To reward the customers who visit our Loring Park store on a regular basis, we’re pleased to introduce the Lunalux Card Club. Customers who purchase 10 individual greeting cards at regular price will be treated to a greeting card on the house! To facilitate the program, we’ve created lovely letterpress-printed punch cards. We just printed these cards this week, and we think they’re way cooler than any other customer reward card we’ve seen. They’re printed in black ink on 100% cotton card stock, so they look and feel remarkable. Buy a card, we punch a number. Get to 10, the next card is free. Whee! And if you’re hesitant about taking on extra wallet clutter, no worries – there’s a place on the back for your name, and we’re happy to store your punch card here at the shop. The Lunalux studio store is open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11a.m.-6p.m. (click here for directions). Next time you visit, be sure to ask to join the Card Club! For your first purchase, we suggest you browse our fresh selection of Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and graduation cards. In the mean time, you might enjoy browsing our blog archive to read more about what’s new at our charming little shoppe.

In honor of Earth Day, we’re highlighting our most recently printed “green” wedding invitation. We first worked with this couple months ago when we created passport-style save-the-dates to notify guests of their Canadian wedding ceremony and Minnesotan reception (check out this post from last September for a picture, and to read more). The over-the-top announcements were a big hit, but Leah and Jeanie wanted a more traditional, uncomplicated package for the invitations themselves. We letterpress-printed invites and RSVP cards in green and brown ink on French Paper’s cream chordtone cover, a 100% recycled heavily textured stock. The brown-bag kraft envelopes are 100% recycled too. We also printed notecards with just the tree icon, for the couple to use as thank-you notes and social stationery post-nuptials (piggy-backing the thank-you cards in this way minimized the amount of materials used for the project, and saved the couple a bit of dough). The gritty, organic materials were a perfect fit for this earthy design, and felt like a good match for these down-to-earth brides-to-be.

Do you love these invites almost as much as you love the planet? Give us a call, we’d love to print some for you! As with all of our invitation packages, this design can be customized to suit your needs. Click here to read more about our custom wedding stationery, or browse the blog archives to see other invitations suites we’ve created.

We recently received our first shipments of greeting cards from  a couple of newish letterpress stationers: Spark and Old Tom Foolery. We’re particularly excited to have Spark’s Henry cards in the house, featuring adorable wiener dog illustrations. Henry wishes you happy birthday! Girl Henry marries Boy Henry! Henry has a cone on his head and a bandaid on his butt! All super cute. They’re perfectly printed (and we mean that – we’re pretty picky) on lush cotton card stock. Even the envelopes are yummy; custom letterpress-printed and converted A2s feature more Henry goodness, including a doggy pattern flooding the flap, and a nice frame on the front for addressing.

Spark’s Bittersweet Ink series is also a welcome addition to the Lunalux card wall. These petite cards boast snarky greetings framed by graphic borders. With gothic lettering printed in the blackest of black ink on heavily textured stock (Gilbert’s Esse cover?) they look a little gritty and old-timey. But the modern compositions, cheeky sentiments and candy-colored 4bar envelopes (Neenah’s Eames furniture-finish) make for fresh, funny, cards. And we love the unusual detail that the landscape-oriented cards open on the short edge, rather than the more common top edge. It’s clear that the folks at Spark pay attention to the little details.

Old Tom Foolery’s work is similarly unsentimental. These footnote-inspired cards feature traditional greetings (“Happy Birthday!” “To the Bride and Groom”) with a little asterisk kick in the pants. Our favorite reads “Mazel Tov.* (*that’s Hebrew for Hell Yeah!)” They’re letterpress-printed on toothy cotton cover, and paired with envelopes to compliment the ink color. These and the Bittersweet Ink cards are happy companions to the Lunalux Irreverant series (Holy Shit! Congratu-fucking-lations! – click here for pictures and more info). All these cards are avialable now for your purchasing pleasure in the Lunalux studio store.

Check out the InStyle Weddings blog, styleschool.com. Associate editor Jeanine Edwards recently launched a new feature called Paper Break – “a biweekly Q&A with paperie types.” Lunalux owner Jenni Undis dispenses wedding stationery wisdom in the April 9 installment of the column. You can read all about it at styleschool.instyleweddings.com.

Lunalux has been an avid contributer to Strathmore’s quarterly design contest since it started a couple of years ago. In fact we have written here about some of the honors we’ve received in the competition. So we were thrilled to be invited to design and print this quarter’s call-for-entry postcards. The composition had to focus on the paper company’s recently redesigned thistle logo, which we used as a repetative pattern. The card was letterpress-printed in aqua and cool gray ink on Strathmore’s 130# bright white wove-finish cover bristol, one of our go-to stocks for wedding invitations and personal stationery (we love this paper’s subtle texture). We printed 2,500 postcards – a substantial run by Lunalux standards. You can read more about our postcard production process by visiting Strathmore’s very interesting new blog, feltandwire.com.

Along with the postcard, we were asked to create thankyou notes to be distributed as prizes for creatives who enter said design contest. Because we’ve been using Strathmore papers for many of our wholesale products for years, we already had several cards on hand that would have been suitable. But we decided to make something new for the occasion. Well, new-ish. This design is a modification of a card that we printed last December, first as a postcard for our store mailing list (that’s the burgundy card shown in the Lunalux story on feltandwire.com), then as a folded notecard that we mailed to clients as a Happy New Year greeting. We loved the folded card so much, we added it to our wholesale line – and we plan to do the same with this new variation. Like the Strathmore postcard, this folded note was letterpress-printed in aqua and cool gray, on bright white wove-finish cover (we used the 88# cover for this one, though). Locals can purchase these lovelies at the Lunalux studio store, and we look forward to selling them to letter writers across the counrty when we debut our new online store later this spring.