Letterpress and other Distractions: 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: