Bon Voyage Emily :(

A dear friend and colleague of mine is relocating from London to Bristol. I am both delighted for her, insanely jealous, and already missing my cinema buddy.

It's also her birthday coming up, so inspired by our joint frustration with our overcrowded metropolis, we made this card for her.

From that angle, it may just look like your average beautifully letterpressed birthday card (!), but if you look closer, you can see we've been playing with blind impressions again, and a hidden message is revealed...

Here are some pics of the type being locked-up and inked. This was a bit of a messy one, our roller's too wide to do this with any finesse so we had to wipe it off before printing!

I'm pleased to report she loved it. Bon Voyage Emily & Jon, missing you guys already!

Gold! And a lucky find.

Let me clarify. We have not found any treasure, gold is just an ink colour, and the lucky find was a type tray. Ok, expectation management out of the way, just a quick catch-up today...

I've recently gone down to a 4-day week in my day job, allowing me the brilliant expanse of all-the-Wednesdays to focus on our little letterpress company, Grey Letter Press.

I'll admit the first week didn't go that well, I ended up spending more time cooking and cleaning, as it was such a novelty to be home and have time to do these things. Of course, at the end of the day I felt frustrated and cross with myself. I didn't lose a fifth of my salary to be a bloody housewife!

So, since then I've been much more focused and spent lots of time reprinting cards, look here I am, printing...

Cards what I printed (innit):

In big news, we're trading at our first craft market soon (woohoo!), so we need plenty of stock. I will be posting again about this nearer the time of course, but we'll be at the Crafty Fox Market the Dogstar in Brixton on Saturday 25th April. Do swing by if you fancy it (and buy loads of cards please).

We thought some of our cards could do with a little revamp, so I've been trying out printing some existing designs in gold. Gooooolllld! Whaddaya reckon? This one we've decided is definitely a goer:

Not so sure about this one, I think maybe the original black is better? What say you?

In other news, we've had a weekend away in the delightful seaside town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Apparently, it's pronounced "All-brough", which is confusing. Not much to do if you've got kids or are easily bored, but if you just like sea-views, walking, eating and drinking like we do, I'd certainly recommend it.

We took a very windy stroll up the coast to the neighbouring village of Thorpeness, where we found a lovely sort of vintage market, called the Thorpeness Emporium. All sorts of delightful bits in there, including a gorgeous 1960s John Lewis sofa that totally stole our hearts. Head's won out on that one (can't afford it, don't need one), but we did allow ourselves to be tempted by this very unusual looking type tray:

That's me, nearly getting blown away on the walk back. I'm not wearing a tiny hat, btw, that's the handle of the tray.

We believe the tray is for storing leading, or furniture. Well, that's what we're using it for anyway. Lovely stuff.

Sausages!

We've been given a rather unusual commission by a friend of mine...

She and her husband make their own sausages at home, mainly for friends, but they're thinking about potentially selling on a small scale sometime soon. In an interesting twist of fate, she also owns this gorgeous old piggy print block that she bought in an antiques shop many moons ago:

Can you guess where this is going? Oh yes, it's time for some letterpress pig labels : )

We proofed it up on the 330gsm stock we use for greetings cards. As you can see, he's in really good nick, with fantastic fine detail, and he's a handsome old devil to boot:

We're still not 100% certain how we want the packaging to work, so we've not actually gone ahead with the final printing for this as yet, but current favourite idea is a belly-band type number, like this:

Or possibly in this lovely gun metal blue:

We also had a go at masking off the text, for any non-pork products, but this needs some work, as you see we're losing some of the line detail from his back:

Will post an update once the final product is printed.

Excuse the unattractive sausages won't you, they were fresh out of the freezer and purely for demonstrative purposes. Not that there's such a thing as attractive sausages anyway, I suppose...