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!

Inky Goodness

Came across this marvellous video from The Printing Ink Company about how ink is made. Fascinating stuff.

Does anyone else get an overwhelming urge to just jump into one of those vats?? I think I might have a bit of a problem.

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.

Alice and the Arab - Balscote Press Visit: Part One

Last weekend we were lucky enough to have a 2-day private workshop at Balscote Press near Banbury. Our main goal was to learn as much as we could about operating the Arab press, and hopefully come home armed with the knowledge we needed to finish the restoration of our own press.

We had a wonderful time hanging out with Brian in his workshop and learnt a shedload of useful stuff. Most importantly for me,  I'm not scared of the Arab anymore!

I'm going to break our trip down into a few different blog posts so it doesn't get too long and boring. First up: printing our Alice in Wonderland block on the Arab.

Here's Alice locked up in the chase:

We need to get us some of those awesome giant double quoins.

Next we ink the press with this stunning shade of red:

We had a lot of make-ready to do (or "fiddling and diddling" as Brian called it!) before we got her printing to the quality we wanted. Here's the block being inked:

The wooden blocks you can see also getting covered in ink are called type-high bearers. They are a brand new discovery for us, and help to evenly distribute the ink by supporting the rollers at the side.

The press in action:

We printed onto the top packing sheet first (usually called the tympan, but in this case it's an A4 plastic pocket!) to get the positioning right:

Lots of Alices:

Doesn't she look lovely:

Posts to follow on our other activities including making photopolymer plates from halftone photographs (who knew that was even possible?), and making our own rubber stamps.

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. 

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.