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.

Who's Your Daddy?

Yep, you guessed it, this post is about Father's Day cards! For those of you not up to date on the special occasion calendar, Father's Day is 21st June this year.

We were determined to come up with some Father's Day cards that were a bit more interesting and original than our Mother's Day offering this year. Nothing whatsoever wrong with our Mother's Day cards, they were very lovely, nicely printed etc., but nothing particularly clever or unusual about them. So that was the brief we set ourselves for Father's Day. I feel like we've achieved that. I also feel like I'm getting RSI from typing 'Father's Day' over and over again.

So, now available in our shop, here are our 3 designs, along with a couple of in-progress / on-press photos, though I confess I don't have many of those...

The hammer outline originally had another design planned for it, but whilst it worked on screen and made us giggle, we just couldn't get it to come together on press, so we abandoned this one:

The hammer works much better on his own though, don't you think?

If our own Dads are reading this... sorry about the spoilers, you will be getting one of these... but you can choose which one if you like :)

Stand By Me

As you'll tire of me mentioning, we (as in Grey Letter Press) have a stand at the Crafty Fox Market in Brixton on 25th April. As this is our first ever market, we've had a heck of a lot of prep to do.

We're chugging away reprinting our current range, designing our business cards, thinking about packaging etc. We even bought a cash box. It's all very exciting.

Here are the paper bags we've letterpressed with our logo, cute huh? Our customers (if there are any, eek!) deserve the best...

Our biggest concern so far has been how we're actually going to go about displaying our cards at the market. As part of Crafty Fox Uncovered, we're only allocated a table around 75cm square. Which is obviously fine, but requires some creative thinking to have it not look a busy mess, whilst still displaying as much of our work as possible.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with a good old fashioned wire rack display, but it didn't seem very 'us'. So, one half of our duo having had a former life as a paper engineer (not me, the other one), we decided it might be a good idea to make our own display stand. As if we didn't have enough work to do already...

Well, I'm delighted to say it's done, and in my humble opinion, it looks bloody fantastic! Thought I'd share some pics with you here. It's made out of grey foamboard, cut out with a scalpel, and slotted together by hand.

Please ignore the pencil marks we've still to rub out, which rather spoils the look, I know!

It has the advantage of being easy to transport as it's incredibly lightweight and breaks down to relatively small pieces, as you can see.

For any fellow traders out there who like the look of this, you can download the PDF designs for it here. You've still got the hard bit to do, obviously, but we hope it proves useful!

We've going to use a wooden type tray alongside this as well, to allow us to show more designs, and give our stall more of a letterpress-y vibe. It's all coming together!

We do hope you'll be able to come along and see us. Saturday 25th April at the Dogstar in Brixton - get it in your diary or magic phone thing.

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.