You are invited to a party! We are loving our machines with plenty of oil and our guests with plenty of other social lubrications. Join us as we celebrate our new office and press room with an open house on Friday, February 11th begining at 4pm. Come and see some letterpress action and talk shop. We’ll have a limited edition project on press as free gift to party guests. Hope to see you here soon.

You can get the podcast on itunes here.

For their visit, we had a little project on press called “The Pressroom Creed” – printing on 220lb Lettra and will be available soon for sale on our site. It is an adaptation of the better known Rifleman’s Creed, but for letterpress printers. Seriously, everyone in our pressroom must memorize this and we say it together each morning.

Production work will continue during the move, but our office life will be turned on it’s ear. Our access to email and our ability to respond to estimate requests during the week of July 6-12th will be limited. We will begin responding to custom printing requests July 13th. If you need an estimate turned more quickly than this please let us know the timing need in your request. If you can get in touch with us this week – even better.

This is part two showing the production of business cards on our Heidelberg Windmill. Be sure and see Part 1 showing the finished cards.

We start with a high resolution film negative. The negative is used to expose the plastic plates. The plates are attached to an aluminum base and placed into the press. The press uses air suction to pick up a sheet of paper on the left side and deliver it into the press for printing. The printed sheets are automatically stacked in the delivery pile on the right side of the press. The press prints only one color at a time. Each addition color is another pass through the press, blind impression is another separate pass as well. Letterpress is labor intensive printing, but oh so worth it.

Check out some more of the process below. See the image labels for a brief description.