Okay. Remember how I learned to letterpress?
And remember how a week later my sister got engaged?
And remember how I am a compulsive project-doer?
Well, combine those items and you arrive at what became my first big (and possibly last big) letterpress project: 600+ Wedding Invitations.
Lucky for me, I have very supportive family…mostly Aunt Missy, who along with allowing me to print on her press, actually ended up doing most of the printing, and worrying, and clean-up, and tinkering, and gut-wrenching work. Without her, Emmy might have sent out some crazy blobs of ink on paper. Instead, we actually pulled it off!
The Studio. Look at those 600 little cards awaiting impression. Daunting.
We first had to cut the polymer plate to size for the different layers of color on the card. The invitation design came from Andres Montaño. It was then fit for letterpress by a friend, Megan Zurcher. I ordered the plates from Boxcar Press, and we got a rollin!
Here is the larger design stuck onto the boxcar base. We wanted to make sure we could get a nice, even impression with this all-over design before we inked up and went crazy.
After tinkering and playing and adjusting and pressing and playing some more, we got what looks like a very pretty blind impression. Isn’t that the most beautiful paper? It’s made from 100% recycled tee shirts!
Next it was time to ink up. So, I mixed together some dark blue and a little white, and still had dark blue. So I added more white, and still had dark blue, so I finished off the white, and we still had just this awful, garish royal blue, so we printed a couple, were very disappointed with the color, and called it a night.
Next it was time to ink up. So, I mixed together some dark blue and a little white, and still had dark blue. So I added more white, and still had dark blue, so I finished off the white, and we still had just this awful, garish royal blue, so we printed a couple, were very disappointed with the color, and called it a night.
The next day I had an email from Missy, mentioning a local vendor of ink. So, I drove over to MD, picked up a pound of white and a pound of black, and that night mixed up this perfect sky blue. We inked up the press, changed plates to the base color design, which was just this tiny balloon and “of” and got printing!
Hard to imagine this was any trouble, but this little card reflects literally hours of work!! That beautiful, even impression, clean edges and all…what a headache! And only 600 more to press!!
Blue balloons up the wazoo!Here’s a little two-minute peek into the glorious world of letterpress:
You might get bored. But if you do manage to watch all 117 seconds, you’ll notice Missy cleans the plate off a bit, and we have a little discussion about trouble shooting some smudging on the cards. Now, imagine: we pulled that little lever over 600 times for blue, and again for gray, and again for blue on the ceremony invites, and again for gray… not to mention all of the stopping in between for fixes and adjustments, and sleep…
Not as glamourous as it seems. Though, when things were going smoothly, there was a very therapeutic rhythm to that press. I think I might cap out about 200 in the future, though!!
Not as glamourous as it seems. Though, when things were going smoothly, there was a very therapeutic rhythm to that press. I think I might cap out about 200 in the future, though!!
Oh how beautiful the stack of half-finished cards!
Now, flash forward to two days and about thirty man-hours later:
I shirked on my photo-journaling. The mood didn’t lend itself to quite as many snapshots once we were elbow-deep in the problems and solutions of simple machinery. We thought there might be a little trouble aligning the gray impression over the blue, but that went surprisingly well. The other problem we encountered was that the ampersand did not show up in gray because the balloon had already been impressed. To solve that conundrum, we affixed a tiny circle of paper to the platen (or the place on the press where the paper lies) so that when the card was impressed, the balloon actually stuck back up in line with the rest of the card, and was able to receive it’s double impression! Pretty cool.
The ceremony invites went really smoothly. In fact, Dave and I showed up on what I expected to be D-Day to finish the invites, and Missy was practically finished! I think she was ready to be done with this huge project.
So, Dave and I sat and counted out the cards, doing a little quality control at the same time. Smudges out. Smears out.
There you have it! 650 reception invitations and 30 sealing invites. Signed, sealed and ready to be delivered.
Lucky for us, Missy’s husband was Salt Lake City bound the following morning. So, we packed up the cards and shipped them off to be oohed and ahhed over as they were stuffed into 600+ envelopes.
Oh, and the real exciting moment came when I opened my little mailbox last week and saw this awesome kraft-paper envelope.
I ordered the matching return-address label from Love To Create Stamps on Etsy. The guy was great to work with and created the stamp straight from the PDF file I sent him. It turned out beautifully.
And inside? A perfect stack of unique, hand-made goodness. We found that great red and white bakers twine at Bell’occhio in San Fran, the photo was done by the amazing wildflowers photography, and those incredible letterpressed invites? Look no further!
No, I’m sorry, I’m not taking orders at this time (unless you have a big, huge budget!)
Due to my delicate condition, I’m putting printing with solvent-based inks on the shelf for awhile. And my darling, already-designed-in-my-head Christmas cards will have to wait until next year! In fact, I think I’m more up for Valentines Day cards this year. I should have some project-energy in me by then:)
Anyway, cool invitations, huh?
The wedding next week is staged to be phenomenal.
I’ll let you know!
Credits, once again:
Invitation Design: Andres Montaño
Vintage Rag Paper: Arch Paper
Ink Source: Paper Plus
Return Address Stamp: lovetocreatestamps
Envelope: xpedex
Bakers Twine: Bell’occhio
Engagement Photo: Wildflowers photography
Letterpress invitations: Missy and Yours Truly, but mostly Missy;)
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