It's here!

After the stress of me taking a day off for the press to delivered and then being told it wouldn't be delivered until the next day... it finally made it! Luckily my dad is awesome and was home the next day and helped the guy set it in place in their garage.

Jenny gave me ink and furniture (the wood pieces used to lock in your type, see below. photo by hyperbolation via flickr) to get started.


I'm getting some art ready to send out and have a polymer plate made from Boxcar Press. The polymer plate allows me to design and typeset in Illustrator. Here is an example of one from one-story.com.



Once I get going with this I'm going to invest in some metal type from M&H Type in San Francisco so I can reuse the designs via polymer plates but then hand set the type for each individual project.

Next on my to-do list is naming my letterpress "business", I'm having a really hard time with this! We'll see what I decide...

Chandler & Price 10x15

I've been holding out with this news because I wanted to finalize some details... I bought a large floor model letterpress printing press! Yes...before I even got my Craftsmen Imperial tabletop press up and running that I posted about here. I'll tell you what, this was just a really great opportunity that I couldn't pass up.

On a Monday morning a few weeks ago I saw an ad over on BriarPress for an 8x12 Chandler & Price in Hermosa Beach in excellent condition and for a great price that had been posted the day before. I called anyway regardless of thinking that for sure it would be spoken for already. Actually I called my parents first to ask if they would be ok with me having it at there house (they were!) The 8x12 press was taken already BUT the seller, an amazing lady named Jenny, had another one. A bigger one that she was willing to sell for the same price as the 8x12! I pretty much was set on buying it but wanted to go see it in action first.

I went to check out the press after letterpress class so Brenda & Danni were able to come with me to the warehouse. Turns out Jenny is the letterpress printer for all letterpress things at Papyrus! I had just gotten this beautiful letterpress card for a friends wedding so it was so exciting to see thousands of prints of it. She was nice enough to show us the working of her studio, samples, mock ups etc. and believe you me all three of us geeked out when she asked "Do you guys want to see the glitter room??" The room where they hand glitter any glittered elements on the cards, so cool! The deal was finalized for the press to be picked up before Oct. 1 and to only add to Jenny's coolness she offered to let me come by and do some printing on the press with her supervision to get a feel for it and also answer any questions that may come up. I will be heading over there to do that this Saturday.

I'm so excited for this you have no idea. I've already been researching which fonts I want to get from M&H type foundry. I will take some pictures this weekend but here are some (thanks danni) from when we went to see if the first time around.

please excuse the sleepy eyes/no makeup! you can see how big the press is in this one...

last day of letterpress class

Sadly our four week class finished this past Saturday. I'm really glad I got to print on the other press this time so I could see the difference in setups, feeding the press and all that. I'm somewhat short on time to blog so I'll just post the photos!

Setting up the type on the vandercook to be locked up

another angle of me setting up the type with my teacher watching from the side
feeding the paper to print on the vandercook

My Thank You cards!

Danni took a nice closeup of a card so you can see how the impression looks. Like I mentioned before we couldn't do deep impressions in the class but this is what's called a kiss impression.

danni, me & brenda in front of the Chandler & Price press
yay letterpress!