The board is stained, and framed, and all the brads are in place. Now we’re on to the hearts themselves. The white ones in the picture are paper placeholders so we’ll know where each heart goes when we finish working on it. I’ll post more pictures of the individual hearts as they are finished!

Guest book board so far...

I had an easier time with the second color on the save the dates. The orange letterpress ink seemed much easier to work with, and it was a smaller area to print. It also takes a while to get the hang of rolling on the ink. I was glad that I didn’t have to register my colors very closely, or it would have been much more difficult!

Second color - orange - added

The roller bearers with the orange plate

Save the Dates, printed and drying

In addition to the letterpress experiment, I also experimented with some DIY screen printing. I decided to use this technique for the background mat on the Save the Dates. The yellow paper I was using had a texture, and it didn’t work well with the letterpress, but it was fun to play with with some tabletop screen printing, and it worked pretty well.

I had been reading about Gocco, a Japanese screen printing system made for home use. Gocco machines aren’t manufactured anymore, and it’s getting harder to find supplies and even machines, so I was looking for an alternative.  I ended up getting a StencilPro starter kit. This probably wouldn’t be ideal for printing large quantities, and you can’t reclaim the screens like you could do with traditional screen printing, but it’s a pretty simple and clean process where you can print out an image on a transparency that is made for inkjet printers, then use it to expose the image on the stencil. Then you’re pretty much ready for printing!

The stencil (with masked areas)

The result!

We’ve been making progress on the guest book board. After cutting the plywood to size, sanding and staining it, then cutting, painting, and adding some wood trim for a frame, we used the photo we took before to lay out the hearts on the board in their final position. We also used masking tape to make sure things were symmetrical and evenly placed. Once everything was in place, we nailed in brads so we could hang the hearts on them.

We have been working on the individual hearts and have a lot of them in various stages of completion now. We’ll post more photos when we have some of them finished!

Guest book board so far...

While researching wedding invitations and printing, I fell in love with letterpress printing. Since our wedding is going to be small, we don’t need many invitations, so it seemed like a great opportunity to try out some techniques. We are having a destination wedding, so I also wanted to produce some Save the Date notices to send out. Normally those are a little more informal, but I decided to start there with my letterpress experiment. Yes, I know there are lots of nice kits out there for printing all of these at home, but I can’t seem to do anything the simple way!

I kept reading about the L Letterpress system, and I was intrigued. However, there seemed to be some problems and limitations with the product, including cracking plates and difficulty in getting a clean print. Still, it seemed like a promising idea. Then I found this excellent post from Boxcar Press about some helpful techniques to get better results. These people live and breathe true letterpress printing every day and they really know what they’re doing. I wasn’t sure whether or not home letterpressing would work for me, and I was hesitant to spend a lot of money on equipment just to try it out for a small bunch of Save the Dates and invitations.

A few months ago, I purchased a Big Shot machine for embossing and die cutting, and there is an L Letterpress starter kit that works with it. The starter kit is for people who already have a Big Shot or an Epic Six, so it includes everything BUT the machine. I was on the verge of buying the starter kit, but I knew from Boxcar Press’s advice that I would probably not be using their brayer or their plates. That left the press bed as the only thing I needed. Rather than drop $70 on that, I thought I might first experiment with making my own. DIY ingenuity and internet research paid off again! On The Frugal Crafter blog, I noticed that she had made a press bed by duct taping together two pieces of plexiglass. The Big Shot came with two pieces of plexiglass that would normally be used as cutting plates with die cutters. I put them side-by-side with about a 1/8″ space between them and duct taped them together like a book to make my own press bed. After that, the only things I needed to buy to complete my home letterpress* were a rubber brayer (Speedball 4″ soft rubber brayer, available at just about any art or craft store), a small piece of plexiglass to roll the ink out on, some ink and thick letterpress paper, and custom-made polymer plates from Boxcar Press. I followed the advice from the Boxcar blog and experimented a LOT. I gave up more than once, but when I finally produced some clean, beautiful prints, there was no turning back.

Here, the paper is loaded, the plate is inked, and all I need to do is remove the two long strips (roller bearers for even inking), close the press bed, and run it through the Big Shot machine.

The freshly printed brown plate!

I am printing in two colors, but I don’t have to register my colors very closely. A technique I came up with to help me position my paper and plates correctly was this: I had created my artwork in Adobe Illustrator, so I opened the file and flipped the image (so that it was mirrored, or backward-reading, and also showing border lines where the edge of the paper will be) and printed that out. I taped that printout to the outside (or bottom) of my press bed, and that allowed me to easily open the press bed and stick down my adhesive polymer plates by just lining them up with that printout. To position the paper I’ll be printing on, I laid it down on top of the polymer plate and used the borders on my printout to position the edges of the paper. Then, with the paper still in position, I just rolled a piece of Scotch tape and stuck it to the paper. Then I carefully closed the press bed, making sure the paper didn’t move, the tape stuck it into place where it will need to be for printing. I used Boxcar Press’s step #4 to make gauge pins that will hold each piece of paper in place. After those were in place, I carefully removed the tape from underneath the paper before I printed it. Then I was ready for printing!

I am still in the process of printing, so I do another post when I print the second color and when I finish assembling the whole Save the Date.

*NOTE: I do use the term “letterpress” very loosely – this can’t compare with real letterpress, a 500+ year old art form, which requires special machinery and tons of skill and knowledge.

The first color has been printed on all of these, and they'll be ready soon for the second color.

I work for a small company designing and developing products and packaging for the craft industry. Consequently, I get to see a lot of different types of craft items, and a lot of them accumulate in our office. Periodically, my boss cleans house and I get dibs on some interesting items. Thanks to her generosity (and the kindness of my coworkers who gave me first call), I recently got two sets of these 3 silver lanterns to work with for centerpieces.

These will come in handy for decorating the reception tent!

Three sizes of wooden hearts

4" heart glued and clamped

Layout for board sizing

We like the idea of doing unique and creative projects for the wedding. One project that came to mind early on was to do something unique for a guest book. We decided not to do a book at all and started working on ideas to make an art project out of it. We saw one idea where the guest book consisted of a photo on thick board that was cut up into puzzle pieces. Guests sign the back of the puzzle pieces and the whole thing is later assembled and framed to hang on the wall. We didn’t want to do that exactly, but it gave us the idea of doing a collage made up of individual pieces. The pieces will be made so that each one can be signed and personalized on the back, and then it will hang on a board as part of an art piece that we’ll hang on our wall. Originally, we were going to ask our guests to create the front of the piece too, but we decided that was too much to ask – some people may not be creatively inclined or may not have the time to put into doing something like that. Instead, we’ll do the art, and our guests can choose the piece they want to personalize for us. Their message will be on the back, so we can easily look at it anytime (even easier than pulling out a book).

After lots of sketches and idea-gathering, we decided to keep one central theme to our collage: hearts. To give it some visual variety, we went with 3 different sizes of hearts. We found a manufacturer who sells wooden cutout hearts, and we got them in 2.5″, 3″ and 4″ sizes.  The 4″ hearts were half the thickness of the smaller ones, we doubled up our number and glued them together.

Then we marked and drilled holes to hang them by. Next, we carefully primed the backs, sanded that layer to a very smooth finish, and painted them with a nice white semi-gloss paint. We tested it to make sure the finish would accept writing with a Sharpie and it worked great – no ink bleeds, no smudging! The next step was to finish the backing board that the hearts will hang from. We decided to use about 50 hearts all together, so we laid them out on a piece of 1/2″ plywood to decide how large to make the board. We ended up with a board that was 24″ x 36″. We sanded the plywood, stained it, coated it with polyurethane, then attached wood trim around the edges. Then we laid out the hearts again, and marked where the holes in the hearts were with a nail. Then we hammered a 3/4″ brad halfway in for each heart. Adding hardware to the back of the board to hang it on the wall later was the last step.

Now it’s time to decorate the front of the hearts… (to be continued)

Our bamboo seems to be doing well in spite of some record-setting cold weather in the last few weeks. These pictures are a single plant’s progress over the four months since we planted it.

4 months of growth

Our bamboo is growing like crazy these days. It seems to love the hot, humid weather and all of the rain we’ve been getting. Mark also installed a drip irrigation system, since it likes small amounts of water a few times a day. All 10 plants are starting to fill out and grow taller. The most amazing thing is to compare the growth on two of the shoots that I photographed at various stages. They have grown nearly 10 feet tall in just under a month. No wonder bamboo is considered to be one of the most sustainable materials in the world!

Pretty fast! These are taken from a slightly different angle, but you can see that they’ve grown at least an inch per day. They will eventually be about 50 feet tall. Each new cane that comes in will start at a thicker diameter than the existing ones. When mature, the canes will be about 2.5 inches in diameter.