Printed Things

Hers and Hers love cards on press.

I have several new products and projects that I will be releasing soon in my Etsy shop and on my website, many of which are letterpress printed. I am saving the final product shots for the official release, so you will have to be patient, but here are some in-progress shots to whet your appetite.  

 I made a mini love card series because love comes in shapes and sizes.

 Believe it or not, one of my larger projects for the year was an 11 piece coaster set/book art project. I'll go into more detail in a future post solely about this project.

My old gift tag designs are nearly sold out so I did a new, 3 design set that is rather literal and somewhat in your face.

Make-ready for the love card series

 Love card series lock-up

 Gift tags on press.

 Who doesn't love a little sarcasm when they're being sincere?

 I rarely do a card run that's large enough to make ruining a tympan with a scoring matrix worth it. That means whipping out the ol' bone folder and straight edge for a bit of hand-scoring action.

Wood type is just as nice on its own as when it's printed.

Letterpress Gift Tags

Earlier this week I got to spend a day in the letterpress studio at the San Francisco Center for the Book teaching my first ever letterpress workshop--Letterpress Gift Tags.

The workshop was an awesome 3 hours of printing gift tags on tabletop platen presses. 

We began with learning to set lead type and basic press operation. Then we got right down to business with printing.

 Happy Winter was my design. The typeface kinda reminds me of a beer label...

 This one was a warm up for the students at they learned to work the press

How could we make holiday tags without naughty/nice ones?

Class ended with rounding corners, punching holes and adding string, so the tags could be attached to gifts.

Chickens, Beef, and Gift Tags

Last week I headed into the San Francisco Center for the Book to do some letterpressing. A friend of mine had found this great chicken letterpress image and asked me to print it. The form printed wonderfully and I was so enthused, I made a day of printing, making not only chicken cards, but also some beef cards and gift tags from the scraps.

I tried to make the perfect 'chicken orange' but I just ended up with regular orange. Oh well.

Chicken form, ready for printing

The cards got yellow and red envelopes.

I packaged the cards for my friend, using an old magazine page as the wrap.

Beef cards in the same style

Inked press, ready to print some gift tags

I made 5 different gift tags with various font colors, besides the 'hi friend' ones, I made tags that said 'awesome', 'hey there', 'love you', and 'why hello'.

I wrapped the cards, envelopes, and some gift tags for my friend in old encyclopedia pages and tied them with fancy kitchen twine.