Christmas Cards - round two

We've now finished printing our second batch of Christmas cards. This time a text-based design, definitely not inspired by our lamentable drinking habits...

This being letterpress, each colour has to be printed separately of course. First up, teal:

2nd colour, a silver-grey:

In other news, we're still beavering away at our website, and are getting ever closer to actually launching. Couple of weeks at the most now, I hope. These things always take longer than you think!

Our very first Christmas cards

When we first started getting into letterpress, we set ourselves the challenge of printing our own Christmas cards for 2014. This seemed a rather daunting prospect at the time, and in many ways something of a pipe dream.

I can't quite believe how much of a journey we've been on since we made ourselves that promise, barely a year ago. We've learned an extraordinary amount and met some fantastic people.

I'm pleased to say that with regards the Christmas cards, we have not let ourselves down, and whilst our second design is still a work in progress, our very own Little Robin card is all printed and ready to send out to our wonderful friends and family... Hope no-one will be too disappointed by seeing it on here first, but I'm too excited not to post about it!

These are the first cards we printed from photopolymer plates rather than vintage type. As with everything in letterpress, it was a bit of a struggle at first, and needed some, uh, 'creative' problem-solving but we got there.

Here's the work in progress (we used a mask in order not to get ink all over the aluminium base):

After our initial test run for the orange elements, we decided it was too pale:

So we mixed up a redder red-breast:

We printed these on our proof press (our type-high base is to big for the Adana), so each individual card had to be printed one at a time, with the plates inked by hand for every card (twice of course, as it's 2-colour). This has taken TIME. We really need to lay our hands on a treadle press!

I won't bore you with any more of the trials and tribulations though, here instead are a few shots of the final product:

As I have hinted at, we're hoping to launch our shop very soon and all being well, these should be amongst the items for sale. Whoop!

Milling About... A visit to Frogmore Paper Mill

Being the massive geeks that we are, we elected to visit a paper mill to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Who wants a posh dinner when you can run around an old factory??

The mill in question was Frogmore Paper Mill on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead. Frogmore claims fame as the first mechanised paper mill in the UK, with their oldest gear dating back to the early 1800s, I believe. Sadly, a lot of the large-scale machinery is now lying dormant at Frogmore, as post-recession it's very hard for them to compete against more modern paper manufacturers. They still make some wonderful specialist papers though, including some made from sheep poo (and no, it neither looks nor smells like poo, silly).

We began our tour with a little papermaking session, where we each made our own sheet of paper to bring home, which was great fun. If you're visiting with kids, they'll love this bit.

We then proceeded to a tour of the facilities. My memory is appalling, so I'm not going to try and identify the name or function of each of these. I'll just generalise... look at this amazing collection of old industrial awesomeness:

We also saw the water wheel:

And a fascinating exhibition of historical artefacts relating to fire-fighting. Here's me hanging out with the lovely people there:

I was also very enamoured of the typewriters on display, puts my collection to shame somewhat:

Then just as if we weren't excited enough, they had a bloomin' letterpress studio! Woo!

After our tour (and, to be honest, after all the other visitors had basically gone home!), we hung around for ages having a proper good chat with Paul, the letterpress chap there. He's a volunteer, keeping the presses running where possible. He was knowledgable and incredibly generous with his time; we came away with some excellent tips and a wish-list for new toys as long as your arm!

Frogmore do actually run letterpress courses, so we'll certainly be looking into that.

Here are some of the wonderful presses they had there.

Also saw this, but I hope we'll make it through a couple more anniversaries before this becomes relevant:

So in short, a marvellous day out for anyone with an interest in our industrial heritage, paper, or printing. If you're into letterpress as well, get down there, you're in for a ruddy treat.

Have a SERIOUSLY Happy Birthday

Another personalised birthday card for a friend to show you this week. This one is more of a departmental in-joke at work, so possibly looks a bit odd. I'm pleased to say the recipient, my lovely Polish colleague Kornelia, was delighted with it.

This was our initial lock-up, but I decided it wasn't dramatic enough:

I needed to draw more attention to the word "Seriously" and then have the "Have a" and "Happy Birthday" almost as an after-thought for the joke to really work. So we went with mixed wooden type, like so:

A delicious hot pink was really the only colour choice here:

And then the other bit. You can't go wrong with Gill Sans:

And the finished card:

I'll admit I don't think this one is going to have much appeal outside of the Usborne Production department, but it performed its role perfectly!

What does Admiral Ackbar say?

Just a quick post today. Here's another personalised birthday card, this time for our dear friend Graham, who is a huge (and I mean HUGE) Star Wars fan.

This lovely old wooden type is so worn down that none of it is really type-high anymore, but on the proof press, make-ready is easy-peasy, so this didn't take too long to set up.

This is printed with Black Caligo Safe Wash Relief Ink on 330gsm Naturalis in Absolute White Matt (FSC).  

Star Wars not being what you'd call a niche interest, we're hoping to have these for sale one day.  We're very busy bees at the moment, taking slow but steady steps towards launching our website (with a little shop and a proper company name and everything... eek! And sshhh! It's still all under wraps for now!)