Latest Letterpress Printing Project

I recently printed a set of wedding invitations for the delightful Keith and Vicki, so I thought I would post some pictures giving a few hints about the printing process. I worked on these at the excellent Em Space studio, using the SP15 flat bed proof press. The invitations are a combination of lino cut and metal type; three colours and four printings in all. 

Here's the first printing, using the lino block with a carved treeline - this will be printed over with the invite text and another linoblock layer.

The block locked securely into the press with furniture and quoins. (The quoins are the metal things on the bottom and left of the block.) This colour looks like more of a mint green on the press, but it's less blue when printed.

Prints left to dry on the rack. I usually leave prints for 24 hours to make sure they're dry before printing on them again. No smudges! Especially with this large area of ink. 

The metal type all set up to print. Notice that this text is center-aligned, so an equal amount of lead spacing material is placed on either side of the sentence. Large amounts of center-aligned type is quite a pain. (Justified is the worst.)

Testing out the ink colours I mixed for this project. It's better to try them out on paper to accurately see how they will print.

The ink cabinet. We have rubber-based and oil-based inks. Different textures, different drying times. I tend to prefer oil-based inks.

The press set up for the darker green colour. This is the final run - the text has already been printed.

This is the same block that I used for the dark green, but I carved an area of it away - kind of a reduction cut method.

This is the SP15 press from the side.

Racks of spacing material in various sizes. 

A type cabinet  - for this project I used a sans-serif font in font sizes 14 and 24. Those are in the typecases down at the bottom - very heavy and difficult to maneuver. 

The finished invitations, put in envelopes and ready for mailing out. I chose a light brown envelope, with a little texture to it, to complement the foresty colour palette.

The original sketches for the design. Sorry these are especially rubbish pics, but you get the idea.

(By the way, I took all of these photos with my phone, so sorry they aren't better quality in general!)