1st Birthday Card

Our youngest nephew, Ted, is turning 1 next month. Here's the card we made for him. It was a rather loose concept, just all the 1's we could find in our wooden type collection, and his name in the middle. It went through various incarnations whilst locking-up:

I enjoyed myself mixing the inks as usual:

Finished:

In a last minute flash of inspiration, Samuel thought it would look a bit more interesting if we trimmed it down, so that the numbers were bleeding over the edges. Genius!

This is a Test

Today, we decided to run a test print on the 10 G.F Smith sample papers we took delivery of recently.

We're hoping to narrow it down to one brand that we particularly like, and then order a decent quantity of trimmed sheets, so we can stop dicking about with scalpels every time we want to make a card for someone.

As usual with our ancient wooden type, a fair amount of make-ready was necessary before we could even get all of the letters to print:

We weren't at all worried about getting a perfect or polished finish, just wanted to get an idea of the result we'd get on each of the papers.

You can't really tell from these pics, but the difference in the results was really very pronounced. We're currently tending towards the smoother papers, as these give a sharper edge to the text (obviously), and we find that more appealing.

Having said that the wire texture on their standard Colorplan stock was pretty awesome:

Not quite right as a standard material of course, we need to chose the right job for this.

Thanking you

Our project for this weekend was a thank you card for one of my brothers-in-law. He and his partner were kind enough to give me a little backstage tour at the Eden project (where they work) whilst I was down in Cornwall, holidaying with my family. I had a wonderful day, and felt very well taken care of.

We were using mixed type and some of this stuff was in a bit of a state. So lock-up was something of a nightmare / bodge job:

A proof (we love orange):

And here we go:

We'll give that a couple of days to dry, and then it'll  be in the post!

Post!

A couple of exciting things have arrived in the post recently.

'Swiss' packing for the Adana, and all sorts of goodies, from Happy Dragon Press:

I'm really looking forward to getting this set-up. Hoping for an improvement on the current cereal box and newspaper combo.

And G.F Smith certainly know how to make a girl feel special (well, aside from spelling my name wrong):

G.F Smith's sample ordering service is absolutely exemplary, really well thought out. I thoroughly recommend it!