Services
We specialize in letterpress design and printing of personal stationery, wedding invitations, business cards, greeting cards, coasters, art prints, broadsides and the like. We can design your project as well as print it, or we can print a design you provide to us. We print with polymer plates, linocuts, vintage printers cuts, hand-composed type – anything a job requires that can be relief printed.
Letterpress Printing
What brightens our day is printing beautiful, hand-crafted paper goods with time-honored techniques. We love working with our hands and running our old presses with human power. Every project is treated with special care and attention to detail. Each sheet of paper becomes a little work of art.
From a traditional “kiss” impression to a deep, textural deboss, we can help you achieve the look you desire. We can print designs provided by other designers, or we can help you design something as well as print it. We print smaller and thicker items on our platen presses, and larger items on our Vandercook SP-15. The largest sheet size we can print is 14 x 18 inches.
Graphic Design
We’d be happy to help you design your letterpress project as well as print it. Christy has a 30+ year career as a graphic designer working with a wide variety of clients. She earned a BFA with a concentration in Graphic Design in 1991 from the University of Wisconsin – Stout.
Christy will start the design process by getting to know you, your personal style, the vision you have for your project, and your printing budget. A typical presentation back to you will include two or three design options with up to two rounds of revisions. Design services are billed separately from our printing services.
Hand Typesetting
When we print with hand-composed type, the history of letterpress printing really hits home. We’re essentially using the same methods Gutenberg used 500+ years ago! We are fortunate to be the caretakers of a growing collection of metal and wood type; from tiny 6 point metal, to large 6 inch wood letters. Much of it is quite old, and with the right care we’ll be able to pass it along to future generations.
If you would like us to use moveable type in your project, we are happy to accommodate within some boundaries and understanding. Metal type will wear down with heavy repeated impressions, so we avoid deep impression printing with handset metal type. Older type is not always perfect. Nicks and imperfections will be visible, but sometimes this can be a great way to show character in a print.
Outsourcing Digital Printing
If your budget is small and seeing a deboss in the paper is not important to you, we might recommend that your project be digitally printed. We outsource this work to a trusted vendor who specializes in digitally printed stationery, with beautiful results.
We take care of all the ordering and file coordination. You’ll receive high-quality printing on beautiful paper. This works well for items such as business cards, notecards, wedding invitations and envelopes.
We can also mix digital printing with letterpress printing. For example, a watercolor illustration can be digitally printed as the background of an invitation. The text for the invitation can then be letterpress printed with a deboss over the illustration.