Custom-Made Wedding Album

Sarah and Chris asked me to create a one-of-a-kind album for the photographs from their wedding. What a dream project! I came up with several designs for them to choose from, and this was the final result.

Sarah's dress and train were covered with six-petal organza flowers, so I used similar flowers as a design element for the cover. I layered the flowers in letterpress in white ink on the dark paper. The flower petals almost look like organza themselves, brighter where the two layers of white ink overlap:



Their wedding color palette was chocolate brown and petal pink, so I used chocolate Lokta paper from Nepal for the exterior, with pink for the endpapers. The pages and spacers are bound with two screw posts, so pages can be added, removed, or reordered:



The first page has their names, and the date and location of the wedding, all letterpressed in chocolate and pink ink:



Their initials are letterpressed at the bottom of each page, along with a smaller pink version of the six-petal flower:



And the back cover is simple, but the small flower detail ties it all together:

Custom-Made Calling Cards

I recently had the pleasure of creating custom-designed letterpress calling cards for Jacqueline Marque, a photographer out of Rhode Island. She specializes in weddings, and does an amazing job of capturing the emotion of the moment. You can see her beautiful work here. She told me her very first camera was a Canon AE2, and asked me to draw one for her calling card. We tried several ways of integrating the camera icon with her name, along with several ink and paper color combinations. This was the final product.

Hello, Little Birdie!

My dear friend, Estelle, recently welcomed her first child into the world. I was honored to create custom birth announcements for the arrival of her sweet little boy. She and her husband settled on this design, with bold, playful birds on apple green paper accompanied by a lively turquoise vine. Because Estelle also happens to be French, we had two versions, where I could switch out the turquoise elements for each language but keep the brown plate the same. The tall, flat announcement was mailed in a clear vellum envelope, with just a hint of the exciting news showing through.

Two Sisters Jewelry Boutique

I've had an influx of custom work lately, which has been a nice change (although I'm behind on reprinting some items on my own website, but I hope to catch up soon). One of the projects recently has been jewelry cards for Two Sisters Jewelry Boutique out of Arizona. They're simple little cards for earrings and necklaces, but fun to do, and set off Gina and Jennifer's designs nicely.

Printing the orange ink on the brown paper has been a little bit of a challenge. It turns out that it takes a double hit of ink to make it pop. I put the paper in, print it once, let it dry for about 8 hours, and then come back and print it again. Luckily, the registration has been lining up fairly well, so the letters remain crisp. Anyway, check out their website here — so many beautiful, beautiful things!

A New Twist on Old Maid

A while back, I joined a social network for industrious printer gals called Ladies of Letterpress. It's a diverse group of all sorts of girl printers who trade news, advice, and support. One of the other members, the talented Kathryn Hunter of Blackbird Letterpress in Baton Rouge, organized a letterpress swap over the summer. Participants each designed and printed a pair of cards for a deck of Old Maid. We came up with any character we wanted to, designed and printed 35 pairs, and sent them all to Kathryn to be collated and returned to us as a full deck. One of the requirements Kathryn set forth was that the pair of cards be slightly different from one another – they could be different illustrations, different colors, etc. – just different somehow.

Here is the first card of my pair:



And its mate:



Here they are together for comparison:



Friends will see the autobiographical nature of my character, I'm sure. I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of the full deck...

Nathalie's Notecards

I've been working on a number of new custom pieces lately (part of the reason I've been so quiet!), and hope to share some of them with you over the coming weeks. I'll start by introducing you to Nathalie Márquez Courtney, a photographer in Dublin, Ireland, who asked me to make her some bookmarks, business cards and notecard sets using her logo and a luscious embossed swirl in the background. Above are the notecards, which were printed on Crane Lettra 100% cotton paper, and the accompanying peach and robin's egg blue envelopes, which added punch to the package. Check out Nathalie's gorgeous photography here.

King Street Kitchen Co.

Over the last six weeks or so, I've had the privilege of printing some stationery for a new kitchen design company in Charleston, South Carolina. The folks at King Street Kitchen Company asked me to print their grand opening invitations, business cards, and notecards in letterpress. They requested Crane Lettra as the paper stock, and I was in heaven printing on this gorgeous paper. It's like printing on watercolor paper; the impression of the letterpress is so deep in the soft paper that the pieces truly become three-dimensional.

They were very patient with me, as it took quite a while for me to complete the thousands of pieces they needed on my hand-powered press. My poor little press had a small hiccup in the middle of everything — the pin that moves to hold each piece of paper in place snapped, and I had to rig a replacement part using a steel rod from my ironing board. Yikes. Such is the peril of working on antique equipment. Still, it was a joy to work on this project. Please stop by and visit the folks at King Street Kitchen Company if you're in Charleston's Upper King Design District. I hear tell that their new showroom is amazing.

Coming soon: new bookplates! Stay tuned...

Letterpress Stationery Project

My friend, Leigh (an outstanding editor and online media expert), has recently struck out on her own as a freelancer, so she asked me to design and hand-print some custom stationery for her. She requested something inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, so I created a monogram reminiscent of the leaded, stained glass windows of that time. Registration was rather tricky on this project (yikes!), but everything turned out well. Best wishes to Leigh in her new endeavors!