@Tasmith - Chinese people use those mizuhiki knots too, but we call them 盤長 (pán cháng). These days they tend to be purely decorative. The different shapes of them have different meanings (signifying friendship, marriage, good luck, etc). When I was young and my parents sent me to summer school in Taiwan to make sure I knew how to be Chinese, knot-tying was an important part of the curriculum, right alongside language, music, calligraphy, decorative paper-cutting, and martial arts classes. I see that you're in the DC area! You could stop by the Folger Shakespeare Library and see some of the beautiful historical documents they have on display - print and manuscript!
And...
What a nice press,
@JanisTX - it's a larger one than they usually use in letterpress classes. But the Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis does have classes that use larger presses (even larger than yours, actually - one of them took four of us working together to operate). I highly recommend their classes!
https://www.mnbookarts.org/From the perspective of a calligrapher, the terminology of printing and engraving is like opposite land. Here's a great glossary of terms that explain "engraving" as opposed to "printing":
https://www.printmag.com/article/engraving-terms/And here's a nice discussion of embossing/debossing and blind impression:
https://www.themandatepress.com/2015/10/emboss-vs-deboss-vs-blind-letterpress/If you're getting unintentionally debossed letters, you might need to repack your tympan paper and/or ease back on the pressure when you press them. If you're having trouble sourcing tympan paper, a manilla folder works in a pinch. For a crisp image, don't reuse the tympan paper too many times. Also - the thinner the paper you're printing on, the less room for impression you'll have. So if you don't want the letters to bite into the paper, pack the tympan harder and print on denser paper with less pressure.
Here's an image that I printed to demonstrate the process to my students, and to promote a program that I'm filming for our alumni association this coming week. You can see it was an early impression when I was still getting the ink mix right!
--yours truly, K