Letterpress Studio

 I so love letterpress type.  I love type in general; I love design; I love fancy letters and especially flourishes.  It was fun to poke around the studio and look at all the old plates and type in all the drawers.  Now I want to make some text posters.

Letterpress!

We have letterpress business cards!  Most of them are slightly smaller than actual business cards, but they still relay all of the information (namely our website--which you should check out if you haven't seen it yet!)

Real letterpress--look at the indentation! Very exciting. I know, I did go a little bit overboard with the photos, but it's very exciting.

I stumbled upon:

This website as I was searching for letterpress information.  Briar Press is not only a great place to learn about the art of letterpress, but a veritable warehouse of files upon files of vector ornaments for personal use.  I spent hours being inspired by their images and graphics (and I downloaded some too!)

They also have listings of letterpress studios organized by state, an open forum where you can ask questions, and tons of information about the machines themselves, as well as the history of the craft.  And they also a great interactive typecase header.   I could literally spend hours here (OK-I have).

I love the ands and fancy!

Letterpress!

So my sister's taking a letterpress bookmaking class. This weekend while I was visiting, I crashed the studio and was able to use the proofing press to put together some cards for Lock and Spoon:

The font is Baskerville 24pt (my favorite). This weekend I learned that the term font technically refers to the actual size of a typeface. Each size had to be made separately, since they are cast individually. So each point size of a typeface is technically a different font. However, the word is very rarely used in this context anymore-font is generally interchangeable with typeface.

The letterpress studio in which she takes her class is AMAZING. It's about as large as my house and the walls are filled with font trays, along with all kinds of fancy old image plates. As you can see, I used the chairs and pretty decorative element. I could spend hours in the studio doing nothing but going through tray after tray of little elements. My favorite tray was filled with calendar plates--there were blocks of numbers from 1-31, each starting on a different day of the week. I even saw one for leap year February.

I was also playing with my mom's stamp collection. I made some pretty pages and some simple gift tags: