Newly printed and designed, these personalized letterpress stationery features delicate wildflowers that seem to sway in the breeze. The process begins with working on an illustration. Then I send the file in for processing into letterpress plates. Once I have the plate, I set up my printing press with its rollers and then hand mix the inks for the particular color. Place a bit of ink on the inking disc and by pressing the treadle, the rollers will spread the ink on the ink disc. Fit the plate into the chase with the wooden furniture ( it's sort of like working with a jigsaw puzzle at times), and then place the chase onto the press. Do some test prints and then print! The work is not over though! The personalized name is hand set and then that is printed. Each image and each hand set name is printed one at a time, so that means for a set of 20 cards, each card is printed twice. For multi-colored prints, that means cleaning the ink from the press and rollers and then re-inking the rollers and ink disc with the next color. Cleaning can take up a lot of time because the ink must be removed carefully so that the next color used will not be affected by ink residue from the previous printing.
