Welcome Lucille to the family.

Hello everyone, 
We have new addition to the family. Lucille my new letterpress. My 8"x5" Adana letterpress all the way from France. It makes Lou Lou look like a toy. But both in working condition and old wireless printers. Mr.C. is slowly going lose his shed, as I still really want a C&P. 

Funny thing happened... In all the pictures of Lucille you don't see any rollers on the press. Yeap that's right. In my big clean up of the study, I must have thrown them out never to be seen again. So you could imagine my stress out when I had to do this job. Ahh! Mr.C my hero, my rock, my everything suggested that we "paint the ink on". Thanks darling, for that lightbulb moment. We can just hand roll the ink on with a brayer.

Plate supplied by the lovely people at http://www.the-distillery.com.au/ 

Then the fun started. Printing like a little team Mr.C and I and we got done 80 invites over two days. But what about drying? As you can probably tell Mr.C and I aren't masters of letterpress just really keen. We have 80 invites looking at us, saying we need to be mailed out. Ok, I may have had a Macgyver moment. And put them in over on a low heat for 20 min. DONE! 

Due to the wedding on being for a while out of repeat I don't want t post the finish invite. But there were smiles. 

♥ Rachel  

Little Lou Lou

There has been some development on the letterpress side of things. I have my 1st print run. I thought yeap why not just have a go? All smiles for a about 1hr.

This is nice the roller go over the ink plate then over the plate. And make a print. Now what? Me being a perfectionist, had to now work out how to get an impression. You would think this was easy? NOOOOOOOO. It has taken me 1 month to find an impression. I have no photos as yet as I'm not totally happy with the result. But I will never give up. I tried the knobs on the back. Did some googling and no that's not the done thing to do. Don't touch them. It's all to do with type height boxes or plates and the packing on the tyumen (the plate that the paper goes on).

I have some new paper coming this week so I can't wait to try it out. It's coming from America I hope it is worth the wait.

Other news... My Letterpress 8' x 5' Adana that I ordered from os is coming in 10 days. It's like the stork bringing a gift. I'll have to make room.

♥ Rachel

Playing with my Press

Hi,

I needed some help with my letterpress as I was swimming in circles creating paper piles on my kitchen table of less then impressive impressions. So I made contact with an old master letterpress printer Mr. B Wright. Sometimes you can find him printing away in the letterpress print shop at Bundoora Park. It is a great setup there. Type cases as below. Three beautiful machines all working. One C&P & two windmills. I just love it there!!

Mr B Wright kept saying to me that Letterpress printing is dying out. Ahhhh! No its not, so many people out there are wanting to learn the art of letterpress. But I have find this little gem. So I took little lou lou down to the shop and Mr B Wright had a go. It was really funny a master of letterpress using my little press after seeing him using a windmill at full force. So he got Lou lou working after applying A LOT of WD40. He said "the old girl was dry". The plate I made the type height wasn't right. I needed a lot of packing. Also he worked out the tyumen paper thickness. JOY!

My paper is coming from Holyoke paper YEAH. So I will be having fun over Easter printing away. I brought business cards and blank folded cards. That will be my Easter.

♥ Rachel

My Little Letterpress Lou Lou

Lou Lou came in the post late Feb. This little package. Ok so I didn't know what 5' x 3' inches looked like. I only worked in mm being a Graphic Designer. Anyway, Lou Lou came out of the box, placed on the bench. Looked at it for 30min and said to myself so what do I need to make a print. Paper, plates, ink and know how.

I have none of them.