I've been to a couple weddings in the last few months - it seems that I'm suddenly at that age where everyone I know gets married at once. I'm done for this season, but there will be another round in the spring. Of course it's lovely to see my dear friends so happy and all, but the really great thing about these weddings is that I can offer to print the invitations as a wedding present - SCORE! This is wonderful because I don't have to actually buy them a silver fork or whatever, I get printing practice, and they get a very good deal on what might otherwise be extremely expensive invitations. I think it works out for everyone.
I printed the invitations for the most recent wedding we attended, which was appropriately fall themed. The wedding was in the Catskills, and Glendon and I decided to make a long weekend of it and enjoy the gorgeous autumn scenery and weather. Of course a weekend in the Catskills wouldn't be complete without a visit to Hobart, a mini book town, and the Bibliobarn. You MUST go if you're ever in the Catskills!
That's the whole front, laid out flat. Sorry, but no matter what I do, I cannot seem to get a nice image of this on the web. It looks great until I load it here. Damn you, limited photoshop skills.
Corin, the groom, designed these nature-themed invitations for their outdoor wedding, and I think they turned out really well. On the back we laser printed a hand-drawn map of the wedding area, and on the front is the letterpress printed invitation. Then we folded it (well, I think poor Corin got stuck with most of the folding) into a little instant book. Let me know if you want folding directions for something similar and I can email them.
We used polymer plates from Boxcar Press, which I printed on a Vandercook 4. It all went quite smoothly for my first big project with polymer (no, I didn't mention that to the happy couple - they're under enough stress already!). We ganged up the images to make the plate a little cheaper since they charge you per inch. Fiscally this was a good idea, but be wary if you need major accuracy in alignment, etc. I had to cut everything up and reassemble it onto the base, and since the image was so large, I actually had to do two runs, with half on the base at a time.
As you can see from the image of the folded invitation, some of the folds are right next to the text, so accuracy was key. I didn't actually think about that at the time because I'm not always great at seeing ahead and this was my very first time doing anything like this, so I have to admit, I kind of freaked out after realizing this. However then I remembered that a lot of posters on the Letpress listserv recommend using transparencies to check alignment for multicolor runs, etc. Glendon was incredibly helpful in cutting out the polymer pieces and printing out the original design backwards on the transparency, and in the end it worked out just fine. I just placed the transparency over the Boxcar base and positioned the plates accordingly. Set-up probably took longer than it would have otherwise, but it was a good learning experience. I'm really glad they wanted me to print the invitations and I'm sure they'll be very happy. Congratulations Corin & Renee!
