Stationery Saturday: botanical silhouettes

This weekend, we’re personalizing pretty floral notecards for Stationery Saturday. We’ve pre-printed three botanical silhouette designs, and shoppers can select their favorite to be letterpress-printed with the name or phrase of their choice. We’ll wrap it up with ribbon and a classy Lunalux tag when we’re done, so it’s ready for gifting. The cost is just $29.00 for 10 cards and matching monarch envelopes. Could you ask for a better last-minute Mother’s Day present? The May 8 Stationery Saturday runs 11a.m.-6p.m. If you want to help us spread the word, you can use the Stationery Saturday event listing on the Lunalux Facebook page to invite your friends.

If you’re curious about the ins and outs of letterpress printing, Stationery Saturday is a great opportunity to see how the process works. We encourage visitors, wether they’re buying personalized notecards or not, to look over our shoulder and ask a bunch of questions as we set the lead type (that’s 18-point Caslon italic) and run the press (that’s a 10-by-15 Heidelberg Windmill). Or you can shop for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards while we print your order, it only takes 15 minutes or so. We’ll also have complimentary home-made cookies and fresh coffee on hand. For more details about Stationery Saturday, including a list of dates scheduled for the rest of the year, visit our Stationery Saturdays page.

Design + Print: mod floral invitation

This blustery winter weather is bringing me down. So I’ve been self-administering a little paper therapy, sifting through stacks of summery samples to lift my spirits. The most effective treatment thus far? Adrienne and Matthew’s vibrant fuchsia and tangerine wedding stationery. This was such a big project for us, I’m not sure why it didn’t make the blog before now. Were we too busy to write? Did we get distracted by pretty shiny objects? Hard to say! But I’m happy to share it with you now, mid-blizzard. We started working with the bride and groom last May. When they first visited Lunalux, they had specific ideas about what they wanted on their invitations (a funky little flower, and bold lettering with a strong emphasis on the date) but left the particulars of the design up to us. So it was great fun to experiment with different graphics, fonts and compositions. We explored a number of charming flowers, mostly culled from our vast library of clip art; so we were excited that they settled on this two-color image, a Lunlux original.

The wedding invitation, with its RSVP postcard and separate invitation for a pre-wedding cocktail reception, incorporates the mod flower and bold sans serif typography. Everything is letterpress-printed in bright pink and orangey-yellow inks on fluorescent white 100% cotton Lettra cover. The face of the stark white envelope was punched up with a little flower as well. The couple also took advantage of our hand-addressing services, and we mixed a custom orange ink for the project – such a great way to introduce another color into the mix without splurging on three-color printing! As the big day rolled near, we created programs for the ceremony, and placecards (again, hand-lettered wtih custom-mixed ink) for their outdoor reception.

You can read about other recent design projects in our blog archive, or click here to learn more about our custom-designed letterpress-printed wedding stationery

 

Design + Print: program covers

Have you noticed that the Lunalux blog has been kinda quiet lately? Me too. The main reason: I took several weeks off from work in October because my mom passed away. I come from a great big family, so we all huddled together for a while to take care of each other. There is, indeed, strength in numbers! We all pitched in to help plan the funeral, too. My task: creating programs for the service. Late one night, with one of my brothers peeking over my shoulder, I did my best to create a quiet, beautiful design for my least favorite thing ever. After staring at the computer screen for an hour or two, we discovered a lovely coincidence: the lily of the valley image includes 10 individual flowers, one for each of my mom’s 10 kids. The next afternoon, we (and by “we” I mean 2 brothers, 1 sister and myself – we’re all printers) letterpress-printed the covers with green and gray inks on pearl white 100% cotton Lettra cover; the interior pages were modest photocopies, because there wasn’t time to do every element so fancy. The programs were bound with green double-faced satin ribbon. Extra program covers are doing double-duty as thank-you notes.

It feels a little weird– wrong, even – to blog about something so personal and sad. But I think it would feel even more weird to skip over this monumental project like it never happened. So here it is. And now we’re moving on to other things.

Design + Print: earth-friendly wedding stationery

Leigh found Lunalux while searching the internet for wedding stationery that is both sophisticated and earth-friendly. She wanted invitations printed on 100% recycled paper but didn’t want them to look crafty. It was a fun challenge to work with a long-distance client who had very specific needs! Leigh found a shower invitation on our website that was almost perfect (click here to read our post about it from last February). She loved the composition, but knew that her botany-wise relatives would hassle her for using seasonally inaccurate dogwood blossoms on invitations for a August wedding. Because all Lunalux invitations are custom-designed to suit our individual clients, I assured her it would be no problem to replace the dogwood with a different floral graphic. I created an illustration of trumpet vines and sourced heavy 100% recycled card stock and envelopes from Michigan’s earth-loving French Paper, staying in touch with Leigh every step of the way via phone and email. The trumpet vines are incorporated into the invitation, RSVP cards, thank-you notes and place cards in deep, saturated shades of orange and turquoise. When Leigh received the finished product, she was thrilled – and we were thrilled by her enthusiastic thank-you. “The invitations are perfect! Now everyone will see that is IS possible to have environmentally friendly invitations that are elegant.”

Looking for unique wedding invitations? Click here to read more about our design and letterpress printing services.

Design + Print: gladiolus wedding invitations

We started working with Kate and Nick late last year, when they ordered a bunch Lunalux quote postcards to use as their save-the-date announcements. They got in touch with us again a few months later, excited to work on custom-designed invitations for their Big Day. With little direction aside from “We like glads,” we developed a few different concepts for the New York couple to consider. The winning design features a bunch of gladiolus in full bloom, exploding from the base of the invitation. The vibrant violet and green inks, letterpress-printed in natural white wove-finish card stock, are ideal for a summery wedding. The full set also included RSVP postcards and matching thank-you cards. Click on the photo above for a larger view.

The postcard they used for their save-the-dates featured a quote by poet James Tate. This design was originally created as a Valentine’s Day promotional postcard back in 2006, but all these years later, we still adore the lovey text unexpectedly paired with an image of an old rooster weather vain. The ruby red and cyan blue inks really pop off the bright white card stock. It’s gratifying to know that it was re-purposed as a wedding mailer, and think it was upstaged only by the invitations that followed!

Click here to read more about our graphic design and printing services. Or browse our blog archives to see other recent wedding stationery projects.

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