Time warp (and a bit of printing)

I have been stuck in a time warp the last week or so. Where in the world did September go? Argh!

As you can probably guess, the shops are busy, the new house is busy (I have officially met every single person working in the county that does anything even remotely related to permitting renovations and additions!), and Lachlan is busy, all while the husband was away in Australia for 6 weeks. He is home now and I'm catching up on things, including printing a few birth announcements (all for boys and all with airplanes!).




I'm also working on a very special two-color birth announcement for a very special set of twins who are almost two weeks old now! I'll print the second color this week; I can't wait to show them to you!

Pretty in pink

I have a ridiculous amount of printing to do this week. First up today was the light pink color called blossom. I had an order for 160 birth announcements for little Annie Louise using one of my brand new monogram fonts. So excited to get to use it!

Since I had ink on the press, I also printed a sample using this same monogram font that I can post on Etsy (I don't like posting actual customer's announcements to protect their privacy).

And while I was at it I printed a birth announcement sample with another new monogram font with a vine flourish.

And last but not least, I printed some notecards with another new monogram font (yes, I bought a ton of monogram fonts lately!).

Hopefully I'll manage to get these new samples posted in the shop before the year is over!

New monograms

Monograms are turning out to be quite popular for birth announcements, so I've been working on making more designs available. Here's one I recently did with a leaf frame, printed in a dark blue-black color called night. I printed it this weekend for a sweet boy named Penn and shipped them off yesterday. Now I am working on creating some coordinating return address labels for his mom. I like them so much that I might just make them available in the shop.

Leo and Eloise

I've been printing a lot of birth announcements over the last few weeks, including some for Sophie in Switzerland and Hans in Australia! I need to round up all of them and take some pictures to post here, but lately it seems that the only time I have to take any photographs is practically in the middle of the night. Here are two photos that I took with my phone using instagram (what an awesome invention!) while I was printing.

Leo's cards were printed in a mint green color, and Eloise's cards were printed in a custom mixed persimmon color.

I have two more sets of birth announcements to print this weekend, then another set of birth announcements and some save the date cards next weekend. It's nice to be back printing so much again. I'm also finally getting back to cleaning the type and printing more samples of the personalized stationery (I feel like a broken record because I keep saying that!). Hopefully I can finish moving everything out of the house and into the new space this weekend, and in that process I'm hoping to discover all of the other samples I printed but can't seem to find right now. :)

Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Birth announcements for Mary

Yesterday I printed these sweet birth announcements for little Mary Caroline. The lucky girl is also getting her own set of personalized stationery. It's the least her mom could do for her, considering she has to grow up in a house with two big brothers!








Today or sometime over the weekend I'm hoping to print some more samples of the personalized cards. My goal is to have them all printed and photographed so I can send everyone their sample cards by mid-October. :)

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

June giveaway: Birth announcements!

This month's giveaway is a doozy! I've teamed up with Kristen from Paper Crave and I'm offering a set of 50 birth announcements and coordinating stationery with return address envelope printing to one lucky Paper Crave reader. WOOHOO!



If you win, you can keep it for yourself or give it to a friend (think what a nice baby shower gift this would be!), and the offer is good for up to a year. The giveaway runs through midnight eastern on June 28, 2011, so be sure to visit Paper Crave and enter to win before then. Note that you'll need to comment over at the Paper Crave site--not here--to be considered for the giveaway.

Good luck!

Lachlan's birth announcement

While we're on the topic of birth announcements this week, I wanted to show you the announcement I did for my own wee one.

Because we didn't know Lachlan's sex beforehand, I decided to keep the baby's room very neutral. I decorated it with art of African animals I got in Ethiopia in 2008, which happened to include a lot of giraffes. Nothing about the room really screamed "baby!" and I wanted that same sort of vibe with the birth announcements. I wanted to avoid pastel colors and overly cartoon-y giraffes.

My original plan for a spectacular 3-color announcement got thrown out the window late in pregnancy. This was going to be my first baby and I wasn't sure how soon I'd feel like standing at the press all day, so in the end I went for a much simpler 1-color option. My awesome friend Young designed it for me and I was super happy with how it turned out.

To save paper, I made the announcement A2 size and included a separate photo of Lachlan rather than printing a larger announcement and attaching the photo to it. When Lachlan was 6 weeks old we had a friend of the husband come over for a little photo shoot, and I am in love with the photo we included with the announcement. He just looks so peaceful.



I custom mixed the ink to be sort of a slate blue. Again, I didn't want anything too pastel and babyish.



I especially love how the spots of the giraffes look with the impression created by letterpress!

Sweet and simple custom letterpress birth announcements

I know I've been neglecting this little space for awhile, and I'm sorry about that! Lachlan is keeping me busy and I've been spending every spare moment working on several letterpress projects.

I finally (FINALLY!) finished printing the samples of the birth announcements that I've been working on for months now. I actually finished printing them quite awhile ago, but I finally managed to photograph everything last week and add them to my Etsy shop over the weekend.





The idea behind these sweet and simple announcements is just that: they're simple, and therefore they are really quite affordable (at least as far as letterpress goes).



I made them A2 size, which is 1/4 of a sheet of regular 8.5x11 paper. This allows me to get four cards per sheet of paper instead of just two 5x7 cards (with waste left over), and the way the cost of the cotton paper I use is increasing, this is a very good thing. People will have a choice from a nice selection of animals or other objects for the top of the card and their choice of several fonts. The ink colors are limited to pinks, purples, blues, and greens. By somewhat limiting the selection of ink colors, I increase the chance that I might be able to print more than one order while the press has a particular color on it, therefore saving my time (and money!).



I'm also offering the option of purchasing personalized note cards at the same time as the announcements. They make great thank you cards for all the gifts the baby will get, and by printing a larger number of cards at one time, the price per individual piece can be lowered quite a bit.



Now that this project is finished I'm turning my attention to wrapping up the new line of wedding invitations (I think I have nine designs now), as well as some other more elaborate baby shower invitations/birth announcement designs (including the one that was created for my very own munchkin).

I also have another fun venture up my sleeve. I can't wait to share it with you, but it will have to wait just a bit longer. I need a little more time to organize and photograph everything, and a teething baby who doesn't want to nap much these days is starting to really cut into my time to do that. :)

Letterpress for the little ones

I'm probably not telling you anything new when I say that babies can be pretty expensive. For the majority of the population without their own printing press, I imagine it is probably a hard decision for parents who want to announce the birth of their bundle of joy with an elegant letterpress birth announcement. Do they splurge on the announcements or buy another box or two of baby wipes at Costco?

So with this in mind, I've been working on developing a line of letterpress birth announcements. They're sweet and simple, and because of that they'll also be pretty darn affordable. Over the last few weeks I've been printing some samples as I get free time (i.e., when Lachlan sleeps for more than 15 minutes at a time!). I can't wait to finish them (only two more to go...). Until then, here's a sneak peak at three of them.