Wedding Words of Wisdom

Last week we had an interesting commission from a family friend. He was attending a wedding, and was looking for a letterpress print of this rather wise and lovely quote from Audrey Hepburn:

"The best thing to hold onto in life is each other".

We were, of course, delighted to take it on, but there was an element of time pressure, a little over a week until the big day! In which time we'd have to design and/or typeset, print, let it dry and post it to Oxford. So, no time to waste!

After trawling through our available type, we decided we didn't really have the right font (or certainly not in the right size) to do the piece justice. So photopolymer plates it had to be.

We drew up 6 different designs and sent them off for the perusal of our client (ooh that's a grown up word). Here's a couple we didn't go with, I think they're still pretty cute though...

The chosen design was a bit more modern and relaxed. I'm happy to say it was my pick of the bunch too.

Here's the plate inked up on press:

We tried it in blue, as our black ink was playing silly buggers and not distributing very nicely:

But sometimes only black will do, so we persevered:

We were very happy with the end result and sent it off post-haste (or special delivery as it's commonly known).

I decided to type a covering letter on my 1922 Underwood typewriter. Not really sure why, but I don't get to use it enough these days. It was totally covered in cat hair, and probably is in need of a bit of maintenance, but you can't beat the look of a hand-typed letter can you:

He had the print professionally framed, it looks fabulous with a proper mount and everything:

We're hoping to have copies of this print available for sale soon, and hopefully some others as well. Any suggestions for quotes you'd like to see, do drop us a line!