Etsy Treasury Feature: Green, Copper & Red Crane String Cards

Our gorgeous green, copper and red Crane String greeting cards were featured today in a treasury on Etsy! The treasury, pictured above, created by MalcolmStudioShop, features twelve different peace themed items from a variety of etsy sellers! Click on the treasury link to view the actual page!

Our green, copper and red Crane String cards make a wonderful holiday card and are also great to send any time of the year. They are available as singles, sets of 6 or sets of 12. Get yours today!

In other etsy-related news, I was delighted to log-in to our shop this morning and find that we have over 400 (!) followers who love our shop (see below)! That's pretty awesome (and somewhat humbling). You guys are the best! Thanks for spreading the love!

Just a reminder, too, if you are a Facebook user and would like to keep up with what we're doing in our studio there, Twin Ravens Press now has a facebook page. Go become a fan today!

Happy Belated Valentine's Day!

I hope everyone had a wonderful and long Valentine's Day and President's weekend this past weekend.  I've been meaning to do a little blog post for a while now to show off all of our new love-themed cards for Valentine's and this spring, but we've been so busy with custom work lately that this blog has been sadly neglected for over a week.  If you've been watching our Etsy shop, you've probably already seen these designs, but in case you haven't here they are below!  With the exception of the Valentine Checklist card, I feel that all of these designs would be a wonderful way to tell the people you care about and are thinking about that you love them throughout the year!  And really, who doesn't love getting a sweet "I love you and I'm thinking of you." message at random?  Just because it's not Valentine's Day anymore, doesn't mean you shouldn't tell 'em you love 'em.  

Our first new love-inspired design is an A2 size card that we're calling "Love Letters".  Inspired by vintage valentine's and wedding postage stamps this letterpress card features the letters L-O-V-E inside of a light pink rectangle with little grey finches perched on and flying towards them.  You can see the full card at the top of this post and there are a few detail images below.  

Check out how awesome the embossed white letters look in the above detail photo!  They are really fun and tactile and beautiful to see and touch!  Each of these cards comes with a corresponding A2 envelope in light pink and they are available for purchase as singles here.

For our next new love-inspired card, we decided to try out a brand new card size.  The size is a monarch size, which measures 7.25" x 3.75".  I've done a few save-the-date cards for weddings and a few programs that were this size in the past, and I liked the size so much that I thought I'd try it out for a greeting card.  Check it out below:

Each of these cards features an adorable baby elephant running across the front with a trail of little pink heart-shaped bubbles trailing behind him.  The bubbles continue across the front of the card and a few even float around to the backside.  It features a very simple message: "Love you.", letterpress printed on the front and it is blank on the inside for your own personal message.  Want one of your own?  You can find it here.  

Our totally Valentine's specific design for this year was a cute and somewhat humorous checklist card.  The card is a 5.5" square size that is folded and has a lovely brown, leafy vine pattern stretching around the list on the front.  The list was printed in brown also with little pink checkboxes that you can fill in yourself depending on who you plan to send it to.  It's really the perfect card for all of the Valentines on your list!  Here is a photo:  

We still have a few of these cards available in our etsy store, so if you'd like to stock up for next year, you can find them here.  

And, last but not least, is an adorable card design for the dog-lover in all of us!  My family and I had black labrador retrievers growing up and they were such wonderful family pets - and so sweet and loyal - that I decided to make a love card featuring them.  The card design is fairly simple - there is a black lab on the front with a light pink heart in his mouth.  See below: 

You can find the black lab cards here.  Do you love this design, but would rather have a chocolate or yellow lab?  We have those too!  

You can find the yellow labs here and the chocolate labs here.  

I'm going to try to get back into a regular schedule of posting here soon, and I have lots and lots of new custom stuff to share with you!  So if you're especially interested in custom wedding invitations stay tuned, more of those will be up very soon!

Carlos Lascano

I'm headed up to Portland this afternoon to run a few letterpress-related errands and potentially do some shopping.  While I'm away, you can tide yourself over with this lovely stop motion animation.  I recently discovered Carlos Lascano, and I think that I may be in love (with his work).  As another blogger put it: his talent truly runneth over.  More letterpress tomorrow.  Enjoy!

A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

Glowing Reviews

Now this may sound a little pretentious, but Twin Ravens Press loves glowing reviews of our work almost as much as we love puddle stomping and Oreo cookies with peanut butter on them.  While I feel like getting to do what I love every day is reward enough in-and-of-itself, reading or hearing about someone else loving my work is always an added bonus.  Remember the most recent wedding I posted about?  Well, the lovely bride from that post, Lynn, just posted another glowing review of her stationary and Twin Ravens Press on Wedding Bee, and on her personal blog.  Thank you, Lynn!  I'm very touched.  Go check it out!  

Lynn & Matthew are Getting Married!

This will be the first of many posts on this blog regarding weddings and custom wedding stationary.  When I first started Twin Ravens Press I knew that I was really interested in doing custom letterpress printing and design work, one on one, for various clients.  Don't get me wrong, I like doing the cards and other commercial printed items for etsy, arts & crafts shows, and retailers a lot, and I get really excited every time I sell something to someone somewhere where I've never sold anything before (so excited in fact that I'm tracking them on a map like you do in elementary school, but more on that later), but there's just something so much more awesome about getting to create work for an individual client.   It's even more awesome when said client is great to work with and really excited about what you're doing.  Lynn & Matthew were this kind of client.  

I'm not entirely sure at the moment where Lynn found out about me.  It could have been through my etsy shop, or from another blogger who blogged about my work, but it was most likely from a previous client blogging about my work on her wedding bee blog.   You see, Lynn is also a blogger on wedding bee (she's Miss Coconut), so I'm guessing that's probably where she found me.  

When I first started working with Lynn she told me that her wedding colors were chocolate brown and yellow and that she really liked my elegant scroll pattern thank you cards from etsy and that she was also trying to incorporate a bird theme into her invitations, decorations and other stationary items.  Check out this cute reception poster she found from another etsy seller.  After trying out some different ideas based on this info, this is what we came up with:

The entire stationary suite incorporates both yellow and chocolate brown inks on Crane Lettra Pearl White 100% cotton letterpress paper.  This job was a lot of fun because we got to create so many different pieces and it's always fun figuring out how to use a theme throughout several pieces in the design.  

The main piece of any custom wedding stationary suite, is of course the invitation.  Lynn & Matthew's invitations are an A7 size invite and incorporate both colors and two of the three fonts we used throughout the suite.  You can see photos and close-ups of just the invitation and invitation envelope below.  (Please Note:  there will be selective blurring of certain information on the following photos to protect the client's privacy).  

Here is the invitation with both the front and back of the envelope.  The address on the flap was letterpress printed in yellow ink and Lynn hired a calligrapher to do all of the recipient addresses on the front of the envelopes.  I don't personally do calligraphy, nor does my shop offer it, but I think that it's awesome when people use it for their stationary.  

To complete their invitation package Lynn and Matthew also ordered some cute RSVP cards with matching envelopes and a Directions/Accommodations card.  Both the RSVP and Directions/Accommodations cards are double-sided.  I modified a map Lynn provided for the map on their directions card so that it would fit in a little better with the whole "look" of the other pieces and elements in the suite.  I think it turned out really well.  You can see photos and details of both cards below: 

The top photo above is the RSVP card, front and back, with envelope and the second photo is detail images of the RSVP card.  Below are details of the accommodations/directions card.  

Another popular option that I like to offer my clients for their stationary is thank you cards.  I think this is a really nice thing to get, especially if the couple getting married has gift registries. Sending out matching thank you cards for your wedding presents to your guests is always a classy gesture.  Check out Lynn and Matthew's thank yous below:

Sometimes my clients also order stationary items for their actual ceremony.  Lynn and Matthew ordered program covers, menus and place cards for theirs.  The program covers are square and were printed on chocolate brown Waste Not Paper with yellow ink.  For the place cards I printed a small scroll pattern on the bottom and Lynn's calligrapher is going to write the individual names on each of the cards.  You can see pictures of these three pieces below.  

Last but not least, when I started designing all of the little "extras" for Lynn, one of the designs I came up with was for a custom coaster for them to use at their ceremony.  I kind of like the idea of having coasters at a ceremony for cocktails or during the dinner and I think that making them custom to your specific ceremony and design taste is really cool.  Believe it or not, I actually had never printed coasters prior to this custom job.  When looking at everything else they were getting L & M didn't think they had room in their budget for this one extra thing, but since they were such totally awesome customers (and they had already ordered so much stuff!), and I liked the design and wanted to try out printing some coasters, I decided to print them for them anyway as an early wedding present.  The turned out pretty good, don't you think?  

I'll be posting about more upcoming and past custom wedding jobs in the future, but I thought that this was a great one to start with because it was so much fun and really shows off all of the different types of things that Twin Ravens Press can do for a wedding or other event.  Lynn was really excited about all aspects of the process and about her stationary.  If you'd like to read what she had to say about the stationary or about working with Twin Ravens Press you can find it on her personal blog here and here.  Or on wedding bee here, here, or here.  Another wedding website also read what she wrote and wrote about it here.  Check it out!

Congratulations Lynn & Matthew!!  Thanks for being so awesome!