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.

Off with their heads!

S'alright, we're not really decapitating anyone, just bought us a guillotine and I can't think about the word guillotine without that coming to mind. We'll only be trimming board with it, promise.

So here he is, lovely no? Please ignore our hideous kitchen, we can't afford to do it up because we keep buying letterpress gear.

We had no idea that Adana made guillotines as well as presses. I'm so pleased he's as handsome as our little 8x5!

We bought this on ebay a couple of weeks ago, collection only. The seller turned out to be a charming bloke called Glenn, from Inky Beard Press.

He's based in Whitstable, so we managed another trip to the seaside this month in order to collect. It was absolutely pissing it down, but I'm always happy to see the sea, whatever the weather.

We enjoyed an interesting chat with Glenn, he showed us around his little workshop. He has a marvellous collection of type, and this hunking beauty of a press, a Crown Folio Arab. We are very jealous:

Here's some of his lovely work. I love the 'public hanging' poster:

We can't wait to get cracking with the guillotine and are anticipating it will save us a shed load of time. We've been trimming by hand (it seems we do everything by hand!) with a scalpel up to this point, so hopefully this will give us a few days of our lives back.

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...

Milling About... A visit to Frogmore Paper Mill

Being the massive geeks that we are, we elected to visit a paper mill to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Who wants a posh dinner when you can run around an old factory??

The mill in question was Frogmore Paper Mill on the outskirts of Hemel Hempstead. Frogmore claims fame as the first mechanised paper mill in the UK, with their oldest gear dating back to the early 1800s, I believe. Sadly, a lot of the large-scale machinery is now lying dormant at Frogmore, as post-recession it's very hard for them to compete against more modern paper manufacturers. They still make some wonderful specialist papers though, including some made from sheep poo (and no, it neither looks nor smells like poo, silly).

We began our tour with a little papermaking session, where we each made our own sheet of paper to bring home, which was great fun. If you're visiting with kids, they'll love this bit.

We then proceeded to a tour of the facilities. My memory is appalling, so I'm not going to try and identify the name or function of each of these. I'll just generalise... look at this amazing collection of old industrial awesomeness:

We also saw the water wheel:

And a fascinating exhibition of historical artefacts relating to fire-fighting. Here's me hanging out with the lovely people there:

I was also very enamoured of the typewriters on display, puts my collection to shame somewhat:

Then just as if we weren't excited enough, they had a bloomin' letterpress studio! Woo!

After our tour (and, to be honest, after all the other visitors had basically gone home!), we hung around for ages having a proper good chat with Paul, the letterpress chap there. He's a volunteer, keeping the presses running where possible. He was knowledgable and incredibly generous with his time; we came away with some excellent tips and a wish-list for new toys as long as your arm!

Frogmore do actually run letterpress courses, so we'll certainly be looking into that.

Here are some of the wonderful presses they had there.

Also saw this, but I hope we'll make it through a couple more anniversaries before this becomes relevant:

So in short, a marvellous day out for anyone with an interest in our industrial heritage, paper, or printing. If you're into letterpress as well, get down there, you're in for a ruddy treat.

Mixed type and not a lot to say...

We've had rather a hiatus from printing of late, been a bit busy with real life (boring). This may continue for a little while longer, but towards the end of this month, we'll be back on it, and this blog should get more interesting again (well, "interesting" might be a bit generous).

I've got a couple more cards to blog about, but have to wait until they've been given to the, uh,  lucky recipients before I post any photos, so as not to spoil the surprise.

So in the interim, here' some things we've acquired...

Some mixed type from an antiquarian bookshop in Penzance. That's a lotta P's. Not sure what I was thinking really, but was so excited to have stumbled upon some type whilst on holiday, I got a bit carried away:

A bucket load more wooden furniture (you can never really have enough):

And for our Christmas cards this year, some lovely Naturalis board from G.F Smith:

And some very sexy grey-lined envelopes from Pitshanger. These are rather expensive, but just so gorgeous, we couldn't help ourselves!