Half Off Bacon - Mad Men Letterpress Class

After the Madmen inspired letterpress class, Lisa took her coasters with her to show friends at dinner. She said the wait staff were very intrigued but not intrigued enough to give them 50% off bacon!

Images from the class. Such a fun day!

Letterpress Central Open House

We are having an open house at Letterpress Central on April 21 from 10 - 2 pm. 

Come join us--you can make a print and have a snack!

Mike decided to make some signs using our enormous sign press. Great chance to use some super large wood type. The sheets he printed are 22 x 30 and the 3 signs almost cover an 8 foot table! 

Gary and I worked on the invites that would be mailed. We could have done a polymer plate but decided to do all hand-set metal type and ornaments. Then of course, I forgot to photograph the lock up. Hand-set type lock ups are almost a work of art by themselves. So much more interesting than polymer plates. We have such an amazing collection of old typefaces and ornaments that it can be hard to choose! We ended up with a reverse Gill, Trylon shaded, Brody, Packard and a french typeface - Le Moreau where the nick is upside down and it totally confused us!

 Wonder if the color of the clothes influence the ink color? Hmmm.....

We printed envelopes in three fun colors, chartreuse, aqua and kraft. I think I like printing envelopes as much as the invites because it is such fun to get surprising mail!

Letterpress Holiday Card Class

The holiday letterpress class was fun! Thanks to all who participated. Here's a sampling of the cards we printed using vintage holiday cuts. Everyone was printing like maniacs and ended up with 20 letterpress cards that were all ready to be sent to their favorite people. Yay!

Folks had fun even embellishing their envelopes. These are the kinds of envelopes I open first when I get the mail.

We still had all the stuff out for tee shirt printing so here's the shirt I printed. You can definitely go crazy printing tee shirts. So many possibilities!

Wayzgoose Fun!

 photo by Rhonda Lewis

We were thrilled with the turn out of the first AZ Wayzgoose!  The fun thing is that it seemed like everyone did a little bit of everything! Lisa described it as a 7-ring circus and she was right! It was so much fun, that none of us even remembered to eat lunch.

We started off with magnetic poetry. Jeryl and Lisa did a great job helping folks lock up words in the little proofing press. The favorite line of the day was: She said go loosey goosey be silly cheese and Be a dingbat slug letterpress printer.

Photo by Rhonda Lewis

Letterpress was buzzing with coaster and bookmark printing.Mike was on the go most of the day.

 Photographer Rhonda Lewis made my favorite bookmark of the day and she also took this fab photo of the press!

Donna kept things humming in the papermaking studio where everyone made handmade recycled paper.

Gary led the making your own envelope session. Notice the festive Halloween Hat!

The hit of the day was the tee shirt printing. (see Gary's shirt above) Below, Lisa helps the Labyrinth guy with his design.

We concluded the day's activities with a little pochoir on letterpress.

It was really a fun filled day! A great chance to connect with old friends and meet new ones as well.

We'll definitely do the Wayzgoose next year so stay tuned!photo by Rhonda Lewis

You can see more photos of the wayzgoose on our flickr sites: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisatakata/sets/72157622581803607/  and

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thepaperstudio/

Wood Type Letterpress

Lately, it's all about the wood type.
I was actually a little nervous using this very large "W" as a background piece given how widely it was used during the past presidential administration...if you know what I mean! ;) With revamping our letterpress studio, we are finally been getting all our wood type out of their boxes an into cases. My in laws have been amazing in helping me clean some very dusty wood type. Old wood type gets an almost charcoal like dust on it--probably from sitting in somebody's old barn or warehouse for 50 years! Here's our most recent poster in process. We are used 3 different wood typefaces.
Gotta love the vandercook! I just got new paper guides--sweet! Nothing like new shiny guides to make your life happy!