This month’s Stationery Saturday is all about the wood. We dug into our collection of vintage type, and designed folded notecards that showcase the giant wood letters. We’ve pre-printed with decorative borders; visitors can choose a gray diamond stripe or a red starred stripe, on either smooth natural white or textured bright white cards. We’ll print the text of your choosing on two lines, in overlapping gray and goldenrod inks. We’ll work the cards through both our Heidelberg Windmill and Vandercook SP-15 to complete the design, making this one of the most complicated letterpress-to-go designs we’ve offered to date. 10 personalized cards plus 10 blank envelopes set you back just $34. Aren’t you lucky!?!

Why are we all in a twist over the type? Our sights are set on a volunteer weekend at Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum later this month. The museum, an invaluable resource for lovers of type, printing, and design, is on the move. They’re leaving their historical home and headed across town to a new old building, a project that requires both lots of cash and lots of helping hands. When Jenni and Morgan hit the road to Two Rivers, Wisconsin, they hope to have a stash of cash to cover their gas and motel, plus some extra to donate to the Wood Type Museum. So we’re asking you to help the Ladies of Lunalux help Hamilton! $10 from each set of notecards sold on Saturday will go to our travel fund, plus all proceeds from our limited-edition Two Rivers or Bust prints (featuring super-sized wood-type, hand-inked by Jenni, making each print a totally unique piece). Hamilton Wood Type is an amazing organization, and we’re eager lend a hand, so we hope you will be too!

To add to the excitement of the day we’ve invited Mary Bruno of Bruno Press to join us for the day. She’ll be selling her makes-you-LOL letterpress-printed greeting cards and t-shirts. She’s an incredible printer who hails from St. Joseph, MN – so we don’t get to see her as often as we’d like to! But we think you will love to meet her, so make a point to chat her up while you’re here, OK?

Stationery Saturday will run all day on March 9, 2013. All are invited to stop in between 11a.m. and 6p.m. The ordering personalized letterpress-printed cards is encouraged but not required! We have an excellent selection of stuff in the store right now, including cards for the upcoming holidays (Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day), new greeting cards from 1canoe2 on Mr. Boddington’s Studio, and sweet sparkley springy notebooks, stickers, cards, and sticky notes from Papaya! As always, we’ll have coffee and homemade cookies to share. Check our Stationery Saturday page for all the nitty gritty details.

If you aren’t able to visit Lunalux this weekend, but want to order come cards or donate to our Hamilton fund, call or shoot us an email and we’ll take care of you that way. We can be reached at 612-373-0526 of info (at) lunalux .com

For the April 6 Stationery Saturday, we’re personalizing animal-themed lettersheets. Crazy for cats? You’ll love the sleepy kitten. Fancy a fox? We got that covered. And there’s a wiener dog, a chickadee and a squirrel too! Pick your favorite critter (or two) and we’ll imprint a set for you with the name or phrase of your choice. There’s two 18-point lead fonts to choose from (Goudy Oldstyle or Clarendon Bold), and two ink colors too (brown or blue). All the animals have been pre-printed in taupe ink on 80# natural white wove-finish stationery sheets, measuring 5.5×8.5 inches. We think it’s a great size for a letter – not too big, not too small! You also get your choice of 5 different textured envelopes to accompany your custom stationery. And we’ll tie it all up with butchers twine and a letterpress-printed tag, making a ready-to-give gift or a handsome treasure to keep for yourself.

From 11 to 6, we’ll have the Heidelberg Windmill and the Vandercook proof press inked up and ready to go. Guests can watch as we set type and run the presses, or just nibble on homemade cookies and browse in our shop while we do the dirty work. Whatever you choose, we’ll send you home with a set of custom letterpress-printed stationery for just $29. Do make sure you peek at our Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards while you’re here, we have a bunch of great designs in stock and they’re going fast.

Special guest Dr. Christa of Caravan Vet will be here too! Caravan Vet is the metro’s first full-service mobile veterinary clinic. You won’t be able to miss her big poodle-emblazened rig, which will be parked out front. Christa was a part-time worker bee here at Lunalux when she was a student of veterinary medicine, so we are excited to have her on hand for one of our weekend specials. She’ll be giving tours of the clinic, and handing out gift bags (full of pet goodies from our other friends at Urbanimal) to everyone who takes part in the Stationery Saturday festivities. Be sure to visit the Caravan Vet website to learn more about their services.

Check our Stationery Saturday page for additional details about the event, and upcoming Stationery Saturday dates. We’ve created a listing for the event on our facebook page, and we hope you’ll tell all your friends about it! If you can’t participate in the fun this weekend, you’re not out of luck. You can order your personalized animal stationery through the Lunalux storefront at feltandwireshop.com

We knew we would offer Reggie an internship before his interview was even over. Like many we’d interviewed before, he brought samples of his work. He didn’t have any letterpress or printmaking experience, but demonstrated great attention to detail and a love of the hand-crafted when he showed us what he’d been making lately: paracord belts. Time-lapse photographic prints. And chain-mail neckties! All this in his spare time while he’s working on an undergrad degree in engineering! Chain-mail neckties?!? That’s so… unexpected. You’re hired! Since he started with us earlier this year, Reggie has been up to his elbows in type. We’ve set him on the long-term project of re-organizing and re-labeling our lead type collection, so he’s becoming very familiar with the layout of the California job case. He’s been helping out with lots of other odds and ends too, including researching materials and concepts for our Northern Spark project and fielding questions from guests who wander through our studio. As the type collection becomes more organized, he’s started to print full specimen sheets of some of our favorite fonts – specimen sheets on the merchandise bags we use in our store! We’re thrilled to send shoppers home with these intricate prints. And we’re thrilled that Reggie is helping make it happen!

Some of Reggie’s wares are for sale at his etsy shop, Reggie is White. Check it out!

Big news: Lunalux will be part of the 2012 Northern Spark festival on June 9 and 10. Though the dusk-til-dawn arts extravaganza is three months away, we’re already planning and scheming. As a new partner in the event, our first contribution is a limited-edition print to support the festival’s fund-raising efforts. “We all do better when we all do better” was printed with antique wood type on our hand-operated proof press, using black ink and hefty recycled chip board. And it’s available exclusively through the Northern Spark kickstarter campaign – pledge a donation of $40 or more to the festival, and one of these signed and numbered prints can be yours. We would love to see our friends and fans snatch all these up, and make the Northern Spark folks even more happy that they welcomed us into their fold! Pledges must be made by the end of March, so don’t delay. Proceeds from the fund-raising campaign will go to the independent artists whose projects will be included in the festivities.

Northern Spark is a free dusk-til-dawn art festival. This year the fun starts at sunset on Saturday June 9, and continues until sunrise the following morning. For these nine hours, Minneapolis will be bustling with performance, visual arts, films, and interactive media, at dozens of sites around the city both indoors and out (check the maps on the Northern Spark website for information about what’s happening where). We are just beside ourselves with excitement to be a partner in this amazing celebration! For our part, we will be open all night long, printing a series of nine posters inspired by the ideas of that night’s visitors. And we’ll be giving them away for free. Details of the event – the whole festival, and our Letterpress Lock-In – are still developing. But it’s already shaping up to be quite an evening, and we look forward to sharing our craft with this great big creative community. Stay tuned for more details!

Stationery Saturday on December 3 will feature two different projects. Personalized photo cards will be running on the Heidelberg Windmill, while the Vandercook cranks out Americana buckslips. Whichever you choose, you’ll go home with a unique set of cards, printed just for you. First up: Holiday Photo Cards! We’ve created three different designs, pre-printed with a seasonal greeting and a decorative border. Choose from the cherry red Merry Christmas, aqua Happy New Year, or lime green December Whatever. All cards measure 5×7 inches, are letterpress-printed on shimmery bright white card stock, and have room for a horizontal photo. The press will be inked up with jet-black ink, and we’ll print your family name or other brief phrase along the bottom. All you have to do is slap a snapshot on there when you get home, are they’re ready for the USPS. And to answer your question, we recommend a glue stick. The photo cards include matching white envelopes, but you can upgrade to even fancier lined envelopes for an additional $1 per piece. These are gonna knock the socks off everyone on your mailing list!

We’re also revisiting one of our favorite Stationery Saturday projects from this past year: Americana Buckslips! We created this suite of four designs over the summer, but we think they look pretty good this time of year too. You choose your favorite motif: patriotic bunting, arm & hammer, stars & stripes, or time flies. The name or phrase of your choice will be printed in black ink using 24-point Huxley Vertical, a slender & elegant font, on the hand-cranked proof press. You can even try operating the press yourself if you like! Cards measure approximately 4 by 9 inches, and will be paired with your choice of parchment-style open-end envelopes. We’ll tie a letterpress-printed tag to the package using lovely baker’s twine, and the set is ready for gifting (or hoarding).

While we try to change things up a bit each time we host a new Stationery Saturday event, some things remain the same. The presses run all day, from 11a.m. to 6p.m. We’ll have homemade baked goods and fresh coffee to nourish the body, and lots of good cheer to nourish the soul! Quantities are limited, and guests are served on a first-come-first-served basis. Cost is $29 for a set of 10 cards with plain envelopes (additional cards with the same imprint are available for $2.00 each). Visit our Stationery Saturday page for more details. We’ve even created an event listing on the Lunalux facebook page, if you’d like to R.S.V.P. and/or invite your pals to come along. Give us a jingle at 612-373-0526 if you have any questions.