The Making of the Wedding Invitations: Part II

Once the design was finalized and plates created, I made an appointment at LaLa Press in Silverlake to rent studio space and print my invitations.  I blocked out an entire Sunday from 10-6 to do the actual pressing.  Mabel runs LaLa Press, and let me just tell you, she's amazing!  She has such a wonderful spirit, truly loves the art of letterpress, and is a former-law-school-candidate-turned-stationary-business-owner.  She is pretty much my idol.  Not only was she incredibly helpful, she was such a pleasure to spend the day with.

Lucky for me, the ink color I chose came ready out of the ink can, which saved me the time and trouble of mixing inks!

Letterpress plate with Pantone color guide

So the first thing we did was cut up all our paper into roughly the size of the invitations.  When I was at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, all we had was a regular cutting board, but LaLa Press has this incredible  guillotine cutter which cuts several sheets at the same time!  I wish I had a picture of the cutter because it was so old, but so incredibly efficient with safety levers and everything!  Basically, it took two hands at once to get the machine to cut so that your fingers would never be under the blade!

Polymer plate mounted onto bunting base.

Once the paper was cut, we mounted the polymer plate onto the bunting base on the letterpress machine.  In my case, I used a Vandercook Universal I.  Her name is Maddie.  She was my dancing partner and we did the side-step hundreds of time that day.

Me feeding envelopes into the Vandercook

Me and Maddie

As I wrote in a prior blog entry, every color is it's own run on the letterpress machine.  For my invitations, we had to do two runs - one for the inked portion, and one for the blind impression.  I made approximately 120 invitations so that means for the invitations (2 runs x 120), rsvp card, directions card, return address on the envelopes, return address on the RSVP address, I had to press (do the side step twirl with Maddie) at least seven hundred and twenty (720+) times!!!  At the next day, I was so exhausted.  I had a blister on my hand and my shoulders were super sore! 

First complete invitation! I almost cried.

Pre-trimmed, but already still so pretty.  Just look at that texture.

Once everything was printed, we did final cuts on all the prints, and shrunk wrapped everything for me to take home!

And here's a little video on the whole process that I found on YouTube:

Next, I'll talk about assembling the finished product!