us up and asked if we’d like to take part in a little seasonal collaboration. They’d seen the dead Christmas tree project that we’ve been doing for many a year, photographing the detrius of the festive season and thought they’d like to share the love with some of their most valued clients. So we made forty prints, had them framed then sent them each one of our lost Christmas trees, along with a lovely poster of all the series which was individually numbered, signed and certified witha  nice gold seal.

The all new 2012 calendar is out now. If you’d like to have an iyrie! calandar to accompany you through the year, let us know – there’s only a few copies left, so first come first served.