Meet the Presses

First, I want to thank everyone who has entered the letterpress giveaway this week! It's so much fun for me to read all the comments, and it's nice to see all the letterpress love out there.

With all this talk lately about my new big press, my other press is feeling a little slighted. She's been doing a lot of hard work over the last year. Isn't this sort of like kids, where the first one does all the work and the second one comes along and just gets all the attention?

This reminds me, I feel like I need names for the presses. I've been referring to both of them as females, but I'm open to one or both being male. They are both made by Chandler and Price and are referred to as a "C&P" so I'd sort of like to come up with some C or P names. Any suggestions? (Hey, if I pick your name[s] and decide to use it/them, you might get some letterpress stuff!)

So, I introduce you to my first press, a Chandler and Price Pilot. She's a petite thing, weighing only around 200 pounds or so, and she fits nicely on a table in the comfort of what will one day be my official studio (as soon as I get organized enough to find some furniture so I can get organized). The fact that I can use her inside on a freezing day means she'll always have a special place in my heart.



She works much like the bigger press, but her small size limits the size of what I print unless I get really creative and print small sections at a time. Her big disadvantage, though, is that I have to pull that lever each time I want to print something. Put the paper in, pull the lever, take the paper out, put the paper in, pull the lever, take the paper out. You know the drill. It gets tedious after awhile. In April I was printing a set of wedding invitations--150 invitations, envelopes, reply cards, reply envelopes, directions, maps, escort cards, place cards, and table numbers. Some cards had to be printed in two or three sections. By the end of it, I figured I had pulled that lever about 5,000 times. First I wrapped a washcloth around the handle because it was actually blistering my palm. And then I informed the husband that I needed a bigger press with a treadle.

What? Did someone say something about my big press? Do you want to see her again? OK. Here she is, and this time you can see that I've added the wooden feed boards to her (him?).