0

Cart

A few months ago, our great friends from France, Florent and Emmanuelle, came over to print their wedding invites with us. They also brought some home-made Tartiflette, which is the best thing to come out of the Alps in all history – Ā Reblechon cheese, potatoes & Lardons (thick bacon), Heaven.

Anyway, I digress. I’ll stop drooling and talk about the printing. We had 200 invites to print, and had a stack of Lettra ready to go, which had taken Manue two days to cut by hand – it was before I had my stack cutter. We had our polymer plates delivered from Centurion Graphics and the little Adana was readied, inked and oiled…

IMG_4664

 

I was yet to get the Peerless press up and running and I wasn’t comfortable having other people use the large platen for safety reasons so we opted to use the Adana for this job. It’s easy to use and once set up we got printing at quite a pace. Printing this many pieces on a hand press is hard work, but we had four people taking turns to share the workload. It was really nice for our friends to actually take part in printing their own invites. Florent liked it so much, we had to keep stopping every now and again for him to take photos to show his family. Lots of laughs were had – even when we messed up some of the impressions, which meant more cutting for Emmanuelle.

It’s amazing how you can get such a nice print from the Adana. There is a requirement to work within the limitations of the machine, especially when printing what was quite a large coverage. We weren’t expecting to get a huge impression and were simply aiming for a good, even print. It would have been possible to get a deep impression on the Adana by cutting the plate into three pieces and reducing the print area per pull, but these invites had to be in France in four days so we decided against it.

DSC_3510

IMG_4765

One thing I did realise is the need for a drying rack. We had invites and envelopes all over the house. One more thing for the shopping list!

During the evening I thought it would be a nice idea to do a stop motion video of the whole process, dissected by a dinner break with some gorgeous wine and tartiflette (I can’t stop talking about tartiflette). Have a look at the video below for the end result.

All in all, we had a great time, the invites and envelopes were all printed by the end of the night, and I think our friends are now hooked on letterpress printing. If anything I can get them to come help me print in the future. All we need to do now is book the ferry for their wedding. Can’t wait!

Join the discussion One Comment

Leave a Reply