Letterpress wedding invitations

Warning, this is a long post! Back in March, after I finished writing the book chapter, I completed my biggest, and most time-consuming crafty project to date - letterpress wedding invitations. The pictures in this post are intentionally taken from a distance to protect the privacy of the bride and groom. Readers may remember that Mr made me a letterpress from wood, and it performed beautifully through a whole run of printing. From start to finish, the process took many months, from choosing paper to designing the plates to printing them in two colors. As always, I couldn't have done this without much help from my husband and so appreciate his help, his ear, his ideas and suggestions, and him taking care of me and the pets throughout this long project.

Letterpress printing creates the best impression on 100% cotton papers, and after ordering many samples we settled on Arturo papers from Italy. The Arturo line offers folded and flat cards already cut to size and matching envelopes, so no paper cutter! This paper is truly beautiful and luxurious. As we were choosing papers, I was also designing the invitations and response cards in Illustrator. Once the designs were finalized, I sent them off to Boxcar Press for platemaking. The stationery designs are mashed into one big file, following their dimension guidelines, and are easy to cut up when received. The plate is made of photopolymer.

The plates are adhesive-backed and mounted on the base of the press. I also ordered the ink from Boxcar Press. It is a rubber-based ink, and I swear I can still smell its weird stink. Side note: cleaning up this ink became my nemesis in this project. The ink comes in many colors, but I ordered a starter pack which comes with the basics and mixed my colors myself. I mixed in large batches and stored the mixed ink in containers with lids, so I could use the ink at different times and not worry about the color being the same.

Here's a shot of my setup, on the kitchen table.

I used a brayer to apply the ink to the plate. I also cut a piece of paper to fit around the plate while applying ink to keep the base clean. The inked plate in blue is the response card and the inked plate in brown is the invite.

Once the plate is inked, the paper is placed on top of the plate and pressed with the platen (our platen is the big piece of wood) using the press screw. There is a science to getting the paper in the same spot on the plate each time, and this is called registration. Registration is especially important in two color printing, because the designs must line up exactly. Registration was a hard and tedious process, but to explain what we did to make it happen will take several more paragraphs, and I would hate to subject anyone to those boring details. Here is the letterpress in action, with a response card being pressed.

So, we printed invites and response cards, each in two colors. We printed one color, let the ink dry, and printed the second color. Rubber-based inks dry from the ink soaking into the paper, so it took several days for the ink to dry. The printing took several weeks to complete. Since there was a little variation in the printing, I printed all 100 of the cards for the invites and 100 response cards so the bride could choose the ones she thought were best from the batch. The printing went on for weeks and weeks. As usual, I did not expect it to take nearly this long. Some nights I literally printed until my back hurt so much that I couldn't pick up the platen any more (that thing is heavy!). Drying stationery took over our house too!

As usual, there were many lessons learned, too many to list here. In the end, I was very pleased with the final product and had a gigantic feeling of accomplishment for having pulled it off. The cards were very well received. I still don't know if I would ever put myself through this again.