Letterpress exquisite corpse experiment

I first played Exquisite Corpse as a kid. There are several variations of the "game" which started with Surrealists in the early 1900s. You can easily play the drawing method by folding up a piece of paper. You can also create sentence as long as they maintain the following structure : "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." I saw a different letterpresser, over at A Two Pipe Problem, adapt this for workshops in England. With that inspiration, I decided to try it as the project and teaching tool on the first day of my beginner classes.

So far, I have loved how its has helped me teach! I have each student randomly draw a piece of the sentence and let them lock up one word. Once I have all the words set, I bring everyone over to learn the process of locking up a form.

Before this, I started originally having students lay out one FONT so they got a handle on where all the letters and numbers were in a case, but that didn't allow me to easily show them how forms were locked up. By giving everyone one word, I could then lock the whole thing up for them. So brilliant !I am so happy with how my first class went last night and look forward to using this method in the future. In fact, I am keeping a mini notebook with tiny copies of all we print! The brown one above was a test I did last week, so I didn't actually lock it up nicely.  Last nights results are below!