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.

Save the Date: Kara & Steve are Getting Married!

Let me say up front that I LOVE it, when couples looking for custom letterpress stationery contact me well in advance of their wedding date! The more you plan ahead, the more time we will have to come up with something totally awesome, and totally "you".

Seattle couple, Kara and Steve, are getting married in late August of 2010 in Kara's hometown of Billings, Montana, and Kara contacted me originally back in April of this year asking about custom letterpress printing for her wedding. We began talking about designs for her Save-the-Date cards in July and we finished them up and shipped them to her so she could send them out to her guests about eleven months prior to her wedding. I have to give her mad props for planning way ahead - that's awesome!

Right before I began working on Kara and Steve's designs, Kara sent me a fabulous and very detailed description of different things she liked and what she already has planned for her wedding next August. Kara wrote:

"[Our wedding] will be at my parents' home; they have a country-type house on 20 acres. We'll have the ceremony in the backyard in the early evening and then the reception will be in one of those huge white tents, probably 40' x 120', and will last late into the night. Overall, we want our wedding to have an elegant, romantic, chic feel. Our colors are aubergine and blush pink, with accent colors of lime green, brown, and ivory. In our reception tent, we want the tables to have aubergine lamour (satin-like finish) tablecloths and dark wood chivari chairs, and to have lots and lots of votive candles on the tables. For flowers, I love peonies, magnolias, ranunculus, anemones, orchids and hydrangeas..."

When discussing what she wanted for her stationery, I found out that Kara loved the idea of a super-thick paper that would really show off the letterpress impressions well. She really wanted something that was fresh and modern, but with a touch of romance and whimsy, all the while incorporating elements of her and Steve's personality and the colors and style that they would have for their upcoming wedding. You can see in the photo at the top of this post, and in the ones below what we came up with.

Kara and Steve's Save the Date's are a very modern monarch size card (which measures 3.75"x7.25") printed on Crane Lettra 220 lb. 100% cotton duplex paper in Ecru. The duplex paper is twice as thick as the regular Crane Lettra paper and handles deep letterpress impressions very well. We decided to go with the warm Ecru color, rather than a standard white or off-white shade, to lend a slightly more rustic, traditional and warm touch to an otherwise, very modern design. This save-the-date is also very unique in that it is double-sided. You can see both sides and the envelope in the photo at the top of the post.

For one of the sides we decided to do a repeating, blind-embossed pattern of Kara and Steve's wedding date, written several different ways, as well as their names, and the phrase "Save the Date" in a modern, san-serif font all over the entire side of the card. This created a really interesting visual and tactile "texture" on the surface of each card. Click on the photo below to see the detail better!

Then, on top of the pattern I letterpress printed the words "Save the Date" in Kara's actual handwriting in a dark aubergine ink. In order to do this, Kara wrote out the words she wanted on a piece of paper several times until she got it to look the way she wanted it to. Then she scanned the handwriting, e-mailed it to me, I converted it into a vector image, and then created a letterpress printing plate from it! Pretty neat, don't you think? Here is a detail image of Kara's handwritten "Save the Date" as well as of the blind-embossing:

On the other side, we continued to print with the same Aubergine ink and utilized Kara's handwriting and the fonts I used on the reverse side for the blind embossing to print the actual information. Check it out:

Kara wrote her and Steve's names for the design on the top of the card and then below them, we printed their full names, the date, place and their website info. The layout and style is very modern and I absolutely love the way that Kara's writing extending off the edges of each sheet looks so fresh and stylish, yet timeless and personal all at the same time!

In order to incorporate another one of their wedding colors into the Save-the-Date, Kara chose a light green, monarch-size envelope from Green Paper Company to pair with her cards. The shade of green is called "Balsam Fir" and we letterpress printed their return address in aubergine ink on the flap.

Kara asked me to blur a fairly significant portion of their address, but you can still get an idea of where the address was situated and what the color and shape of the envelope was like from the above photo. Everything about these cards turned out beautifully. They are so unique and I can't wait to see where we decide to go for their actual invitations!

In other news, I would like to wish a very happy wedding day to a Eugene, Oregon couple I printed wedding invitations for who are getting married in Cannon Beach, Oregon today! Congratulations Leia & Tyler! I haven't shown off their stationery on this blog yet, but I will very soon, so keep an eye on this blog if you want to see it!

October Special: Business and Calling Cards

Happy October Everyone! I've been pondering the idea of doing semi-monthly specials for a while now on certain retail products that we print or on custom printing, and I've decided that we're going to give it a shot! I know I write a lot on this blog about all of the awesome wedding-related stationery that we design and print, but you should know that we also print some wonderful business-related cards and stationery as well!

So, for the month of October, our special will be (drum roll, please): 10-20% Off on all Business or Calling Card orders!

You heard me right! If you are a current business or calling card customer of Twin Ravens Press, place an order with a deposit for reprints of your current business card design between October 1 and October 31, 2009 and receive 20% off of your printing!

If you are a new business or calling card customer, don't worry, you can get in on this deal too! If you haven't ordered business or calling cards from us before, but would like to, place your order with a signed contract and deposit between October 1 and October 31 and receive 10% off of the printing of your cards. This discount does not apply to design work or platemaking.

If you have any questions, or would like to place your order, please contact us at twinravenspress@gmail.com!

Worldly Thank You Cards and A Beautiful Spanish Wedding

Last week I received a really fun e-mail from a client that I've been working with for quite sometime. If you've been following this blog for a while, you may remember Isabel and her now-husband, Luis. Isa and Luis live in Tunisia and were recently married in Madrid, Spain. Isa designed all of the stationery for her wedding herself and hired Twin Ravens Press to print it. It was pretty fabulous! If you don't recall what Isabel and Luis' wedding stationery looked like, or if you haven't seen it yet, you can see photos and read about it in a couple of my previous posts: here and here. You may also remember that I printed and die-cut a very cool set of round wedding menus for their wedding, which you can see and read about here. Anyway, shortly after their wedding, Isabel designed and had me print a set of thank you cards for them to send out to their wedding guests. I hadn't shown these off on the blog yet, but when I received Isabel's e-mail last week with a bunch of truly beautiful and awesome photos from their wedding, I figured now would be the perfect time to show off both!

First things first: I have to show off Isabel's beautiful thank you cards! You can see a photo of one of the cards and their envelopes together at the top of this post. Here is a closer photo of just the card, by itself:

As Isabel and Luis have both english and spanish-speaking friends and family members who attended their wedding, Isabel created a bilingual design for her thank you cards. I love the challenge of designing printed pieces in multiple languages, but don't get the opportunity to do it very often. All of Isabel and Luis' stationery has been bilingual English and Spanish and I think she's done an excellent job throughout, incorporating all of her wording in both languages without making her designs feel cluttered. Her thank you cards feature a large compass rose in the center of the A2 size card with the names of a variety of cities all over the world from where Isabel and Luis' guests journeyed from to celebrate their wedding. The text at the top and bottom reads "Thank you for coming from near and far to celebrate with us". Both the compass rose and all of the text were printed in chocolate brown ink on Crane Lettra 100% cotton ecru paper. We also blind-embossed an antique map of the world behind the compass. It's a little bit difficult to see in the large photo, but here is a close-up photo so you can see it better:

Isn't that cool?!? For her envelopes, Isabel chose a chocolate brown A2 size envelope from Waste Not Paper and had us letterpress print on both the flap and front in copper metallic ink.

I typically don't print on envelopes with this much ink coverage, but the results were amazing! Here are a couple of detail photos so you can see the front and back flap of the envelope a little better:

Aren't those amazing?!? I love how Isabel stuck with very romantic, classic images throughout all of the pieces in her wedding stationery suite! As I briefly mentioned above, printing these envelopes were no small feat, due to the large amount of ink coverage. Because I hadn't had a set-up in a while for envelopes that was this complex, I took a few photos so that my fellow printers (and anyone else who's curious) could check out the make-ready (fancy printer's term for set-up) for printing these envelopes. It was pretty crazy!

In all three of these photos you can see where the printing plate is sitting below the ink disk. To make the image have an even and clear impression on the envelope I had to cut out the parts of the envelope on an extra one that were causing the printing to be uneven and the tape this cut-up envelope on top of my tympan, but under some acetate to create an even, but smooth surface from which to feed the envelopes to. I used rubber bands to create a frisket to help pull each envelope away from the heavily-inked plate after the print was made so that the envelopes didn't stick and get caught and smashed by the press. You can see the rubber bands in the photo above. It was pretty crazy, but I always love a challenge!

Isabel's thank you cards came out beautifully and I've been very excited to show them off to you along with the rest of her stationery! Which brings me to something else that's really exciting! Every now and again a bride will e-mail me photos of their actual wedding. After working with so many couples, having so many different types of weddings, all over the world, I've found that it's really fun and exciting when I receive an e-mail from a couple with photos of their celebration. Isabel and Luis' wedding was no exception to this, and honestly, I was super-excited to see photos of a wedding in Spain!

I'm not entirely sure about many of the details of their wedding, but I love how absolutely gorgeous and happy both Isabel and Luis look in all of them. I also love that many of the photos Isabel sent are in black and white. I think it adds just one more touch of classic romance, to an already very traditional, classic and romantic-looking celebration.

Aren't the couple and the church where they got married, absolutely beautiful? The above photo almost looks like an antique image to me. It's almost difficult to believe it was taken on May twenty-third of this year. So beautiful!

I love how happy they look in the two photos above and I love it that you can see the rice being thrown in the second one!

Aren't they just so romantic and wonderful? I feel so so sappy, but it totally made my heart flutter just a little bit when I looked at them the first time. Thanks so much Isabel and Luis for hiring me to be a little part of your special day, and thank you for sharing your gorgeous photos with me, and for letting me share them with the world!

Congratulations!

Become a Fan of Twin Ravens Press on Facebook!

Twin Ravens Press now has a Facebook page! Log-in to Facebook and become a fan to get updates on what I'm up to in the studio, and to hear about special sales on greeting cards, new card designs and potentially deals on custom printing in the near future!

Robot with Heart Coasters Featured on Etsy!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I must apologize. I have been a bad blogger. You haven't seen or heard anything new on this blog in almost two whole weeks! Tragic, I know... It's not that I haven't been up to stuff, believe me, it's still been rather busy. I don't even have any decent excuses for the lack of blogging this time, but anyway, I'm back, and I've got all kinds of neat stuff to show you, starting with this:

I got a lovely e-mail yesterday from Emily of Sparrownestknits on Etsy about a treasury she created featuring our brand-new robot with heart coasters. The coasters feature our same robot from the classic card design I've been doing for a while now, but in coaster form. If you haven't seen them yet, check them out here. Also, be sure to check out the treasury link above to see Emily's other awesome robot picks and the link to her shop where she sells some gorgeous knitted scarves, hats and other items! Thanks so much Emily! You rock!

200 on Etsy

I hope everybody out there had a wonderful and long Labor Day weekend! It's been a pretty busy "Monday" around here getting back from it, and I still have lots of gorgeous recently completed or in-the-works things to show you, but in the meantime, Twin Ravens Press hit a small milestone on Etsy today. Our etsy shop made it's 200th online greeting card sale! Check it out:

The 200th sale was one of our famous love-inspired robots. This is one of my oldest greeting card designs, which makes it exciting that it was #200. If you haven't seen it yet, you can, here. Cheers!