Stationery Saturday: blind-embossed notecards

Stationery Saturday is back in 2011. This weekend, Saturday February 5, we’re printing without ink on luscious cotton card stock to create a stunning, subtle effect. We’ll be working with bold sans serif lead letters on our hand-cranked Vandercook proof press, so adventurous customers can try their hand at printing. We’ll have 5-by-7-inch Lettra cards in three shades of white, and a rainbow of colorful envelopes to choose from. The name or phrase of your choice, up to 15 characters, will be letterpress-printed on ten cards for just $29.00. You can watch as we set the type and crank out the cards (and ask all the silly questions you want along the way), shop and nosh on home-made cookies while we do the printing, or place your order and make arrangements to pick up your finished cards at a later date.

Seeing as it’s just a week before Valentine’s day, we think this makes a fantastic gift for your sweetheart. And it’s such a good deal, you will probably want to pick up a set for yourself as well.

You can read more about our monthly personalized-stationery-letterpress-printed-while-you-wait events, including other upcoming dates, on the Stationery Saturday page. If you want to spread the word about this unique event, you can invite your friends via the event listing we’ve created on the Lunalux Facebook page. And if you’re itching to get your paws on some of these cards but can’t make it to our Minneapolis studio this Saturday, don’t fret – you can order online through the Lunalux shop at feltandwireshop.com.

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.

In-house calligrapher, at your service

Helen & Erik live on the east coast, but they discovered Lunalux while visiting Erik’s family in Minneapolis. Erik gets credit for designing their wedding invitation suite, including the fantastic tree illustration. I suggested a few minor edits to the text and the layout, but my main contribution was calligraphy on the invitations and envelopes. The hand-written names are letterpress-printed along with the rest of the invitation text; I wrote the bride and groom’s names over and over again, until each curve was just right, then scanned the best versions and dropped them into the layout like a graphic. The full set – wedding invitation, rehearsal dinner invitation & response card – was letterpress-printed in black ink on pearl white 100% cotton Lettra 110# cover, with matching invitation and response envelopes. When all the work of printing and trimming was finished, I set to the hefty task of hand-addressing the envelopes too, so the mailing address matches the text on the invitations themselves.

I have worked at my penmanship for many years, so it’s a great honor for me to share it with my clients. I have addressed a few wedding invitations in my time, and have occasionally incorporated my handwriting into greeting card designs, but this is the first time that my lettering has been letterpress-printed on an invitation. And it was such a thrill to see the finished product! Since this project was completed a few months ago, I have taken on a few other exciting hand-lettering projects – I look forward to featuring them here in our blog in the coming weeks.

Curious about our letterpress-printed wedding stationery? Click here to read more about our design and printing services. You might also enjoy browsing through our blog archives, where we’ve featured many of our favorite wedding projects.

Design + Print: edged business cards

Photographer Josh Hackney came to Lunlaux with an existing logo for his business, and asked us to develop a memorable tag/business card. We agreed right away that the composition should be very simple, and the wow factor would come from the use of  luxurious materials. So we printed these jumbo cards (they’re 2.5×3.5 inches, instead of the standard 2×3.5 inch business card format) on super-thick 220# Lettra cotton cover. The perfect shade of pale blue-green ink (we decided to call it Sea Glass) looks dreamy on the slightly textured bright white stock. The card is so thick that when you hold it in your hand, you can’t help but really pay attention, to turn it over and study the way the type bites into the paper. It’s in that moment that the best detail catches your eye: painted edges. We’ve only recently started to offer edging service, and this is our favorite deployment of the process yet. Edging works best on the thickest of stocks, where you can really see the color. The cards were gorgeous before we did the edging; the last little touch of color really outs it over the edge though! We drilled tiny holes in most of the cards, so they could be attached to his new bags with lovely grosgrain ribbon, but some were left intact to be used as business cards. The business stationery package was rounded out with correspondence cards and coordinating envelopes.

Are you considering adding a little letterpress to your business collateral collection? You can read more abut our design and letterpress services for business stationery in the custom section of our website. You can also browse our blog archives to read about other business stationery projects we’ve worked on in the past.

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

 

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