Wispy Wildflowers Personalized Letterpress Stationery

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.

Newly Designed Personalized Dandelion Letterpress Cards

I created these new dandelion cards and just listed them in my Aloha Letterpress shop. I love how light and delicate the dandelions came out.

It takes me hours when I draw using Adobe Illustrator. The entire process of creating a card can be time consuming, but I enjoy it when I'm finally printing. With these cards, I first created the dandelions using Illustrator and then I decided to do metal plates for it instead of photopolymer. I think the metal plates will create a better printing for this image because of the finer lines and details.

I then sent the images away to have them processed into plates. Once the plates are received, I fit the dandelion plate into a chase (metal frame) and use wooden furniture or blocks of wood to help hold the metal plate in place, locking and securing the plate with these metal quoins or wedges. In a separate chase, I handset the metal type for the name.

Next, I place the rollers onto the press, hand mix the ink, and ink the press. Once the ink has spread on the ink plate, I place the chase with the dandelion image onto the chase bed. I then print the dandelions and after that, I print the name. This card takes 3 separate printings because of the 3 separate graphics, the dandelions, the wisps flying in the air, and the handset type.

Cleaning up is another story!