Why we print nine thousand passes by hand
Four colours, one at a time, three weeks in a shed above the town gate. What the screen-printing room costs us, and the four things it gives back that a barcode cannot.
Introduction
Every pass for Soltide 2026 is screen-printed in a shed above the town gate: azure, sunshine, coral, then the key plate in ink, one colour at a time, with a night of drying between each pull. Nine thousand of them, plus the six hundred artist proofs and the stage signage. It takes three weeks and two people, and every summer someone sensible asks us why we do not just have them made.
The honest answer is that we tried, once, in 2021. The passes came back in four days and they were perfect, and the weekend was slightly worse for it in a way that took us most of a year to name.
If the pass is only proof you paid, why does anyone keep it?
What the press costs us
Nothing about this is cheap or clever. It is slow on purpose, and the numbers are not flattering.
Three point one per cent is the number we watch. Registration drifts as the screens warm through the afternoon, and a pass whose coral plate sits a millimetre proud of the key looks wrong even to someone who has never thought about printing in their life. Those go in the bin. We have never sold one and we are not going to start.
The mistake we made in 2021
Don't outsource the thing people keep
We ordered the 2021 passes as laminated cards with a barcode on the front and a sponsor’s logo on the back. They scanned faster, they cost a fifth as much, and by the Sunday afternoon the bins at the town gate were full of them. Nobody throws away something that was pulled by hand. That is not sentiment — we counted.
The pass is the poster, at a quarter size. Same four plates, same press, same paper. It goes in a card sleeve, it goes in the post, and roughly four in ten of them come back to us as photographs on a wall the following winter.
How a pass actually gets made
Four pulls, three nights
- Azure first — the sky and the water, the largest area of ink on the sheet
- Sunshine second, once the azure is bone dry, or the two bleed at the edge
- Coral third — the headland, the one plate that is allowed to sit slightly loud
- Key last — the ink plate carries the type, the date and the run number
Heads up Passes are printed in tier order and posted in tier order. If you buy an Artist Proof in June it will still arrive after the First Prints bought in February — the press does not jump the queue for anybody, including us.
If you are printing your own
People ask, so: this is the whole method, and none of it is proprietary.
Before the first pull
- Register on the key plate, never on the first colour
- Mix enough ink for the whole run on day one — a second batch never matches
- Pull one test sheet an hour, not one a day
- Number the run as you go, on the sheet, in pencil
Number four is the one everyone skips. A run number written after the fact is a guess, and a guess printed on nine thousand passes is nine thousand small lies.
The part that is not about printing
The press is the reason the site looks the way it does. Four inks is not a house style we chose in a meeting; it is what the shed can lay down in three weeks. The stage signs, the programme, the wristband ballot slips for the Cove — all of it comes off the same four screens, so the whole headland matches without anyone having to enforce it.
Take the press away and you would have to invent a brand guideline instead. We would rather have the shed.
Your pass is printed before it is posted
First Print, Full Run and Artist Proof — nine thousand passes, no booking fee, and every one of them pulled by hand above the town gate.
- Soltide print room log, 2019–2025 (scrap rate, run times)
- Gate bin audit, Sunday 18:00, Soltide 2021 and 2022
- The 2026 bill, all forty-eight acts