Letterpress

As you may know, I have been letterpress printing in my spare time for a few years now. I have always been fascinated by the beauty of letterpress ever since hubby and I decided to get married (all of 5 years ago). When we moved to Los Angeles, I took my first introductory letterpress class at the Armory in Pasadena. It was a short course, providing students with a quick taste of letterpress printing. I didn’t really get deep into it until I met Gerald Lange when I signed up for more classes at Otis. Gerald is a master printer extraordinaire, founder of the Bieler Press, expert digital letterpress printer, and teacher of letterpress printing and all things print and typography at Art Center and Otis.

Anyway, after printing Christmas cards and making various invitations for any friend or acquaintance who I could persuade into wanting letterpressed cards, I have decided to offer letterpress wedding invitations in addition to wedding flowers! I initially thought I’d call this new venture The Flower Lab Press, but after Wren died, I decided to call it Tiny Wren Press (a cousin of The Flower Lab).

So if you are interested in “one stop shopping” for the overall look and theme of your wedding – what better way than to have your flowers coordinate with your invitations? Afterall, the invitations are what your guests will see first when it comes to the design of your wedding – the first impression. And then when they come to your wedding, the flowers will further dictate your wedding’s theme so it all comes together in a beautiful cohesive entity!

Unfortunately, tinywrenpress.com isn’t quite completed yet. However, I signed up for some featured advertising on Wedding Wire: www.weddingwire.com/biz/tiny-wren-press-santa-monica/d7595d0f53264397.html

I’ll post more designs as I complete them…

In the meantime, a general pricing guideline:
TinyWrenPress-pricing

Hooray!

Angeles and Steve were introduced to me by their wedding coordinator, Liz Coopersmith, of Silver Charm Events. Liz has a cool blog with very helpful tips and best of all, her Wedding Wise Wednesday posts of cool events and sales around LA and on the web. Not to mention, she’s a nice gal and awesome to work with!

In their invitations, Angeles and Steve wanted to incorporate the atmosphere of their wedding venue, The Hotel Maya Long Beach. They found this fantastic image of the Mayan calendar from istockphoto. We used the bottom right quadrant of the image on the invitation and the top right quadrant for the reply card. I think this image is a great example of how we can get such fine, intricate detail work with digital letterpress. Behold, the awesome beauty of letterpress!

I met Stephani many moons ago when I visited my then boyfriend (now hubby) over spring break in college. Fast forward 13 years and voila, she is engaged to the corniest guy ever and getting married at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles!

Stephani’s mom drew the lovely cherry blossom image for the invitations. We took one part of the cherry blossom branch and used it as the main image for the reply cards. Stephani loves purple! Her wedding colors are lavender and silver so the flowers and names are printed in light purple, the branches and stems in taupe, and the text in deep purple with a hint of silver. The paper is Strathmore cover 110 lb. in bright white.

My smarty pants friend Irene studies ice! She is an ice-ist – so you better not mess with her!! She is also super talented and creative – she drew the koi and water lily leaf image for her wedding invitations.

She wanted to keep the koi motif throughout the rest of her wedding stationery – putting it on the top of the reply card and blank A2 cards later to be used for thank yous.

The invites were printed on Strathmore 110 lb. cover stock in sage green and platinum grey ink.

I made these letterpressed Tiger cards for the Lunar New Year!

Printed on chipboard in red and charcoal grey.

I had some leftover A2 cards and printed these tigers in orange. Maybe I will make a set of zodiac animal cards….

My best friend, Jenny, recently gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, Maxwell Linus, in December. Before the big day of labor and agony, I threw her and her husband Nick a baby shower in Brookline, MA. A chance for me to make letterpressed invitations and thank you cards??!! (perhaps!)

These cards were printed on Strathmore 110 lb. cover in natural white.

As you can see, Jenny loves puns! As a matter of fact, hubby was the emcee at her wedding and everytime he got up to speak, he had a pun prepared. Jenny was in stitches, but everyone else was groaning!

It’s been great talking to Jenny about her new role as Max’s mama – someone to look up to! I am 33 weeks into my first pregnancy and so far so good! I can’t believe the end is in sight – it has all happened too fast!

When Nancy and Nori were starting to plan their wedding, I heavily hinted to them that I would love to make their invitations! At the time I was enrolled in the evening contemporary letterpress course with Gerald Lange at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. It was my second time taking this studio course with Gerald at Art Center (as a way to get printing time). I originally learned letterpress from him in an introductory class at Otis College of Art a year earlier.

The cards were printed on recycled chipboard. For the main graphic, Nancy wanted to feature the dried lunaria, or money plant, she was going to collect from her parents’ farm and use for the reception table centerpieces. The color for the text was a dark chocolate brown, and for the image a rust orange.

In addition to the invitations and thank you cards, Nancy wanted to pass out bookmarks commemorating their special day as wedding favors. These were inserted into books from their personal collection brought to the reception and had special meaning to them as a couple.