Scaling up

Grey Letter Press is almost one year old now, and so far in our little life, most of our output has been greetings cards.

Sure, we've dabbled in bespoke work, wedding invites and so forth, but our bread and butter has been cards, cards, and more cards. Quite a lot of them with naughty words on, to be honest.

In time for Christmas this year, we're keen to scale up to something a little larger, and have produced a selection of prints. We thought you might like to take a look at them, and their production process.

First up, our CMYK-Bees:

This one was pretty labour-intensive. We only have the one 'bee' block, so each print had to go through the press 4 times, once for each colour.

Inks:

Cyan bee on press:

Drying:

Here's a detail shot of the final print:

Keeping with the nature theme, and vintage print blocks, here's our Butterflies piece. Two colours this time, so only 2 passes per print:

I had a lovely time mixing the colours for this one. Dusky rose:

And... not sure what you'd call this one? Peacock blue? Jade green? Turquoise?

Moving on from nature to our other great love in life... stationery! Here's our Scissors print:

I don't have many on press pics of this one. Only one colour this time, but still 3 passes on press for each print:

I love the way the lines of the scissors sort of interlock where they overlap:

Finally, our Pencils print. Probably my favourite, but don't tell the other prints I said that:

We tried this one out on 2 types of board, a plain 330gsm (right), and a more textured 450gsm (left):

The 450gsm board (called Wild White) won out in the end, I love the way the design really bites into the paper when using this slightly pulpier board:

We experimented with various shades of blue to complement the tangerine orange:

Hopefully you like our final choice :)

That's all for now folks, all prints are available to purchase right now on our website. Go on, you know you want to.

Come in and make yourselves a Tome: Bookbinding Workshop with the LCBA

Still here after that appalling pun? Excellent, I think we're going to be friends.

Like many of our crafty mates out there, we do love a good workshop. And as good workshops go, I can whole heartedly recommend a spot of bookbinding with the London Centre for Book Arts.

The actual workshop that we attended was hosted on the airy top floor of the inimitable Foyles Bookshop. I think the run of workshops based here was just a summer thing, but the hands-on joy certainly continues back at LCBA's HQ in our old stomping ground of Hackney. Do check out their upcoming schedule.

Here are the fruits of our labour:

I don't have as many photos to share of the actual workshop as I might have liked. I was too caught up in the actual bookbinding and taking photos was slightly forgotten (clearly I'm not a proper blogger!)

The workshop was taught by a lovely fellow by the name of Simon Goode, with two glamorous assistants whose names I am ashamed to say I did not catch. Simon was both a patient and amusing teacher. We enjoyed his dead-panning: "Has anybody here not threaded a needle before?" etc.

We began with a brief introduction to the bookbinders art and the tools of the trade:

As predicted by Simon, I honestly don't know how I've made it through 31 years on this earth without a bone folder. So handy.

Our first project was a basic 3-hole pamphlet book. There was a range of pre-printed covers available in brilliantly bright colours. These were letterpressed (of course) and we actually managed excellent not-geeking-out over this.

As we are Sam and Sam, of course that's 2 S's. One orange, one golden yellow:

Look at the grain from the wood type. Gorgeous!

The process is fairly simple for this style of binding, but as with everything we did, I think it's pretty easy to do it, it's not so easy to do it well. Does that make sense?

Here's my cover mid-stitch:

You can choose to finish the stitching on the inside or outside of the book, we did one of each, I think I prefer inside myself:

Last job is trimming to get it looking all neat and proper:

Our second project was the slightly more complex and rather fiddly Japanese Stab Binding. Again, very achievable at a basic level, but an absolute bugger to complete to a high standard. We will definitely need a lot more practice!

This method employs thinner paper, folded on the fore edge (ooh, technical) instead of the spine side, and the book block can be held together with clips whilst you work:

Sticking on the corners was actually the hardest job and it was only after the fact that we realised our chosen material sort of looked like sticking plasters  :(

The binding up-close:

Our finished notebooks! His and hers, but the other way round from what you'd expect. It takes a real man to make a pink notebook apparently:

To sum up, this will certainly mark the beginning of plenty more bookbinding adventures for us. We're hoping to produce our very own letterpressed notebooks very soon, and I'm really keen to have a go at case binding next time. 

Do go and check out the LCBA if you get a chance. Wonderful people teaching marvellous old-school skills!

Behind the scenes: printing our stationery-inspired letterpress cards

As I hope you may have seen, we've recently launched a range of stationery-inspired letterpress greetings cards. Here they are, the handsome devils:

We thought it may be of interest to post some behind the scenes photos showing work in progress and a bit of our letterpress process. If that's not of interest, then you should probably just bail now... :)

We designed all of these cards in illustrator and printed from photopolymer plates. Our photos are therefore slightly less aesthetically pleasing than if we were using the more traditional print blocks, but we can't just magic those into existence, so here we are.

First off, we photographed the products we were using as inspiration:

We turn this into vector artwork using illustrator:

Then send this off to the fine folk at Centurion Graphics to get this made into a photopolymer plate. Eventually we hope to have this equipment in-house, but right now we just don't have the space:

As can see, we've got plenty more stationery-themed products yet to come. We're hoping to launch some larger prints and possibly notebooks at craft markets later this year.

When platemaking, you pay by the total area, so it's cost effective to tesselate as many designs together in a small area as you can. As you can see, we combined the stationery artwork with the lovely Audrey Hepburn print (see previous post). It can be a bit fiddly to cut out each component once the plates arrive, but it's really worth it for the economy, platemaking is one of the more expensive parts of the letterpress process for us.

Next, it's time to get inky!

Scissor plate on press, inked in 'yellow ochre', which on fine lines like this comes out as a beautiful muted gold colour:

Printed scissors and fountain pens drying:

Playing with shades of blue:

We started off with a cyan-ish blue for the fountain pen, but then went lighter:

We also like to experiment with the placement of the image on the card, sometimes it takes a few goes to get it right. Here's a rejected position for the fountain pen:

Shades of grey (leave it)...

Pencil plate inked in magenta:

We also printed the pencil card in yellow. This isn't available for sale yet, as we were thinking it looked a bit too light against the white card. It's growing on us though, so it may yet put in an appearance!

It's amazing how the look of the ink varies when it's being mixed, rolled out, then on the plate and on the final card. It makes it harder than you might think to achieve exactly the colour one is looking for. Especially as I often have no real idea what I'm looking for when I first start mixing!!

Black pencil army:

The range stacked up for creasing and packing. As we're consummate professionals, this is usually done of an evening whilst watching a film: