Sarah and I love letterpressing. In fact, I think I would give up just about all my other Haute Papier duties (I joke of course!) if I could letterpress all the all day, everyday. But that's not to say it's all fun and games. There's a lot of work that goes into this craft of ours, including maintenance on an old press, ink mixing, setting up of our design plates (at least we're not setting type!) and clean-up can certainly be a messy job. But in the end, it's all worth it since we're able to produce lovely products for happy clients!
Here's Sarah mixing lots of ink for several projects. We have a stock of rubber based inks that we use to match a desired color perfectly. Sarah likes mixing the inks - we're always surprised that even though the ink might not look like the color it's supposed to be once we print with it while it's in the jar, if you follow the formula, it always turns out perfectly! She's mixing our poppy ink in the photo - doesn't it look awfully red?
Isn't this old type so cool? We found this scouting around a friend's shop. Too bad we can't take it all home with us. We generally don't set type, but every once in a while we get a whim to do thing old school.
In this un-lovely photo I'm posing with our C+P press Gertrude!
Here's one of the finished products - a calling card from our Personal Stationery line to be in stores soon!
Sarah and I are back from our letterpressing “retreat” in Buffalo and we were certainly very busy! We completed all the projects we were hoping to get done and even had time to experiment with some beautiful ( and very messy!) metallic mixing to get just the perfect copper color for an upcoming couture project. We printed over 1900 pieces and changes the ink too many times to count! Our list looks pretty daunting at first, but without it we'd be lost. And I can't describe how happy we get when that green highlighting moves further and further down the our project list.