All in a days work.

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!

The Art of Coordinating Paperie

I'm a complete sucker for coordinating papierie... not to the point of being mother/daughter matching Lilly Pulitzer, but I like when things go together just right! My mom, sisters and I hosted a tea for my cousin who is getting married a couple of weekends ago and I wanted to share the pics and template for creating your own matching tea paperie.  Click here for the original post from The District Domestic.We created these super cute little tea bags by sewing together two pieces of very fine mesh on three sides then using embroidery floss to stitch around the top.  Once filled with tea, all it takes is pulling the thread tight to close the bag.  Here's the template for making the tags on the end of the thread.

Here are the tags that went on the loose leaf tea that we used to fill the homemade tea bags with.

And here are the tags for the food and favors.

Happy Tea Party!

We're Back

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.

As seen in ...

Check out our cool ad that just ran in the May issue of Washington Life.   The first picture is of Gertrude (or Gertie for short) in action.  Although all of our letterpresses have female temperaments (in just about every sense!), Gertrude is a bit more masculine looking and we needed a name to reflect her more manly stature (sorry to all the Gertrudes out there)!  We mixed the bright green for great clients Beth and Frank.  You can see their wedding program showing how beautiful blind letterpressing can truly be!

We've worked with a ton of great couples who have seen our work in Washington Life and are looking for the impress their guests with a letterpressed invitation suite.  We've also recently worked on the magazine's fabulous Young and the Guest List party!

The Real Deal

Hello again! This week we are holding down the fort because Sarah and Erin are in Buffalo, New York for business.  We are getting a little taste of the responsibilities and tasks that Sarah and Erin perform on a weekly basis. We have also begun brainstorming and designing some ideas in Adobe Illustrator for Haute Papier’s holiday line.  Currently, our plan is to develop a variety of designs for the holidays including Christmas and Hanukah, as well as other general greetings such as Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings.  This week we are primarily focusing on Christmas, and as the weeks progress we will incorporate the others in our designs.