Correspondence cards

My really good friend, Leigh, saw some letterpress correspondence cards and wanted something similar for her husband. The cards she admired had a set of antlers with the name underneath. I talked her into this more benign (in my mind, anyway) image of a top hat.



I printed envelopes to go with the cards.

Natalie's first birthday

My niece, Natalie, turns one next month. My brother and sister in law asked me to print some invitations for her birthday party. They pretty much designed the whole thing from the chocolate brown paper to the pale pink ink. I helped them with layout and the font.

Envelopes and tape on the rails

I just finished the 200 envelopes to go with the baby announcements. Hurray! During the process, I learned something really important about making a clean image without compromising the impression. As I inked the press for a couple of practice runs, I noticed that the rollers were hitting the magnesium plate so hard that ink was getting on parts of the plate other than the raised portion. (Unfortunately, I did not think to take photographs at the time, so I am duplicating everything that happened using the thank you card plate that I did next.)


This resulted in small yucky ink marks around the finished print.


Previously, when this happened, I reduced the makeready and the impression wasn't as deep but the problem was solved. I wasn't totally satisfied but I didn't know what else to do. I checked Briarpress - and of course, somebody had already recognized this problem and figured out the solution: Raise the rollers with layers of tape on the rails so that the ink gets only on the image.




Now the print is totally without any extra ink marks.

Finished baby announcements!

They are finally done!




One lesson that I've learned is 200 of anything on a Chandler and Price Pilot tabletop letterpress is A LOT of work! That this was two colors with a requirement for fairly precise registration made it even harder. In the future, I will probably limit my work to much smaller projects.

Baby announcements - Part 1.5

As sometimes happens when I work too hard, I made myself sick. I've been fighting a cold since last Thursday and haven't felt well enough to print until today. I had hoped to get a lot more done this weekend, but only succeeded in finishing up Part I of the baby announcements for Sarah and Michael.



I was also able to play around a little bit with Part II and was really happy with the results. I was a little sad that the Pilot didn't print the houses as evenly as I would have liked. As you know, I experimented with the makeready a lot to get it to this point. My teacher at Otis told me that the actual printing surface of a tabletop letterpress was much smaller than the chase (which is 6 1/2 x 10), and he was right! Since Part II is smaller, the printing was perfectly even.