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!

Wedding Words of Wisdom

Last week we had an interesting commission from a family friend. He was attending a wedding, and was looking for a letterpress print of this rather wise and lovely quote from Audrey Hepburn:

"The best thing to hold onto in life is each other".

We were, of course, delighted to take it on, but there was an element of time pressure, a little over a week until the big day! In which time we'd have to design and/or typeset, print, let it dry and post it to Oxford. So, no time to waste!

After trawling through our available type, we decided we didn't really have the right font (or certainly not in the right size) to do the piece justice. So photopolymer plates it had to be.

We drew up 6 different designs and sent them off for the perusal of our client (ooh that's a grown up word). Here's a couple we didn't go with, I think they're still pretty cute though...

The chosen design was a bit more modern and relaxed. I'm happy to say it was my pick of the bunch too.

Here's the plate inked up on press:

We tried it in blue, as our black ink was playing silly buggers and not distributing very nicely:

But sometimes only black will do, so we persevered:

We were very happy with the end result and sent it off post-haste (or special delivery as it's commonly known).

I decided to type a covering letter on my 1922 Underwood typewriter. Not really sure why, but I don't get to use it enough these days. It was totally covered in cat hair, and probably is in need of a bit of maintenance, but you can't beat the look of a hand-typed letter can you:

He had the print professionally framed, it looks fabulous with a proper mount and everything:

We're hoping to have copies of this print available for sale soon, and hopefully some others as well. Any suggestions for quotes you'd like to see, do drop us a line!