Lunalux letterpress stationery » floral

Stationery Saturday: cheerful spring icons

Jenni — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:43:35 +0000

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

Jenni — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:50:18 +0000

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

Jenni — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:21:15 +0000

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

Jenni — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:29:23 +0000

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

Jenni — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:20:49 +0000

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

Jenni — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:34:49 +0000

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

Jenni — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:07:22 +0000

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.

Scratch pad fever

Jenni — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:26:46 +0000

When we have interesting scrap paper and some free time in our production schedule, we love to make scratch pads to sell in the studio store; it gives us a low-pressure opportunity to make something cool, and it’s nice to have a constantly rotating selection of pads for sale in the store. In recent weeks, we’ve gone a bit overboard in this department, so we have a ton of great new designs for sale. My favorite was created by John, who used cool vibrant ink colors for overlapping floral silhouettes, printed on bright white textured card stock. These pads are bigger and more elaborate than most of our other designs, so we’re selling them for the top-shelf price of $6.

We’ve also got pads featuring images of bicycles, bunnies, Mexican wrestlers, sunflowers, golf balls, owls and our fine neighbor to the north, Canada! Most recently we printed the state of Minnesota in three colors (red, blue and dark charcoal) on light gray felt-finish card stock. These we’re selling individually for $4 each, or in bundles of three pads (one of each color) tied with a satiny bow for $12 – we think the set makes an excellent present!

All of our pads are letterpress-printed on high-quality papers here in our Loring Park studio, and for sale exclusively in our store for $3-$6 each. They’re so nice and so inexpensive, once you try a Lunalux Deluxe Scratch Pad, you’ll never settle for anything less. Have we infected you with scratch pad fever yet? The only cure is for you to come to our shop and buy some pads. Check out our store page for hours and directions, or read more about recent store news in the blog archives.

Wildflower notes for Stationery Saturday

Jenni — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:21:23 +0000

We’re looking forward to a fun day at the Lunalux studio store tomorrow. Not only do we still have many great deals on our sale table (Moleskines! Canvas totes! Fancy pens! Great greeting cards!), but we’re also hosting Stationery Saturday! John printed a popular wildflower graphic on folded notecards for me yesterday, in pretty yellow ink. All day we’ll be customizing these cards for our customers, using dark gray ink and chubby wood type (lower-case letters only). 10 personalized notes letterpress-printed while you wait, with 10 matching yellow envelopes, for only $29 – how cool is that?!? You’ll find all the details on our Stationery Saturday page. And don’t forget, anyone who spends $25 on regular or sale-priced merchandise will receive a free goodie bag valued at $25!

Design + Print: dandelion letterpress stationery

Jenni — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:28:19 +0000

When Joyann, a freelance fashion/style editor from NYC, searched for business card designers on the internet, she found Lunalux. I was tickled that someone from such a high-fashion industry was drawn to our work (“I love your designs!” she exclaimed in an introductory e-mail), and excited to work with someone who has a serious sense of style. I asked intern Katie to channel her East Coast Fashionista (she spent a few months in New York interning at Harper’s Magazine) and assemble a package of samples to send to our potential new client. She picked some pieces of work that I was very proud of, and others that I would not have selected. But I trusted her experience and sent the samples off for consideration.

Well, good thing Katie helped – Joyann loved a dandelion motif that I never would have thought to include in the sample selection (click here to view the wedding invitations in which we first used this graphic). She also found some paper, ink and typeface examples that suited her. Through phone calls and e-mails we refined the design and created just what Joyann wanted: a lovely suite of business cards, notecards and envelopes, all letterpress-printed on 100% cotton papers in blue and black inks. Because the cards would be used primarily for work, it was important that everything look very professional. But since she’s a freelancer, her printed collateral could show off her personality, too. Click on the above image for a larger view of the finished product.

We used super-soft Lettra 110# cover for her business cards, while the A6 notecards are on a smoother 134# cover (same color, better texture for hand-written notes). Most importantly, we got the cards to her just in time for a business trip to The Other Coast. Interested in learning more about our custom-designed business and personal stationery? Check out the custom page of our website, or read about other recent projects in our blog.