Sara Janssen, who I worked with back in the day at Carmichael Lynch Thorburn (now The Thorburn Group), designed them beautifully. The detail of the hummingbirds and the classic type makes this an elegant set of wedding stationery indeed. Hummingbirds are such an exquisite little bird of great symbolism, we love the copy they put on the table number card. The color is a dark purple ink printed on Gruppo Cordenons Canaletto 111lbC. We’ve been specifying this sheet for some weddings as a cost savings alternate to Pearl White Crane Lettra. It has a more pronounced texture but only a 20% cotton content. It does not taste very good though.

This is a follow up to our post about affordable wedding invites. These invites were designed by the bride and groom Stephanie Mead and Doug Kohnen at Docent Creative. Doug did some beautiful illustrations that turned out stunning on press. We letterpress printed and trimmed the cards for them. They are dense black ink on Crane Lettra 110lb Pearl White, 100% cotton. They sent us some photos of how they assembled everything with a tag and ribbon. They even silk screened their own envelopes. So, how do you get a gorgeous wedding invitation for a reasonable price?

We’ve been asked about providing templates for wedding invite press sheets. We’ve shown some images below as an example of  how this invite template was laid out on the press sheet. But really, most any card size configuration can work. This is a 10 x 13 size press sheet, very common to our press room. That size represents great economy as we trim those sheets from even larger parent size sheets. When more cards are required in an invitation set, we can move to a larger press sheet. The point of talking about press sheets is to help people understand the process. When we can print everything together, that saves money. Since letterpress prints only one color at a time, more colors in a design mean more time on press, which means more money. The more we can print at a time, the better the deal.

We typically do not have clients send their projects to us as a press sheet layout, just your production ready design files are perfect. We lay out our own press sheets based on the pieces being printed, so we are sure it will print well on our presses.

So how much does it cost? The short answer is that every invite is different based on the needs of the couple. All of our letterpress work is custom. Prices for a job will vary based on the paper, quantity and number of colors. But as an example we can say that a project like this one color, single sided invite costs  $500 to $600 dollars based on 100-150 quantity. That is among the most reasonable of prices we have seen for this amount of letterpress. This design was supplied to us by the bride and groom. However, if design services are needed, we can do custom design work as well for additional cost.

NOTE: We do not have a price list. All projects are estimated based on the custom needs of our clients. If you need a price for your project please contact us. If you are on a budget, tell us what you have to work with. It helps us to know what a client wants to spend to put together a set of production specifications that will make the project possible to letterpress. (less expensive paper, size and number of cards, etc.) We do have a $300 project minimum.

For an estimate mail us at: numbers_at_studioonfire_dot_com

The column layout using justified type accents information and creates heirarchy in a way unique to wedding invitations. The invite set was letterpress printed in our studio with black and silver ink on a single press sheet to keep costs reasonable. (just the little dotted lines of hearts are in silver) The whole invitation set uses Crane Lettra 110lb Pearl White cotton paper stock with matching envelopes. The program card was printed separately closer to the wedding date. It is a very long and narrow card format with printing on each side to handle all the program information. All in all, simple type, done up proper.