Out of Town

To all of my wonderful clients and readers: I wanted to let you know that I am going to be out of town this week, Thursday (today) through Sunday. I am traveling to Minneapolis to go to one of my younger cousin's weddings. This trip is both kind of exciting and making me a little nervous, because I haven't seen this particular part of my family for 15 years. I spent a little bit of time last weekend going through some old photos and found the photo at the top of this post. This photo was taken during the summer of 1995, which was the last time that I saw any of them in person. I'm the girl in the pink shirt on the far right, and was 11 years old at the time. My cousin Heidi who is getting married on Saturday is the one standing right behind me in the plaid shirt and overalls. She was 9 when this photo was taken, and the other three girls are also cousins who are in Minneapolis, who I will get to see at the wedding.

Aside from seeing my family that I haven't seen in a while and attending Heidi's wedding, I'm hoping to do some awesome Minneapolis work-related things while I am there, including meeting the uber-talented calligrapher/illustrator/designer, Crystal Kluge, in person. Crystal and I have been working together for a little while now on a few different collaborative projects including a few wedding invitations suites and some really cute holiday gift tags this last Christmas, but have never actually met in person, so I'm super-excited to finally meet her! (Click on the tag at the bottom of this post to see some of these projects! They are awesome!) A trip to one of the letterpress studios that I idolize, Studio On Fire, may also be in order, as they are located in Minneapolis as well.

If any of you out there are waiting to hear back from me on a print job or design work, or have recently made an inquiry about my services, I will be back to work on Monday morning (March 1st) and will answer your e-mails as soon as I can! Wish me luck and have a great weekend!

Tart Workshop + Twin Ravens Press Holiday Gift Tags

I recently had the opportunity to team up with the awesomely creative calligrapher/illustrator of Tart Workshop, Crystal Kluge, to design and letterpress print an absolutely adorable set of holiday gift tags. Crystal and I have had (and currently have) some mutual custom clients, so it was really exciting to get to work with her again on a project specifically for Tart Workshop & Twin Ravens Press!

These gift tags come in sets of six, one tag each of six different designs. All of the patterns were created by Crystal and all of the letterpress printing, die-cutting and assembly was done by Twin Ravens Press. These gift tags are 2.75" in diameter and feature a different pattern in one of four ink colors (red, green, copper or silver) on one side, and a place to write who the gift is to and from on the back side.

Each tag is tied with a piece of all-natural hemp twine, making them easy to attach to gifts or hang from a Christmas tree. The tag sets come packaged in a 100% biodegradable, clear, corn-cello bag.

Since we are releasing these tags so late in the season, we are offering you a very special deal on them! Visit the Twin Ravens Press Etsy Shop today or tomorrow and purchase $20.00 (or more) of our products (this can be single greeting cards, boxed sets, coasters, etc.) and receive one set of gift tags free with your purchase! This offer is only valid until tomorrow, Sunday, December 20th at 5:00 pm, Pacific Standard Time, or while supplies last, so head over to the shop now! If you just want the tags, that's perfectly fine too, they are also available for purchase on etsy, right here.

If you are currently a Twin Ravens Press retailer or you are considering carrying our products in your retail store, these tags will be added to our collection, and are available for wholesale purchases now. If you're already looking ahead for next year, keep these in mind, as they are super-cute!

If you'd like to check out more of Crystal Kluge's gorgeous hand-lettering, graphic design, illustration and typography design, check out her website and blog. I love working with Crystal, so check out her work if you have a custom project in mind!

Thanks so much again for the collaboration Crystal, and to all of my lovely readers out there: Happy Holidays and Happy Shopping!

From the Mailbox: Gorgeous Watercolor Maps by Crystal Kluge

Yesterday afternoon I was totally delighted when my mailman came and brought me a large chocolate brown colored envelope that was decorated with some gorgeous calligraphy, labels and those very awesome king & queen of hearts postage stamps that came out earlier this summer:

I get quite a bit of mail and it's not everyday that you receive a package that looks this neat on the outside. Check it out, she even calligraphed our address on the large light grey circular label on the front:

This package was from a wonderful artist/calligrapher that I worked with a couple of months ago named Crystal Kluge. Crystal and I worked together with our clients, Allison and Ryan, to create a gorgeous wedding invitation booklet, complete with hand-illustrated maps for their wedding in September. Crystal illustrated three maps for them, and did the calligraphy for several different pages of their booklets, and I letterpress printed it all, along with the art I designed for their invitation, and hand-bound it all into small invitation booklets. If you don't remember what this amazing suite looked like, check it out, here.

Anyway, in the previous post I mentioned that Allison and Ryan had commissioned Crystal to illustrate the three maps that were included in their books and I letterpress printed them. They also had me print a few loose maps on watercolor paper and send those to Crystal so that she could hand-watercolor them. Allison and Ryan wanted to have these maps as keepsakes and gorgeous art pieces that they could frame and hang up in their home. Crystal sent me photos of the finished maps she did for Allison and Ryan a couple of months ago and you can see those here. At the time, I sent Crystal a few copies of each map so she had some extras in case of mistakes or in case she wanted a set for her portfolio or for other promotional purposes.

Anyway, yesterday I opened her gorgeous envelope and found these:

Crystal water-colored a set of the letterpress printed maps and sent them back to me!! How awesome is that!?! I wasn't really expecting it because I know that doing work like this is incredibly time-consuming, but I was absolutely delighted to get them in the mail! They are gorgeous! Check it out:

This is the first map in the booklet. It shows a detail of Allison and Ryan's wedding location on the Oregon coast. The next map was a map of a large portion of western oregon and the I-5 corridor:

I love all three of these maps, but I think I love this center map the best. You can also see in the above photos the very sweet note that Crystal wrote me. And the third map was of Portland, Oregon:

Aren't her maps and watercolor work just absolutely stunning?!? If you want to see more of Crystal's work online, be sure to check out her website or her blog. She is incredibly talented and just a super-awesome person all around. If you love her style and are considering having a map, calligraphy or any hand-illustration done for your wedding invitations or another project, Crystal would be a wonderful person to contact. Believe me, it was a total pleasure working with her, and I can't wait to work with her again! It was so much fun too to receive such wonderful work and a reminder of our collaboration in the mail yesterday!

Thanks so much for the gorgeous maps Crystal! They will most certainly be cherished.

Letterpress Printed Watercolor Maps

Remember the awesome letterpress printed invitation booklets I blogged about last week that were created for Allison & Ryan?  Well, there was one other part of that project that I didn't mention yet: water-colored letterpress printed maps.  When Allison and Ryan hired me to do their invitation books, they also had me print a few extra copies of their maps to send back to the original designer/mapmaker, Crystal Kluge, to be water-colored.  I was just over checking out Crystal's blog this morning and saw some images she posted of the finished maps and boy do they look fantastic!  You can see a photo of one of them at the top of this post, and you can find the pics of the others here.  Aren't those great?!?  And what a fantastic and beautiful keepsake to hang up on your wall.  Love 'em!

Allison & Ryan are Getting Married!

I've had the pleasure the last few months of working on a rather complex, but totally beautiful wedding invitation suite for a lovely couple who are getting married near the Oregon Coast later this year!  Allison and Ryan's invitation suite (or rather, booklet) is one of the most unique projects I've printed lately, partially due to it's complexity, partially due to getting to work with some other very talented artists/designers and partially because of the bride, Allison's, totally awesome, eco-conscious style!  

From the very beginning of our design discussions, Allison knew she wanted something for her invitation suite that was beautiful, but also highly eco-conscious and sustainable as well.  We accomplished this in several different ways.  First of all, Allison's book design was created using natural and sustainable papers from a couple of my favorite sources, and secondly, the book design allowed us to put all of the information Allison wanted in her suite into one gorgeous little package, eliminating the need for extra cards the would have used more paper and might be tossed after the ceremony.  

You can see a picture of what the booklet looks like open to the main invitation page at the top of this post.  Here is what the booklet looks like closed: 

Allison's booklet's measure 5"x5" square and the covers were made from beautiful dark brown, Nepalese Lokta paper.  Allison has a French-inspired lavender and poppies as well as an outdoors/summer camp theme for her stationery and wedding.  In order to dress up the outside of the books a little I glued a stem or two of fresh pressed lavender to each cover flap.  This gave all of the books a much more unique and natural feel, as well as causing them all to smell absolutely lovely (like lavender!).  

If you were to receive one of these invitations, open the front cover, and this is what you would see: 

Allison's books were comprised of six pages on the inside, all made out of a custom 100% cotton recycled paper that is embedded with wildflower seeds from Porridge Papers.  I've worked with a variety of Porridge's creations on several different occasions and their paper is so wonderful, beautiful and unique!  It takes letterpress impressions beautifully and the most awesome part is that it's truly plantable - if the seeded paper is planted it will actually grow wildflowers!  How cool is that?!?  

Here is a close-up of Allison & Ryan's first page: 

Allison and Ryan's book opens with a very sweet little poem letterpress printed in chocolate brown ink.  All of the hand-lettering that you will see throughout these books was done by the very talented, Crystal Kluge of Minneapolis.  Allison and Ryan hired Crystal to do much of the lettering for their invitations as well as to design some gorgeous maps which you will see later in this post.  Seriously, if you haven't checked out Crystal's work, or blog you really ought to. Her talent truly runneth over...  Plus, she's incredibly awesome to work with.  If you'd like to see her posts about this suite, you can find them here or here. 

Turn the page and you will find Allison and Ryan's main invitation.  The invitation is simply another page of the book, however, to make it stand out a little more from the rest we printed it in three colors (chocolate brown, violet, and deep red) and we did some blind embossing as well, as part of the design.  You can see a view of the whole book, opened to this page at the top of the post, and you can see a close up of it here: 

The invitation and graphics for it were designed by Twin Ravens Press, and the hand-lettering was done by Crystal.  I didn't know it until we were well into the design process, but Crystal also designed the font that we used for the body text of the invitation.  It's called Silverstein.  If you like it, you can purchase it from Font Bros. here.  

Because Allison and Ryan are currently working out of the country (and just because they were curious), I took several photos of the invitations throughout the printing process to e-mail them.  We figured, this way, they could have a virtual experience of seeing the process of how their invitations were created.  Here is an image of one of my presses, an 8x12 Chandler and Price platen.  This is the press that was used to create Allison & Ryan's (as well as most of my other client's) wedding invitations.

And here is what one of her invitation pages looked like as it was coming off the press: 

Pretty neat, huh?  As always, if you are a client local to Eugene or Oregon, and if you'd like to come by and see your invitations as they are being printed you are more than welcome to!  Just let me know.  Likewise, if you are an out-of-town, out-of-state and/or international client and would like us to take pictures of the process of printing your invitations, I'd be more than happy to oblige.  Just ask!

After the gorgeous invitation, are three separate pages each with a different hand-drawn map of different areas relating to Allison and Ryan's upcoming ceremony.  The maps feature Portland, Oregon, a larger view of Western Oregon and their ceremony site.  All maps were hand-drawn/designed by Crystal Kluge.  I love how whimsical they are!  Crystal sent me the drawings and then I created a printing plate of each of them and printed them on the separate pages of Allison's books using chocolate brown ink.  Check them out: 

Aren't they gorgeous?!?  Last but not least, the final page of the book explains how to send your reply for this gorgeous event.  For logistical reasons, as well as to save paper, Allison and Ryan opted to have their replies made via a website.  This is a great idea if you are moving, out of the country, and/or just want to save some paper and postage right before your wedding.  

Each book was hand-bound by me using chocolate brown linen thread.  If you flip the books over, to the back cover you will find a tiny surprise!

Very subtly letterpress printed in black ink you will find a tiny (about 1" square) Viking-Ninja.  Allison told me a wonderful story, which I'm sure she may elaborate on more in detail later on her blog (she's a blogger over on weddingbee.com).  However, the Viking-Ninja was at Ryan's request - he one day wants to write a very cute sounding children's story involving one and they wanted to have him featured as a subtle and quirky little extra on their invitation.  The viking ninja was drawn by one of my very good friends, and also the proprietor of Spastic Rabbit Studio on etsy, Tara M.  I just love it when couples include an element or elements that are truly and uniquely "them" as part of their invitations.  It makes the whole thing so much more personal and fun!

The other piece we printed in conjunction with Allison and Ryan's lovely books was a 5.5" square envelope to go with them!  These envelopes are from Waste Not Paper company and are their Luxe Cream color.  Allison and Ryan's return address, as well as one stalk of lavender, was letterpress printed in violet ink on the back flaps.  You can see the envelope and booklet together in these images:

Aren't they gorgeous!?!   Allison and Ryan were absolutely wonderful clients to work with and I know that their quasi-French, eco-friendly, summer camp wedding on the Oregon Coast in September is going to be totally awesome and beautiful.  Once again, if you'd like to read more about Allison's wedding in her own words, go check out her blog, she is Miss Bearcub on Wedding Bee.  

Congratulations and thanks again, Allison and Ryan!