By way of an introduction

Hello.

My name is Sam. I'm 30 years old and live in Hertfordshire, UK, with my husband (also called Sam) and our Bengal cat, Basil. We both work in London, myself in children's publishing, my husband in software design.

We've recently been gripped by a rather consuming obsession with all things letterpress related. Thank goodness it's both of us, I dread to think of the rows it could cause otherwise, it's looking to be rather an expensive hobby...

Our interest began when we had a our wedding invitations letterpressed last year:

We designed them ourselves and they were printed by a very nice man at KDP Promotions.

The next major bucket of fuel on the fire was the letterpress workshop we attended, run by the lovely folk at Turnbull Grey. It was a great morning, and left us very thirsty for more...

Here's me having a first go on an Adana 8x5. Loving the zingy orange, mixing the inks was one of my favourite parts:

An impressive collection of vintage wooden type:

My "Kim's Cabin" sign all locked-up and inked on the proof press, ready to print. Kim's Cabin is my mum's little craft business. More on that once her website is up and running:

The proof press in action. I'll be honest, I needed help, it's a weighty beast and I am as pathetic as I look:

This was Sam Boy's poster, our cats as DJs, I love it:

I even managed to squeeze in a little Sherlock number for myself:

An awesome day, all told.

That was at the beginning of June. So neither of us counting patience amongst our virtues, we've already bought ourselves an Adana Eight-Five from ebay to refurbish over the summer. This rusty old gal here:

I'll leave the detailed posts on this for another day.

Over the coming months I'll be blogging about our forays into the world of letterpress, as well as anything else we may have going on - we're currently renovating our house, as and when we can afford to, so there might be a bit of that as well.

If you're more interested in cats than printing or DIY (fair enough), then Basil has his own blog, right over here. Look at his handsome face: