LA Printer's Fair

This past weekend, I attended the 2nd annual LA Printer's Fair held at the International Printing Museum in Carson (which I heard about here). In addition to tons of letterpress vendors selling stationery and supplies, there was also a swap meet for letterpress equipment, printmaking demonstrations, and tons of educational and hands-on activities.

Even though it was sweltering outside this weekend (102 in September!?), it was the perfect way to enjoy a Saturday afternoon.

Letterpress flashcards! Can I have these for my classroom please?

Letterpresses for sale (most of the ones I saw cost anywhere between $800-$3000)

Trays and trays of type!

Isn't this little one darling? I want to take it home and call it mine. :)

Dr. Miles demonstrating how the proofing letterpress works. Proof presses were used back then to proof pages of text before they were printed on the massive letterpress machines. The museum tour was one of the highlights! I have a feeling Dr. Miles dresses like this everyday. :)

I forget the name of this machine, but the typist can sit there and type the letters and the metal letters fall down one by one into place. This way, whole lines can be created much faster than hand-setting the type.

This machine also allows a typist to type in rows of text, except instead of dropping down pre-cast letters, it actually casts the entire line immediately! Sooo cool. After the lines are used, they're put back into the machine to melt and re-cast.

They actually had one of these machines working at the fair, and we got to have our names cast and printed.

Here's the typist proofing our name. Doesn't this pic remind you of Santa's workshop?

Our names set in to be printed.

The print!

And we got to keep the metal type too. :)

Here's a huge Columbian press that I'm trying out. This involved a lot of hand-cranking and pulling. Don't think I could have done this 200 times for our wedding invitations! The museum docent told us that in the olden days, the really experienced printers could print out 250 sheets in an hour. He said that even with their best printers at the museum, they could only do 100 sheets an hour. It definitely took me at least 2 minutes to do even one!

The print from the Columbian Press.

And I picked up this gorgeous letterpress calendar for my sister. :)

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DIY Stationery

Along with my wedding invitations, I also designed and created coordinating pieces of stationery for other parts of the wedding. Here's an overall look at what our stationery suite looked like, including the invitation:

Clockwise from top left: Invitation, Unofficial Guide to Harvard Square (cover and inside), Thank You card, Thank You postcard, Program, Wedding Announcement, Menu, and Escort Cards (in center)

There was about 2 hours in between our ceremony and reception, so we thought this would be a great chance for our guests to explore the Harvard Square area, where Dean and I have made so many memories during our dating years. So, after the ceremony, we sent our guests off with our own personalized “Unofficial Guide to Harvard Square” that contained a map labeled with all of our favorite spots in Harvard Square, along with short descriptions of why the cozy coffee shops, dessert locations, and even the Charles River and Weeks Footbridge were all so special to us. We hoped that the guide would help us share a part of our lives with our guests.

Letterpressed tag on cover

Inside of guide

A group of close friends and I put together the programs ourselves. For the covers, I letterpressed our names onto a small sheet of cream-colored paper, which was then layered on top of a textured aubergine-colored cardstock. The insides of the programs were printed with my printer onto cream-colored paper. The programs were then assembled and sewn together with lavender thread. The loose threads at the top of the program were cut off, but the bottom threads were left hanging loose.

Program

For our friends whom we were unable to invite to the wedding, I created wedding announcements that we sent out after the wedding. Because many of our parents' friends are unable to read English, we incorporated both Chinese and English onto our wedding announcement. These announcements were letterpressed during our second session at the press when we letterpressed our menus and thank you cards.

Wedding Announcement

A letterpressed menu was set at each guest's place setting.

Menu

I was also able to letterpress some personalized stationery for each one of my bridesmaids as part of their gifts. I found matching envelopes and packaged them together by tying them with pieces of fabric especially picked for each girl!

Personalized stationery

Overall, I was extremely happy with how our wedding stationery turned out. I am so grateful that we had the opportunity to letterpress so many pieces of our stationery - I certainly would not have been able to afford it if we had not stumbled upon the Adams House press! It was such an enjoyable and enlightening experience for us to learn all about the art of the printing press and to take part in something that has such a long and rich history. I am so thankful to all of the volunteers there for their kindness and generosity, and most of all, for their contagious enthusiasm and love for the press.

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DIY Invitations

One of my favorite DIY wedding projects has been the wedding invitations. You may remember a while back, I blogged about the letterpressing process of them. Now that the invitations have long been sent out and received, I wanted to show you some more pictures and write a little bit more about how I made these.

When I got first got engaged, my wedding invitations were probably the thing that I was most looking forward to designing. I knew that as the first piece of wedding-related stationery that our guests would be receiving, I wanted it to be a glimpse of our colors, our wedding style, and the overall mood for our wedding.

I decided that the image of a butterfly seemed fitting for our wedding because of its whimsical quality and because of its symbolism. It represented the long journey of our relationship - growing, incubating, and being transformed. Not only did we end up using the butterfly as a graphic element in many parts of our wedding stationery, we also made a logo out of our initials, "d" and "b" and added wings to the d and b to create a butterfly.

db butterfly

Here is the complete invitation suite:

Invitation, accommodations, and rsvp card

For the invitation card, I created an image of a butterfly using Adobe Illustrator and then filled in the wings with a pattern that I bought from istockphoto.com. I ended up using that same pattern in different ways for various parts of my wedding stationery, so it was well worth the investment!

Invitation with belly band and envelope

Rejoice, Relax, Respond

For the envelopes, I decided on a creamy yellow color. I wanted the dusty lavender color to appear somewhere on the envelopes as well, so I decided to line the yellow envelopes with lavender paper. To make the envelope liner, I took the same leaf pattern that I had purchased from istockphoto and tiled it several times to fill an entire sheet of paper. I then printed several hundred sheet of these, which were eventually cut to size and glued into each envelope by Billy and Dean!

After the envelopes were lined (it probably would have been wiser to do this before lining the envelopes), I ran each envelope through my printer so that a few butterflies would be on the cover of the envelope.

For the address labels, I bought sheets of labels (the full-sheeted ones that are not pre-cut) and created a template in Illustrator with the appropriately-sized labels for my envelopes. After these were printed out and chopped down to size, my lovely sister hand-addressed each envelope for me. :)

Front and back of envelope

For the accommodations card, I realized after letterpressing the front, I should probably include a map for our guests who are not from the area. The paper was too thick to feed through my printer, so I actually ended up printing out the map on a piece of vellum, and then I used an adhesive spray to mount all of the maps onto the backs of the accommodations card (I would not recommend this route...it created a pretty sticky mess!).

I made the map of Harvard using Adobe Illustrator. I found the area using Google maps, and then I took a screen print of the map. I then imported that map into Illustrator and then drew over the Google map to keep the lines on my map to scale. After that, I deleted the Google map and filled in all my lines. I created little icons for the church, Kirkland, the T-stop, and the parking garage.

Relax - with map on back

For our RSVP cards, I turned them into postcards by ordering a custom "Postcard" stamp from Office Depot. I stamped every card with the Postcard title and our address, and then drew lines to separate the spaces.

RSVP postcard

And here's how it all looked when it was put together (fronts and backs shown)!

The whole shebang!

Hope that gave you a little insight into the whole process of making our wedding invitations!

More wedding stationery posts to come...

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Highlights from D.C. and Boston

Sorry for my recent lack of posts! I just came back not too long ago from a visit to D.C. and Boston where I spent lovely times with my sister and Billy and also doing some wedding stuff and hanging out with Dean at Harvard! :) Here are some of the highlights from my trip!

D.C:

Collecting items for our picnic!

Picnicking under the cherry blossoms

The Washington Monument

Vietnamese food :)

Boston:

Winning Top Chef Kirkland! :) (Dean's competing this week in Top Chef Harvard - wish him luck!!)

Yardfest with tire swings and Sara Bareilles

Dinner with the '08 crowd

Letterpressing more wedding paper goodies! :)

I'll try to post some more DIY posts this week, but first, I need to focus on graduating!! I'm finishing up a final project this week for my last class and also studying for my comprehensive exams on Friday! Keep me in your prayers. :)

Thanks!

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For the Love of Letterpress

One of the biggest (and most time-consuming, but also extremely rewarding) projects that I have taken on for the wedding so far has been to letterpress our invitations. Letterpress printing is a 500-year-old technique that has been used all over the world (think: woodblock printing in China or movable type like the Gutenberg press in Europe) to create "relief" printing of text and images. These days, the invention of the photopolymer plate has made letterpress printing available to normal people like you and me!

After spending months designing and refining our invitations and other wedding stationary that we wanted to get letterpressed, I sent my designs off to the Boxcar Press where they turned the designs into my very own photopolymer plate! We were lucky enough not only to have access to the Bow and Arrow Press (located inside Adams House at Harvard), but also to have the pleasure of working with Sam, a Harvard student and B&A Press volunteer, throughout the whole ordeal. Sam answered all of our questions, guided us through the platemaking process, and reassured us that as long as we had our plate in hand, he would ensure that our invitations would be printed.

Dean was such a good sport through all of this - he acted as the middleman between the Press and I, going back and forth between both parties to ask and answer questions. I sent him to B&A's open press nights (on Thursday nights from 7-10 for all you Harvard students - go check it out!) numerous times to test out different papers, check the ink stock, ask questions, and make friends with the volunteers there.

Anyhow, back to printing. We began our letterpress adventure in the morning around 9 a.m. The first task was to mix the ink to make the correct shade that we wanted for our invitations.

Red + Blue = Purple!

Mixing ink

After that, it was time to ink the press. Sam asked me to dot the ink on the roller like "chocolate chips." How'd I do?

"Chocolate chip" ink drops

Next, we turned the press on to spread the ink out onto the rollers.

Next, we had to peel the back off of our photopolymer plate and stick it to the Boxcar base. Positioning this base was probably the most difficult part of the whole process. Letterpress printing is an art where minute fractions of millimeters make a huge difference. We spent a good hour or two adjusting the base, adding spacers to alter the positioning. At one point, we even added a thin piece of vellum under the base just to give an extra "oomph" to the color. It made a huge difference!

Here's a picture of our photopolymer plate that we had made:

Photopolymer plate

Dean feeding the paper into the press:

From start to finish, it took us about 8 hours to print 200 sheets. Dean did most of the cranking, so by the end, his arm was starting to get a little tired! To see how the printing works, check out our youtube video:

We finished printing our 200+ invitations and boarded a bus to D.C. right before the big snowstorm hit Boston. Having to switch buses in NYC, we grabbed all our luggage (along with the invitations, which were tucked away safely in our bags) and dragged everything through the rain, slush, snow, hail, & sleet to catch our next bus a couple of blocks away. In D.C., Dean, my sister Julie, Billy, and I spent the next 3 days chopping up our invitations, lining the envelopes, and hand-addressing them.

After showing my parents the video of my letterpressing and explaining the process to them, my dad told me that that was how they used to print their church bulletins every week in Vietnam! Who knew that something typically so expensive these days (because of the precision, complexity, and sheer rigor involved) used to be something so everyday that it was simply part of a normal man's life! There was an instant connection between my dad and I as we talked about the art and technicalities of letterpressing and "stencil printing," as he calls it. I am indebted to my dad for passing on his artistic, perfectionist, type-A, detail-oriented genes to me! Thanks, Dad! :)

I still have a couple of finishing touches to put on them, but I am happy to say that our invitations are now safely back in Arizona. By the time they reach your hands, they will have traveled by feet, car, bus, subway, and airplane through 4 different states!

Here's a sneak peak:

Stay tuned for more wedding details! :)

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