Stationery Saturday: cheerful spring icons

For the April 2 installment of Stationery Saturday, we’re offering three colorful spring designs. The yellow daisy, blue cubes and pink asters have been letterpress-printed on bright white 5×7-inch flats. We’ll personalize your favorite with the name or phrase of your choice, using modern sans serif lead letters and jet black ink. For the first time, we’re also offering an optional upgrade: lined envelopes! The regular price of $29.00 for 10 cards includes pure white square-flap A7 envelopes, but we also have a limited supply of envelopes lined with coordinating tissue, which are available for an extra $1.00 per envelope. The press will be up and running from 11a.m. to 6p.m., so we hope you’ll stop by for a little letterpress action! We’ll have coffee and homemade cookies for all visitors, and if the weathermen are right about it being sunny and 50, we hope to have the front door propped open too! We think it’s going to be a fabulous day.

If you’re loving these cards but can’t get here for our Saturday print fest, don’t sweat it! You can order this month’s Stationery Saturday designs online through the Lunalux storefront at feltandwireshop.com.

Check the Stationery Saturday page for more information about this and future print-while-you-wait events. We’re created a listing for this event on facebook too – RSVP there if you like, and invite your paper-loving besties to join us too!

Design + Print: Orange wedding invitations

This project wrapped up months ago. But in honor of the spectacular fall weather we’re enjoying here in Minnesota (in November?!?!), this autumnal-colored wedding invitation gets the spotlight today. Nicole & Mike came to Lunalux over the summer in search of invitations for their September wedding at the University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum. After a browse through our sample books, they zeroed in on a very graphic invitation suite we created a few years ago; they loved the design but wanted to update the color scheme and explore different typeface options. Considering their plans to marry in a modern art museum, the bold color choice was no surprise: orange and taupe on pearl white cards. The type was a harder nut to crack; we must have looked at their names in two dozen different fonts, ranging from formal script to chunky slab-serifs. This calligraphy-inspired lettering beat them all. The text and a flowering branch is printed in bright orange, over a taupe silhouette of that same branch. The 6.25-inch-square invitations and matching RSVP postcards and thank-you flats were all printed on 100% cotton Lettra cover, and paired with a vibrant orange envelopes. We’re especially pleased with the RSVP card, and the way the branch silhouette separates the mailing address from the rest of the card.

It’s a great pleasure for us to create unique custom wedding stationery, weather that means modifying an invitation we’ve already printed, or dreaming up something new. It’s a treat to help couples imagine the invitation of their dreams, and then bring it into being for them! You can read more about other custom wedding invitations we’ve created in our blog archive, or click on over to the custom wedding stationery page for general information about our process and pricing.

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.

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