Posts Tagged ‘Paper Goods’

So, as you know, we have a lazy-girl’s How-To series here on APW, to facilitate the creation of not-too-difficult things for your wedding. But the thing is, this post is not lazy in the slightest—it’s about building a table-top letterpress, and then hand letterpressing your invitations yourself (I know…) but the thing is? I love this post. Because A) it’s totally fascinating to see how it all works, and because B) I love how planning a wedding sometimes turns us on to a passion that we didn’t know we had. So here is Jenn of A Misallocation of Resources, Sisterhood of the Traveling Dress recipient, and APW-er extraordinaire, explaining how she built her own letterpress and how she might better make a little business out of it one day.

Of all the things I have obsessed over during this wedding planning process so far, the invitations have been the worst.  The week after I got engaged I started designing and rejecting invitations, partly because I knew I could save money doing them myself, and partly because I discovered I really like designing invitations.

However, I became increasing frustrated with the paper used by the companies who could do the printing for me, or the paper I could buy from online sources that would actually run through a printer.  And eventually, I came to this conclusion:  I needed, for my personal satisfaction, heavy 100% cotton paper (which I was told wouldn’t fit through my printer – lies!), and I wanted, more than anything else, beautiful crisp letter-pressed invitations.  Mine may not be as crisp as I wanted, but I love them, and it was worth it.

So here is how I did it, step by step, on my homemade DIT letterpress.

As a sidenote:  I am a pretty crafty, hands-on kind of girl.  But I have never printed anything before in my life, not even a carved-potato block print in middle school art class.  So don’t despair if you’ve never done this before!  The internet is also full of people sharing their printing knowledge.

1. Build the letterpress.  Or in this case, ask your dad to build you the press for Christmas. We used this plan.  That guy really knows his stuff.  We built it exactly as he lays it out – email me at jenn.heller7 at gmail dot com if you have questions.  We bought all the materials that we needed at the Home Depot, except the tire jack which we ordered from Amazon.  Total material cost for the press was $80.

2. Buy the rest of your supplies. I bought my paper and envelopes from letterpresspaper.com. (I used 100% cotton Crane Lettra 300gsm paper and envelopes, in Pearl.  It is just barely ivory.  If I could do it again, I would have bought the 600gsm just for the main invite, to allow for more paper thickness and a deeper impression). Then I bought my ink and the brayer (ink roller) online from Dick Blick – I used the Caligo Safe Wash ink, and it worked great, with easy cleanup.  I went with Prussian Blue so I didn’t have to mix colours.  I used a Speedball soft rubber brayer.  If possible, buy a brayer wide enough to easily cover the width of your plate in one roll – otherwise, there is the possibility your roller will dip into the recess area of the plate.

3. Oh yeah, design your invites (or buy a design from one of APW’s great sponsors.)*  I produced mine using a combo of AutoCAD for the drawing and template making, and Illustrator for the text and refinement.  You could easily use Photoshop as long as you rasterize all your text layers.  My invites are inspired by the architectural details of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where we are having the wedding, because I think it is just an amazing and intricate building.  I am obsessed with the lantern hanging in the portico, as well as the grate in the transom above the main door:  thus the design for both the save the date and invitation, plus thank you notes. Continue reading How To: Build And Use Your Own Letterpress

Today’s post is from Mary, who got married on my parent’s anniversary on December 28th (which is not exactly a common wedding date). She owes us a wedding graduate post (achem), but today she’s here writing about the process of letterpressing her own invitations. The simple fact of the matter is this: most of you are not going to hand letterpress your invitations. But. Letterpress in increasingly popular, and it’s also an art form. So, I thought it would be interesting to explore how it’s actually done. A side note: Mary is discussing typesetting and letterpressing her invites, which is the oldest form of letterpress. For those of you who, like me, have graphic elements to your letter press invitations, your design will be made into a plastic plate, and that will be used to press the invites. But this, this is the core of what letterpress is, why it tends to cost a lot of money when you don’t do it yourself (it’s hard labor, involves heavy machinery, and incredibly time consuming) and why it’s a little bit magic.

I need to preface this post by saying that I love paper.

When I was a kid, I would go to the bookstore and spend my allowance on nice journals even though I rarely wrote in them.  I used to sit in the library and read quietly, deeply inhaling that musty-old-book smell.  I was that kid who EAGERLY AWAITED back-to school shopping so that I could go home, unwrap everything, and neatly equip all my school binders.  If you already think I’m nutzo, you probably don’t want to attempt any of the following.  Like most other wedding DIY guides, this post should have an ONLY IF YOU REALLY LOVE IT warning sticker slapped on it. (Editor’s note: And oh, hey! Look! We already do!)

When I got engaged, I began my investigation into wedding stationery and found that letterpress was considered to be the Best of Wedding Paper (Editor’s note: Though as discussed earlier this week, Letterpress isn’t Jesus, and it’s not what your grandma thinks is fancy, though it is an art form). It’s one of those things I had never heard of before I planned my wedding, like charger plates and chiavari chairs. The portfolios of letterpress studios were absolutely breathtaking.  I immediately knew that was what I wanted, but I felt ashamed when the indie wedding world accused, ”Why would you spend so much money on something that people will just throw away?”  I didn’t have a suitable answer for them, and it was no matter because I didn’t have five grand to drop on paper goods anyway.

I started resigning myself to Kinko’s when somehow, I learned that my school, Dartmouth College, had its own letterpress studio in the basement of the library.  The best part?  All students and members of the community were granted access to the studio, its instructors, and its materials FOR FREE.

So in short, I spent several weeks, when I had the time, going to the studio each evening after classes and spending three hours at a time designing, typesetting, and pressing 100 save-the-dates, invitations, reception cards (which I ended up redoing since our reception site changed over the summer), response cards, and thank-you notes.  I would leave the studio with my feet aching, my fingertips dry, gritty, and splotched, but feeling like I had accomplished something superb.

A true step-by-step post probably wouldn’t be productive for two big reasons; first, I didn’t take step-by-step pictures while I was doing my pressing (and you really need visuals to explain this), and second, because it’s a rather technical process and I don’t want to bore you all.  So instead, I’m just going to give you the gist of the process and several pointers and takeaways:

Continue reading How To: DIY Letterpress