Some little girls dream of their wedding dress and the flowers while this bride-to-be has been dreaming of her letterpress self-designed invites since she was 12! My letterpress dream came true with the help of Kim from Vandalia Street Press.

Kim rocked her press skills on her 1956 Heidleberg Windmill. This was a referral of referral of a referral (for real). Thanks to Gina Nacey from Adventure Creative Group in St Cloud and Mary from Bruno Press for leading me to Kim.

The planning began one sunny afternoon. As you can see from our tabletop instagram, we meant business.

The color had to be right. The PMS was 485 and we added some transparency and yellow to it to tone it down to ensure it wasn’t a “red” but a watermelon.

The paper I chose was a Pearl White Crane letterpress paper at 220 weight. I actually ended up buying the envelopes online at Amazon because I needed that side open in the same Crane stock and the local paper store only sold it in hundreds and I needed only 40.

Very excited as we loaded the plates on the press after the final tests. Did you know that simple text outlined PDF’s make the letterpress plates?

Thumbs-up for even the groom showing up to participate with this experience. He was the one asking the main questions too. Who knew?!

Have the professionals cut your invites too. Better then loosing the tip of your finger to your rusty exact knife from college.

Invites are sent! What a relief!
It truly was a dream of mine, but feels good to have them out of my hands and into our bestest friends and closest family. The stamps were bought months ago and the coral and white tropical flowers were saved between the others to pull out the tropical theme and oranges and corals.

TIP:
Stay away from printing the main invites yourself, between the overall printer maintenance, color correction and ink replacement nightmares and additional stress just let the experts do it. You can stick to making your own mini jars of M&M’s and shopping on Etsy.

The main event:

Copper letterpress plates mounted on wood from Owasso Graphics in Michigan. My design was just outlined and exported to a PDF to make these exact size plates for the press. I paid $20 more for the Copper because Magnesium just wasn’t as cool with the coloring and aging of the metal.

This will be a forever keepsake displayed in my office. Plus the groom’s favorite metal is Copper (wires though).

The Save Our Dates were sent out in April and were just the start to the branding of the wedding. They were printed digitally by Printer Mike Oslund from Daily Printing locally in Minneapolis. To help stay focused with the wedding brand. I created this 1-sheet style guide that outlines the colors, fonts and imagery.

 

Original post was on Social Type.

Happy to share!

Bride-To-Be and Your MN Design Gal

Questions?  Email me.