Letterpress love

I've spent a lot of quality time with my letterpress printer lately, including two things that were a lot of fun for me. Most recently, I printed 300 invitations for an open house at a law firm.



The invitation had fine text and a large monogram, so I had to print them separately to be able to get a nice impression for the monogram. I cut the monogram out of the plate, and printed the first set with just the text.

Then I removed the plate with the text, added back the monogram, and printed them all again.

Yesterday they were sent off to their new home in Alabama. I hope they have fun at their party!

The second project I really enjoyed was a set of custom cards for a friend. A while back I had a contest among some friends to develop a caption for a card. AJ won the contest, and her prize was a set of cards printed with her own message, "from the unpredictable mind of aj furay."

I used hand-set type for her message. I'm getting pretty good at reading backwards!

And I mixed the ink to match the same color of green that was used on her wedding invitations.

These cards now live with AJ in her home in Maryland (and I hear that they love the crab cakes out there!).