July 6th, 2010
Our latest additions to the Shuford Prints family are my save the date book marks. I say family because 75 invitations took about 13 hours to make. I have an attachment to each of these. To call it a ‘Labor of Love’ is an understatement. We are having a small Chicago wedding this fall. Below I will explain the inspiration behind the design and the steps taken to create it.
The look and feel of the cards were inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement. Turn of the century Chicago was a hotbed for the American Arts and Crafts movement with leaders like Jane Adams and Frank Lloyd Wright. After a recent exhibit called Apostles of Beauty at the Art Institute I began collecting pieces that I could incorporate.
'Cray' wallpaper by William Morris
Spindle Cube Chair: 1902/06 Frank Lloyd Wright
teapot: 1880 Christopher Dresser
The Arts and Crafts movement heavily stressed the importance in craftsmanship and truth in materials.
In tradition with Arts and Crafts ideal I wanted to bring beauty to an everyday item like a bookmark. Each bookmark went through a six step process!
- Letterpress the text
- Letterpress the florish
- Back with Japanese paper
- Round Corners
- Hole Punch
- Tie ribbons on
Followers were also very much influenced by Japanese art.
sideboard 1876
For this reason I chose a beautiful Japanese paper for the back of the save the date book mark
Stay tuned for the wedding invitations that will follow!
Posted in Arts and Crafts Movement, Letterpress, www.shufordprints.com | 4 Comments »
March 1st, 2010
Shuford Prints has been very busy with stationery orders these days. There are many advantages to ordering letterpress stationery. The obvious reason would be the paper weight and impression your note card will make on the recipient whether it is a potential employer or a potential love mate. The added bonus is after the first run of cards, Shuford Prints has your plate on file. You can reorder in different colors at a later date. Below are three new stationery orders for three of Shuford Prints most loyal customers.
I loved the blue on Anne Miller’s stationery so much I did a run of my business cards in it.
Stay tuned for our next update: Windy City Save the Date Bookmarks!
Posted in Letterpress, www.shufordprints.com | No Comments »
February 15th, 2010
Shuford Prints blog is now broadcasting from the Windy City. In addition to a move to the midwest we have acquired an old Chandler and Price letterpress. Thanks to the kind folks at Sewell Printing www.sewellprinting.com I have brought life back to old rusty machine.
This beautiful machine had been left in the back of a print shop for at least 25 years. It came to me with old rollers that were falling apart along with inches of dust and rust. The plate on the top is supposed to be shiny silver. It was black from years of ink.
Did I mention that this relatively small machine is made of cast iron and weighs 200lbs? It look three very strong midwestern men to move it up two flights of stairs.
Luckily, I found lots of companies outside of Chicago that helped me refurbish the machine to working order. With new rollers and some elbow grease the machine is up and running in the kitchen.
SP’s first letterpress job was a self promotion card offering a Christmas discount.
Our next job was a christmas invitation for my Mama’s infamous Christmas party.
Our next commission was a holiday card for Jamie’s mom, Suellen Gregory. www.suellengregory.com This card was my first run at a two color card. Two colors require two separate plates and two runs on the press. The first photo shows the cards after plate one
The final card had red text but I only snapped a photo in a test print.
Since Sewell Printing was so nice to loan SP the letterpress we have decided to donate 15% of all letterpress profits to Soul Changers. www.soulchangers.net
We will be printing save the date cards and lots of stationery this coming week so check back often.
Posted in Chandler and Price, Letterpress, Sewell Printing, Suellen Gregory | 1 Comment »
April 21st, 2009
They say absense makes the blog grow fonder. I apologize for my tardiness of updating the journey into letterpress. I will summarize by saying I am learning so much and loving it.
Class II we learned about the second type of letterpress, C&P.
Smaller, older and much heavier.
First assignment was to set type with our name and a phrase. I choose Cleo McDowell’s phrase “I feel like Break dancing”. In the spirit of break dancing; I did not want to lay the words out in a straight line. My instructor said that challenging myself early would help me learn faster. This class is only 6 weeks so efficiency is very important. Below is my break dancing study.
I showed this to my instructor and he said “it will be difficult, but it will be awesome.” I relate this to learning the metric system. It was difficult. Not only do the words have to be backwards so do the letters. Then every bit of space between the letter forms has to be filled and locked it.
This takes a long time. It look me 3 hours of trial and error to finally have it set and ready for the press. Once the press is inked up and all the paper is cut and measured it is time to print and here is the result.
Gorgeous isnt it? Tonight I will start making cards and stationery for Shuford Prints.
Posted in Chandler and Price, Cleo McDowell, Letterpress | 3 Comments »
April 1st, 2009
Wow! I just don’t even know where to begin. My first letterpress class was eye-opening. There was so much information that I can not include so I will have to choose some highlights from the first leg of the journey.
First stop: typing out a quote on a typewriter. Can you believe it? I real typewriter. I was so nervous and I wanted to impress my teacher. The quote that was dictated was from Socrates.
The point of this exercise was to show that taking one step back in print technology is difficult and we are about to step all the back to the beginning with letterpress. A moribund technology. Gosh I am already using huge words on this trip. Moribund refers to being in a state of dying. This might be the feeling the reader is having right now. Good! Relate that to Letterpress. Since the technology is dead it can now become an art form.
After this lesson we toured the studio and started learning the machines. This is where it got crazy. People were taking their clothes off and pouring ink on themselves. Well, not exactly just keeping it interesting. I am 4 questions in and only one other student is taking notes.
To layout type on a letterpress every letter,space,period, umlaut, has its own piece of lead. It would be like making a ransom note out of lead only it was designed by the Germans (Ziggy Socky) so everything has to be mathmatically perfect. Oh! and backwards.
This was already set up so we got to run some prints of this poster.
Some euphemisms we use today that trace their origin back to letterpress:
Mind your p’s and q’s: The letters are reversed, making it easy to mistake p’s and q’s in setting the type.
Out of Sorts: Sorts are letters. If a typesetter had set an entire page of the Bible and used all the “J’s” before finishing the page he would be…you guessed it “out of sorts”. This was a bad thing BTW.
Keep it Tight: When you lay out all the type you have to put lots of pieces of wood and lead around it to “keep it tight”. I made this one up just because I like the phrase.
The first leg of this journey ended with a phrase I hold close to my heart: Letterpress is Industrial Romance. It is a machine yet we still have a hands-on relationship with it. Well not yet, it is only the first week so we are taking it slow. Letting the romance build.
My feelings would best be expressed in a quote from Cleo McDowell “I feel like break dancing”.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
March 31st, 2009
The day is finally here! Tonight Shuford Prints will enter into a new phase. Letterpress! I leave in 2 hours for my very first Letterpress class at the Atlanta Printmakers Studio. All in preparation for where Shuford Prints will be in less than a year.
I invite you to join in my journey.
I beg of you, please tell me what is letterpress? Letterpress, one of the earliest forms of printing text on paper, is a form of relief printing where the image surface is raised and the resulting image is pressed into the paper.
Johann Gutenberg was the father of letterpress printing in Europe, but the Chinese had developed similar types of relief printing as early as the 2nd century A.D. Scholars have debated over the origin for years. I hope this brings up a heated debate tonight. Oh the drama of Letterpress!
I will have much more to write about after my first class tonight. I take diligent notes and ask lots of questions so my classmates may hate me but anyone reading this blog will be so impressed they might start to cry.
Tune in tomorrow to see how far we have traveled. I close with a quote from the timeless classic “Cabin Boy” “I love sitting up here, looking at those bright, twinkly things in the sky, I forget their technical name.”
Tags: classes, Letterpress
Posted in Letterpress | 7 Comments »
