Cummings & Eyre

That sounds like it should the name of a publisher or something...

In fact it refers to two lovely quotes we've been printing. These were bespoke pieces for a wedding.

The lovely bride, Cath, had the very sweet idea of gifting her Readers with letterpress prints of the pieces that they read in her ceremony. Nice, huh?

The pieces were relatively long, so we had to use photopolymer plates, and the fonts had to be pretty small to fit into the required frame area (10 x 15cm), but obviously fine detail work like this is where letterpress excels.

Cath selected the font Dakota Handwriting to give a friendly, relaxed vibe to the prints. I think it works really well.

The date and location of the wedding were blind debossed at the bottom right of each print.

For colours, we printed in copper and an inky blue.

I'm pleased to say the final prints were very well received.

Cath was even kind enough to send us photos of the framed copies.

Do drop us a line if you have any of your own bespoke letterpress projects in mind!

Cat Plate - Balscote Press Visit: Part Two

As promised, here's another post on what we got up to on our trip to Balscote Press last month.

This is about the rather miraculous process of letterpress printing photographs. No really.

Being the massive losers we are, we decided the only photos that would do for this experiment were of our beloved cats, Basil and Saffy (they have their own blog here). First step is to convert the image to half-tone:

This basically means it's made up of a series of dots. The greater the spacing between the dots, the lighter the area will appear when printed, and in turn, the denser the dots, the darker the area will appear. Genius.

This is then printed to film:

Then we realise it needs to be a negative and print it to film again:

To create something from which we can print, we use this magical little device to create a photopolymer plate from the film. This is a UV process. Don't ask me how it works...

The basics are that the printing areas will harden, and then the non-printing areas of the plate need to be washed away using this hi-tech method:

And you're left with this (ta da!):

This was all done in rather a rush as we were running out of time, so in future we definitely need to go at it slower. We weren't particularly confident we'd get something printable this time, but we were pleasantly surprised. We got our black ink ready:

Here's the inked plate on the Arab:

And the resultant print:

Just ignore the rather unfortunate shape across Basil's face, it's most likely due to over-vigorous scrubbing of the plate during the cleaning stage. Ahem.

Here's another photopolymer plate (not made in a rush) where you can see some very handsome fishes:

So there you have it! We're incredibly excited about the potential of this technique, the possibilities are endless really. We're very much looking forward to experimenting once we have the time, and when our Arab is ready to play of course.

I've been driving in my car

We've had a few bespoke projects to work on this January, which has been excellent fun.

I'd like to share this one with you; they're gift vouchers for a local driving instructor. My driving instructor in fact. Yes, after almost 15 years of pathological terror, I have finally started learning to drive. So if you value life and limb, perhaps avoid Bishop's Stortford on a Wednesday afternoon.

The vouchers are printed in 1 colour (black) on 330gsm Naturalis FSC in Absolute White Matt.

Here's the photopolymer plate:

And inked up:

Drying after the inked part was all printed:

I'm particularly pleased with the blind debossed L-plate borders:

The finished product:

I'm pleased to say the vouchers were very well received by our client. 

If you or anyone you know is in need of driving lessons on the Herts/Essex border, I cannot recommend Diane highly enough. 

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.