An adventure in Letterpress-land

On Sunday we went to Sapling Press for our letterpress class.  Sapling Press is a local letterpress studio owned and operated by Lisa Krowinski.  She absolutely loves letterpress and has a wealth of experience to pass along.  And we were happy to be educated.  We learned how to letterpress by the age old classic of "setting type" and by photopolymer plates to make our own unique business cards.  For the business cards, we used a lettra (I think) paper and for the "setting type" quote we used plantable paper.  The plantable paper is made by Porridge Papers in Nebraska.  This stuff is really cool as we used the wildflower mix that contains actual wildflower seeds.  If you wet the paper and place it in some soil, it's supposed to actually grow flowers!  Needless to say, I saved every scrap of that paper to plant in my flower garden.  Now to all the details of our adventure...

(I brought sunflowers with me as I bought a bunch for wedding inspiration)

(This is Lisa's awesome vase, she got from one of her past letterpress apprentices)

Josh set his plate up first.  He wanted to do a two color print and setup sections of color on the rollers to get a variety.

His finished product looks like this...  well flipped around and the cut into fours of course!  =)

While Josh was cranking off his 200 cards, I began to set my type.  Yet I failed to document it...  =(  But here is what my end product looked like.  A quote by Albert Einstein.

Then while Josh set his type...I cranked off my cards in a dark brown!  He had a far shorter text to set so he documented me.  Apparently I make some terrible faces while concentrating.  =)

Unlike Josh, I didn't sit down and make a huge intense design as I should have.  Instead I decided to use some neat fonts and would stamp another color at a later time.  The stamps are still to come as I need to test the ability of the paper to absorb stamp ink.  I'm hoping it won't bleed much.  =)

Oh and here is Josh's finished quote!

All and all we had a great day bonding among the letterpress.  Lisa is such a sweety too!  We're looking forward to working in her studio on the final touches of our wedding invites... (cutting the inserts with one of her die cutters for the windmill press and using her massive guillotine cutter to cut the invites to size)  I'm looking forward to more artsy adventures with the future hubby.  Does anyone else find themselves wanting to do little classes with their mate as a way to bond and share a new experience?