Noted

Apologies for the hiatus, we've been a wee bit busy in the run up to the festive season. Much fun has been had with various craft markets, epic Christmas card print-runs, typing letters from Santa etc.

Most of our time has been devoted, however, to another new project, about which we're very excited... Personalised Notebooks!

This started off as 2015's solution to our annual 'massive family, no time' Christmas present dilemma, but we're pleased to say has proved popular with our customers as well.

I don't have as many 'work in progress' photos as I'd like, so will be sure to take some more detailed shots next time we're making.

The covers are letterpress printed with the text either being blind debossed or printed with black ink:

We've given a choice of two 24pt fonts. Gills Sans Bold:

Or Bernhard Gothic Light:

We were able to stick with our ethical sourcing policies by using recycled board for the covers. This is from the lovely Eco-craft, and we selected a range of 11 very sexy colours:

The few work in progress shots I do have:

To bind the notebooks, we use a simple 3-hole pamphlet stitch, like so:

Using our very lovely Bookbinding Tool Kit from the LCBA:

Here's hoping we'll be making plenty more of these in 2016.

Thanking you

A little later in the year than we might have hoped, we've printed these cards for our Christmas thank yous. Certainly suitable for non-festive expressions of gratitude as well, they'll be appearing in our shop sometime soon.

We wanted to keep these fairly simple in design, and liked the idea of experimenting with un-inked type again. We've used blind impressions before, but so far, only for insulting people : )

Now I just have to go and write the blimmin things...

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!