Sunday, February 28, 2010
NEW! Launch of our newest kit
For the last 2 months, Carrie and I have been working on a monumental project. Actually, it's a teeny tiny project in size, but was a mammoth undertaking.
It's a origami house set. It's a paperkraft letterpress diorama small town you build it kit. We need to work on our "Elevator Pitch". It's a kit that comes with 2 sheets--one for the background and one with lots of things to cut out and assemble. Specifically, 3 houses, 7 trees, and 2 background corners to make it stable.
There's so much work that has gone into this that it's hard to know where to start. I hope to post up some process notes here later in the week. Let's just summarize by saying it started with a business meeting on a frosty afternoon, included several drawing/cutting/folding sessions. Then came a weekend marathon of printing 4 colors on each of the 2 sheets.
Here's the background. We drew this first, and printed it first, before we were totally skilled at the registration process on our press.
Here's a house from Carrie's neighborhood. It's from the cut-apart sheet, and as you can see, the registration is pretty flippin' awesome.
Looks good on a mantel, right? You can get yours right here!
And this is only the beginning. We've already been plotting/planning for the next kit. All I can say is "mooooooooo".
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Fancy-pants letterpress wedding invitations
Carrie and I got a call from Ginger at Serendipity-Beyond Design 2 weeks ago. She was desperate for someone to letterpress print these tres-elegant invitations she had designed. So we obliged, we ordered the most expensive 50 sheets of paper known to man and proceeded to print.
That Lettra paper by Crane is simply amazing. I ordered the 220lb, which surprised me by being almost as thick as matboard. It's sturdy. When it was on the press, it took them most amazing level of impression. Carrie and I were just blown away, and the client is super happy as well.
As we were printing these, a couple of Carrie's friends came out to the barn to talk about printing their invites in exchange for some web design help. This is a great deal for all parties involved, and we'll be working on a new 1canoe2 website very soon! (The current one just forwards to our etsy shop).
Labels: chandler price 10x15, letterpress
Monday, February 15, 2010
A new letterpress project...and a guy at the press!
Saturday and today Carrie and I have been up at the barn printing. We have a super fun and super challenging new project in the works. Like a project so big that it has taken up most of the time that I could have spent blogging. Yeah, that's it. I haven't been blogging cause I've been scheming. And baking these delicious strawberry cupcakes. And working overtime at my real job, and etc. etc. etc.
This mystery project involves 8 print runs of 400 prints. It's huge, but not as huge as the 26 runs it took us to do the calendar. (Which we only have 3 out of 300 left of! Amazing that we've come so very close to selling out!!) Carrie and I split up the drawing responsibilities, and there was a fair amount of logic involved, so 2 heads were better than one.
You may not be able to tell from these photos, but it's the beginning of something pretty big and awesome. It's going to be an interactive kit! People will buy them, and the put them together. 
Heres the background of the kit, before we put the brown ink on there. We hope to finish printing these today, but it will still be a week or two before they're in the shop because we have to do some other stuff like figure out packaging, photograph them well, and write the assembly instructions.
Carrie's brother Dustin is in school right now for Graphic Design, and he wants to learn the press, so he came over and printed some thank you cards for his work. I'm excited about having someone else know how to run the press, but Carrie and I were overly anxious that he was going to get his hand smashed!
I'm off to the barn now. I'll post some more photos of progress. If you're lucky.
Labels: chandler price 10x15, letterpress
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Winter on the Prairie
Carrie and I met at the barn thinking we would print our newest top secret project on this frosty winter morning. She came in and said "I'm going out to take pictures. Be right back."
Well, I couldn't be left behind, so we struck out in her Jeep on the dirt roads around the farm. It had been a foggy, but freezing cold, morning, so the fog had frozen on any solid surface. Beautiful! None of these photos was even photoshopped (okay, I sharpened a little. My camera is full of dust from harvest, and doesn't take the most sharp photos. Need to get it cleaned.)
Monday, February 08, 2010
A little Philanthropic project
A couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail from the hilarious and lovely Julie from Dinner with Julie.
She is an amazing woman with an equally awesome food blog. And she decided to take on a monster project: a cookbook to benefit earthquake victims in Haiti.
What this has to do with me is this: I designed the cover! Julie found my recipe card box on Etsy and sent me a convo about using the image. With a little tweaking, and a little calligraphy, and a few different versions, the cover was done, and the real work of finding recipes and designing the cover was in the hands of the lovely Julie and Cathryn.
I really did very little work in the grand scheme of things, but it was great to do what I could.
You can buy the book in hardcover or softcover format by clicking on this link.
Thanks to Julie for seeking me out! They've already sold more than 1000 copies, and raised over $20,000 for Haiti!
Monday, February 01, 2010
Letterpressing Fabric
Carrie's mom wanted us to try printing some fabric for future tea towels. She brought several samples of different fabrics up to the barn where we were printing.
And then she took them home and ran some scientific experiments on them.
These were all printed with our standard rubber based ink. And of course, we didn't have the motor going, we just hand cranked it. Still faster than inking by hand and printing!
The result: a lovely weathered look. I think the one with the iron first looks the brightest, but it all looks pretty cool! I think the best fabric was old tea towels and old sheets. We also tried corderoy and something else.
Now we'll have to think of a cool use for this fabric. Tea towels would be fun...anything else?
Thanks to Carrie's mom, Neda, for facilitating our experiment.
Labels: letterpress