Wedding + Letterpress = Madness

My best friend is getting married and she asked me to design her wedding invitations. Easy right?

Sure it will be easy, apart from I foolishly decided to create the invites on my letterpress. Lets just ignore the fact I have very little experience with my letterpress apart from one small run comprising of one colour. Setting up my press to perfectly align for three passes will be a dawdle! No, not a dawdle more like a marathon. Alignment wasn’t the only problem. There where lots of other little pitfalls along the way. Pitfalls like:

1. We didn’t buy enough stock!

2. The man at the ink warehouse sold me the wrong ink so I had to go back and swap it only to find out the new ink was three times more expensive!

3. I forgot to include the measurements for the crop marks when I was doing my calculations and as a result the plates where 5 mm too big for the bed of the printer. My brother had to built me new runners for the press to compensate.

All of this resulted in a lot of grrrs and arghs.

In the end though everything came together. I was really pleased with the final outcome of the invites. The lining up was near perfect (thanks to my brother), the colours where spot on and the embossing was sharp and clear.

Oh and my friend loved them, which I guess is the most important thing. Check out the full set of photos on my Flickr.