a quiet weekend

This is Henry:


Henry lives in a small printshop in Brooklyn that is stuffed full of 100 to 50 year old letterpress print machines. Henry and I had some quality time today while I learned how to print the same way they used to in the 1800s... pick out individual letters, load them into a chase, ink your press, and print the page one sheet at a time. It was slooow going, frustrating, tedious, and hard physical work, but totally worth learning. So now I'm qualified as a letter press printer in the shop and I can go in and print my own projects. Oh boy.



To get all philosophical, it has a lot of the same appeal as learning how to sew garments, doing something carefully by hand that's usually done in mass production these days. The prints are like 10000% more beautiful when you've spent the last hour setting the text and aligning your paper than when it just spits out of an ink jet printer. ;) I've seen this kind of printing demonstrated before but never done it myself, so I had no appreciation for the amount of effort it takes to print a carefully lined up block of text straight on a piece of paper using these old technologies.

To get all practical, hello letterpress wedding invites that I can now print myself at cost. I'm sure there will be some artsy fartsy projects produced, but there will also definitely be some wedding printing going down. ;)



This was work-by-hand weekend, apparently, because I also spent several hours sewing buttons, frogs, and trim onto Kate's little military jacket. Still coming along... I'm thinking right now about putting snaps under the frogs since they might be hard for her little hands to open & close easily.

Here we have the buttons (from Pacific Trim) down the front princess seam & one side of the frogs:



I'm still debating what to do on the collars and the sleeve cuffs, to add braid or buttons onto them.