Finished wedding invites

A terrible snafu at UPS caused Bridget and Johnny's magnesium plates to be delayed. I had planned a weekend of printing at a leisurely pace. Instead, I ended up getting up at the crack of dawn today to pick the plates up at a UPS Customer Service (ha!) Center and printing madly all day. Here they are:

Wedding invites

My brother in law, Johnny, and Bridget are getting married on a beach in Malibu in a couple of months. Bridget's colors are green and purple and she has an ocean theme. We emailed back and forth about half a dozen times to refine the design, text, and font. I sent these images to Beaver Engraving last Wednesday, and expect to receive magnesium plates in time to print next weekend. Meanwhile, Johnny and Bridget are coming over for Easter dinner, and we'll nail down the colors.

Storing ink

Ink should be kept in a cool dry place. In class, we were taught us to apply a generous dollop of petroleum jelly (like Vaseline) around the opening before replacing the lid to better seal it. Sometimes, however, the top portion will get dried out despite proper storage.

When that happens, use the ink knife to carefully scrape around the edge and fold back to the dried part to expose the useable ink underneath.

What about the storage of smaller amounts of ink that you custom mixed? On his website, Dave Celani describes how to fill small tubes with ink. If that sounds like a lot of work, I think an effective - although not as elegant - technique is to simply scrape the ink onto a piece of wax paper, fold it and then place it into an airtight plastic bag. I recently used some of the brown ink from the baby announcements which I stored about a month ago, and it was fine.

Gripper arms

Gripper arms (which I think are synonymous with gripper fingers) are flat metal extensions attached to a bar beneath the platen.


Letterpress ink is pretty tacky and the paper can end up getting pulled away from the platen and sticking to the image. The gripper arms can be adjusted on the bar, and they hold the paper in place against the platen so this does not occur. Although my Pilot was missing its gripper arms when I purchased it, small images were not a problem. But when I started printing the houses on Sarah and Michael's baby announcement cards, I discovered that I really needed them. I got an incomplete set locally through a post on Briarpress and I got the rest of the parts from Dave Churchman; I believe he manufactures the entire set and sells them for about $100.