The letterpress card upgrade

There are some great cards in our collection that we originally produced through digital or silk screen printing processes. These include such favorites like our holiday venn diagram cards and our recent glow in the dark creations. These were originally designed with letterpress intentions, but with our excitement and eagerness, produced them by other means to share our joy when letterpress wasn't a viable option. 

But that was yesterday!!

Today these cards are getting the upgrade they were made for - printed on 100% cotton rag lettra, smashed with VanSon custom mixed inks and lovingly press by our hand fed C&P. There's just no matching letterpress!!!

There are quite a few cards getting the upgrade and we are ridiculously excited for them to be printed in the fashion for which they were designed. We will be posting pictures via twitter and adding posts to the blog as we go through the stack. So, look forward to seeing some oldies getting a letterpress face-lift in the next couple weeks and all of them will be added to our shop just in time for the holiday season.

Happy letterpressing!!

We missed you internets!

Well Hello Hello!!

It may have come to your attention that we have been on a hiatus for quite some time. You may have thought we disappeared, or maybe something bad had happened, or even worse - that we forgot about you, our dear internet friends!

Don't fret friends - we haven't forgot about you. How could we you devilishly wonderful peeps! We have simply been in a state of constant transition over the last year. You may have read our previous post that we were moving to Ontario way back in October 2014. Well that happened and we found ourselves in the beautiful city of Pickering. Though Pickering was wonderful for us with its beautiful fall foliage, sandy beaches, and plethora of  Starbucks in close proximity, our slew of letterpress equipment just wasn't 'feeling it' (ie. we just didn't have a space to operate our equipment). So, in February of 2015, we made the move to Mississauga, Ontario, where we have found a wee studio space in which we finally moved all our letterpress equipment in to.  With all that moving it has taken us nearly 8 months to get settled, unpack all our pressessories (letterpress accessories), set up our new space, and get back to business. In fact, we are still in the process of getting our main C&P up and running due to some damaged incurred during transit. But we are happy to say, that at least for now we can begin to concentrate or returning to business as usual - even if the transition may continue to be slow.

So it's great to see you once again internets! We missed you a whole bunch and can't wait to post some great new things in the upcoming weeks and months as we get back up to speed.

Happy letterpressing!!

Fritzler-Krueger Wedding

We recently completed our most extensive wedding package ever! This included save the dates, invites, maps, reply cards, reception cards, and even letterpressed envelopes. Wow!!

These invites were for the lovely and effervescent young couple Megan Fritzler and Dustin Krueger. These beautiful people came into our studio with a an inspired visions, an unrelenting enthusiasm for letterpress, and a yellow floral chair (more on this in a minute). Although they knew what they wanted in their invitation suite and the vibe they wanted to convey, they came to us to design all the elements to capture their vision, all inspired by a vintage floral chair. I wish we still had a photo of the chair - recent computer issues has resulted in that photo being lost forever - but it is similar to this one (but in bright shades of yellow and gold).

We hand sketched a pattern from this vintage chair and used it as the centrepiece for all the elements. Also, because Megan and Dustin were so awesome in giving us the liberty to try new things, we decided to make this a four colour - that's right four colour - design. If this wasn't complicated enough already though, we hand mixed all one of a kind colours. These invites may have been labour intensive, but we believe they came out beautiful!!  Have a look and tell us what you think. Big congrats go out to Megan and Dustin! You two are amazing and we truly appreciate letting us be part of your wedding extravaganza. Wishing you both a lifetime of love, laughter and happiness.

The Final Product

The design and polymer plates all ready to hit the press

Laying down the first two custom colours for the
 reception and map portions of the invitations

Laying down the first two custom colours for the invites, reply cards
and accommodations cards

Using our Pantone colour swatches to get just the right colours

Adding in the third custom colour layer

The fourth custom colour layer for the reception and map
portions of the invites

Here you can see the before and after the fourth colour was added

Fourth colour added to the reception cards

The completed invitation card

The completed reply cards and reception invitations

Welcome to the Backyard, Gordon!

In July we shutdown our studio for a little hiatus. We traveled back to our home town, Toronto, enjoy in the festivities of a sister's wedding and to generally hangout and reminisce with some of our close friends. While in Toronto though, we came across a letterpress auction, selling a variety of letterpress goods, including vintage presses. We came across this lovely GP Gordon, and thought "what they hey, let's throw out a bid and see what happens". Well, needless to say, we won!

The press was actually located in Ohio, and we corresponded with the owner who said he would crate, package and ship the press to us once we were back in Saskatoon for what seemed like a too good to be true price. When we arrive back to the "city of bridges", we tidied up the studio and made some space for our new baby, just in time to have the press arrive at our door. We were elated to see the delivery truck, grinning ear to ear just to take a peek at our new purchase. When the driver opened the rear door though, our smiling face quickly turned to looks of concern. The press was shipped strapped on top of two broken, rickety-old palettes. Garbage bags were wrapped around the top of the press, adhered with what could only be described as wishes and hopes. No string. No wires. Not even tape!! We were dumbfounded that it made it this far!! Luckily we had a skilled delivery driver. He slowly maneuvered those rickety palettes with keen precision, and although the flywheel fell off during the unloading - likely the result of not being firmly attached or supported by the structurally sound garbage bag barrier - the press made it successfully into the studio with a few hardy grunts and pushes.

This beauty will need a little restoration before it can be used, but it sure is going to be a show piece when it's done. We are trying to do a little research into this GP Gordon Press in preparation for its restoration, and will be posting about it in up coming weeks, as the little tidbits we found out about this press are quite interesting. In the meantime, here's a couple pictures of our newest old press. Welcome to the Backyard Gordon!

Saskatoon Loves Pilates!

Over the last couple months we have been working with designer Fred Reibin at Zephyr Creative to print a one of a kind letterpress business card for a truly one of a kind business: Love Pilates. Fred had a distinct vision for the business cards and presented us with a wonderfully simple but complex design to be letterpressed. Printing these business cards was exciting opportunity to use French Paper Co's Kraft paper and to combine both letterpress and screen printing processes. We believe that the combination of French's paper with letterpress and screen printing really showcased Fred’s brilliant design.

We genuinely loved being part of this project and enjoyed the whole creative process involved in bringing these handmade business cards to life‼ 

Chandler and Price 10 x 15 Platen Press

The workhorse in our studio is our massive Chandler and Price 10 x 15 Platen Press. This was the second press we ever purchased and you can see from the pictures that it is quite a large upgrade from "Siggy". Our C&P  is known as the 'New Style' - and is easily recognized by its increased size and straight spoke flywheel compared to the 'Old Style' C&Ps (Check out a sweet photo of the C&P Old Style press flywheel here from the people at Duet Letterpress). The 'New Style' C&P is the most common type of hand fed semi automatic platen press, but has not been made for nearly 50 years and in fact ours rolled off the line in 1927.

We had been on the hunt for a C&P for a long while, but soon learnt that they are difficult to acquire. Often these beautiful machines sell via word of mouth or through forums that see them sold within days of their posting. We were fortunate to have come across a graphic designer from Courtenay, British Columbia selling his press and we quickly snagged the opportunity to purchase this bad boy. How excited were we?!? Now all we needed to do was ship our newly acquired humdinger. For those of you unfamiliar with the 'New Style' C&P, it weights 2500lbs (~1100kg) crated with a 55x48x60 inch footprint. To top it off our press was situated in a remote studio located in an open field. This presented us with a whole new set of logistic hurdles. The first shipping attempt played out like Corb Lund’s song Truck Got Stuck, with a total of three trucks getting stuck in an attempt to reach the site (with no success) where the press was located. In trying to arrange a second attempt, we discovered that because the press was located in a fairly remote part of Courtenay, BC all major shipping companies outsourced the initial retrieval of the press to the same local carrier, which after the first dismal attempt refused to pick up the press from its current location. Instead, arrangements had to be made to forklift the press from the studio, placed in a truck and then transported to a loading dock where the press could then be pick up by the local carriers. After much headache and extreme patience our press was successfully loaded and shipped to us in Saskatoon in March 2012, where it lived in our backyard garage and served as the grounds for our humble beginnings. The C&P has since been moved, along with "Siggy", in December 2012 to our current studio space.

Our C&P currently remains the backbone to all our letterpress products. If you listen close, you can probably hear its satisfying metallic clanking in the heart of Caswell Hill in Saskatoon.

Our Presses - Sigwalt Chicago #11

At our sales we often get questions about the type of presses (and where they came from) that we currently use  to create our wonderful letterpressed products. Since it's such a common question we thought we'd share a little detail about the Sigwalt Chicago #11, the Chandler and Price 10x15 and the Kesley 3x5 that we currently own in the next few blog posts.

The first press we ever purchased was a tiny 3x5 Sigwalt Chicago #11 table top press (actual printing area is 2-1/2 x 4 inch). We purchased this from an individual from Atlanta, Georgia. Below are some pictures  of "Siggy" as we first unwrapped it.  As you can see it was in rough shape - needing new rollers, some oiling and some rust removal - but it was operational. What we didn't know at the time was that not all the pieces of the press were original, and at some point replacement parts had been added that did not fit quite properly. When squaring the platen to the bed in preparation for our first impressions, one of the replacement parts snapped the column that holds the platen to the impression lever, rendering "Siggy" nonoperational!! You could imagine our dismay. We didn't even have an opportunity to create an initial impression and see what this little guy could do!! We have been on a search for a replacement part ever since, but because the #11 is a less common table top press, parts are hard to come by. So, currently "Siggy" serves as an ornamental press in our studio, soaking up the rays  near the studio windows, as his bigger brothers, the C and P and Kelsey, do most of the dirty work in the shop.

Even though our little Sigwalt is down for the count, this little guy is a much loved reminder of our humble letterpress beginnings!!