Skeptickle

It was through our engagement photo slideshow that I first heard the song “Our Love is Here to Stay”, sung by Ella Fitzgerald. I had let our photographer pick out the song for the slideshow and I thought that his choice was very fitting, both in lyrics…

It’s very clear our love is here to stay.

Not for a year, but ever and a day.

The radio and the telephone.

And the movies that we know.

May just be passing fancies and in time may go.

But, oh my dear, our love is here to stay.

and in the early to mid twentieth century jazz vocal style. So when I saw this print

Poster by enormouschampion of Brooklyn, NY

I was irresistibly drawn to it. I guess my love for all things paper and with graphic designs is here to stay too ^_- . But at $80 (incl. shipping), the price is pretty steep for a print. Nevertheless, I put it on my Christmas/Birthday/Anniversary wish list and kept hoping that it doesn’t run out 6 months from now since it’s limited edition. Btw, they have other drool-worthy prints that I’m loving over at their website.

So Rob and I were hanging around in the city yesterday and had some time to kill before our dinner reservation. On a whim, we moseyed over to the nearby Urban Outfitters since they always have cool and interesting things to look at. I was browsing around and in between this and this, was this…

Urban Outfitters Version

On close inspection, it’s not nearly as nice as the silk screened, limited edition versions directly from enormouschampion. I think that Urban Outfitter’s printing company, PrintRun, did a half-assed job printing these out because there were stray ink spots and some unevenness here and there. This is such a shame because it really is a great design and great graphic design isn’t anything without good production quality. You lose some of the crispness, detail, impact, etc. Sorry, I had a brief background in graphic design so it bothers me when a design isn’t represented well. So anyways, despite all that, I still bought it. It was on sale for $20 after 65% off! I’m still hoping to get the original limited edition print someday but that might never happen, so I’m willing to settle for the cheapo version for now.

So it was back to the drawing board for our invitations. We were both sad that we weren’t able to see the project to fruition, but sometimes you have to let go of ideas even if they’re good ideas so you can continue to move forward.

I subscribed to about a dozen wedding blogs during the planning process, including the much-missed LGBT-friendly version of Weddingbee. I now forget which blog it was that referred us to Blush Paperie, but it was announced that they were having a huge sale on their letterpress sets. Price-wise, the sale ended up putting us right in between the average cost of letterpress and our own letterpress project, which is to say it made it quite reasonable. I checked out their website and was extremely impressed with their designs. I also appreciated that the prices and options were laid out clearly on the website. I hated having to contact vendors to find out such basics as pricing and custom options. It makes me wonder if they charge some people more than others depending on the sound of your voice*.

I absolutely loved their bird design invitations. They are full of vintage elegance with a touch of whimsy. Perfect!

These online samples were printed using the off-set printing technique on off-white linen paper.

Michelle at Blush Paperie overnighted us some samples and we could tell her stuff was of high quality. However, she couldn’t provide us with samples of the letterpress with her designs because she didn’t have time to press out samples since letterpress is a brand new process for her. She was very nice to work with and whenever I needed one of the colors to be a little darker or a line to be a little more centered, she’d make changes to the online template within a few hours.

In hindsight, I should have requested samples of the chosen ink colors in person before the invites were sent to the presses. Our font colors were slate blue and cranberry red, and we only requested that the slate blue be increased in darkness by a couple of shades. When we received them, the blue was just fine but the red looked more purple than red.

Once ordered, our invites were shipped to us very quickly and with a lovely note with some tips from Michelle. Here they are (sorry for the mess, that’s how I roll when there’s a deadline):

Speaking of deadlines, here was what Rob was doing while I was scrambling to meet ours. All I can say to that is that I kept my sense of humor up until I took a good look at our kitchen and realized that sticky, acidic, pulpy goodness was covering almost every surface in the kitchen and part of the dining area. I’m talking Hurricane Chunky Soda just hit level 8 and swept through our living quarters. Sigh.

The spool of 1″ thick red silk ribbon was from seller bonbont on Ebay. The other inserts (maps, directions, accommodations, etc.) were designed by myself and printed on PaperSource’s A7 superfine white notecards (on both sides to save paper). Rob printed out all the envelopes with guest’s names and addresses, and trust me, it was not easy. For some reason our printer hated that job and protested the whole time.

To assemble the packets, we basically put together all the inserts with the invite facing up. Then we wrapped a silk ribbon around the whole thing as a belly band and glued the ends together using a glue dot. As mentioned previously, we designed our monogram ourselves and then we laser-printed them on a 8.5″ x 11″ metallic paper so it filled up the page when each circle is just a smidge less than 1″ each. We then used an one-inch circle punch and punched out a monogram medallion making sure to cut just outside of the outer circle. I placed a glue dot on the frayed edge of the ribbon that’s still visible and covered it with a monogram medallion. Ta da!

Here is a close-up of the finished packets.

The reply cards.

After stuffing and sealing all those envelopes, I was psyched to be able to stick on these beautiful “Love: All Heart” stamps that USPS came out with last year.

It really is the perfect stamp for us because we both have a ton of love to give to our family, our friends, our community, and most importantly, to each other.

*I’m sure some venders conceal their prices for good reason and not necessarily due to malevolence. However, I have yet to figure out what all these good reasons are.

The story of our invitations turned out to be a bit more complicated than those of other engaged couples’. It started out about the same- I did tons of research both online and in stores about printing techniques, paper types, fonts, graphics, colors, etc. I took home samples of letterpress and fell in love with the texture and sunken relief of the designs. Unfortunately, I started to realize that we couldn’t afford letterpress with the budget we set for our invitations. Most sets (invitation, envelope, reply card, and rc envelope) costed at least $10 a set, which translated to about $800 for all the sets we would need, plus a few extras. We also noticed that the designs of the lower-end sets weren’t that great and there was little room to customize. Ideally, Rob and I would make our own designs since we both have graphic design backgrounds, and be able to letterpress our designs for about $5 each set. Ideally. Well in reality there are very few places that do that. I knew that there is one place in Berkeley that does it but heard that their service is atrocious. Bad service + wedding= no go.

A few months before we were supposed to send them out, it dawned on me that we actually have (or could easily obtain) the resources to pull it off…by ourselves. What we needed was some sort of  press, a way to make a printing plate with a raised design, and a way to ink the plate evenly with letterpress ink. The press we already had, in the form of our Cuttlebug.

Provo Craft's Cuttlebug

Now, I know that’s not what it’s used for, but sometimes a budget bride must do what a budget bride must do even if it’s using an unconventional route to get there. The second requirement is much more difficult to get a hold of. There were two ways we could’ve gone about it. We could order plastic printing plates from a manufacturer by emailing our design to them, but it may take several tries before we get the design to look right and we were running out of time. We opted for the second option, which was to make the plates ourselves by driving an hour north and renting a laser cutting machine. We used our monogram that we designed to experiment with:

Please credit Sophia at Skeptickle.com and/or Darco at deepdarc.com

We ran our finished lasered acrylic plate through the Cuttlebug a few times with some scrap cotton rag paper samples. It actually turned out better than I thought it would, although it was less perfect than the professional letterpress samples. But hey, if it works out then we’d have letterpress invitations for less than $2.50 a set!

The next trick was to run it though with a thin coat of  ink which we accomplished by using a brayer to apply with.

Speedball Brayer

Rob went to an art store and bought metallic acrylic paint, which is not what printers use for letterpress. I was actually hoping to use soy-based ink but that’s hard to find in stores. Rob seemed very attached to the idea of using the acrylic paint (for the record it is beautiful) but our experiments with it had not been successful. I think that if we had invested in some letterpress ink from online and had some foresight on how long all this would’ve taken then we wouldn’t have did what we did next…which was to give up.

Okay, so it wasn’t like we all of a sudden gave up after all that momentum. It’s more complicated than that. You see, Rob and I are both creative individuals but we exercise our creativity in very different ways. He has more skills. I have more motivation. He likes to play around and experiment. I am more focused because I try to go right into accomplishing a particular goal. What usually happens is that I have an initial creative idea and then Rob takes over by trying to get it realized. But along the way, we’d clash because I’d want our approach to be more practical and to keep in mind time constraints, resources, and opportunity costs. His creative process is much more undefined and is more of the “go with the flow” sort of attitude. I often joke that if we combined all the positive aspects of our approaches and none of the negatives, then we’d have nothing less than a superhuman being. So we each had an emotional stake in how the invitations were to turn out if we were to design them ourselves. I don’t think either way is better or worse, but within the time constraints that we were in I was skeptical that they would be finished on time if I just let Rob handle it. So about three months before we were supposed to send out our invites, I told Rob that he has free reign on the diy letterpress idea. The caveat was that if we didn’t have a working “product” within two month’s time then I can pull the plug on the project and opt for someone else doing it for us. And unfortunately that’s exactly what happened.

Next up….Invitations: What Was

Those who had fallen

Tiananmen Square Protest 1989

20 years later…

Photoblog of Sunday:

The first thing I saw when I walked into the faire on Sunday. Yay for sustainable solutions!

Those are sexy words my friend...

Look at the air this guy caught on his bouncy legs. Amazing!

Skeletal Dropkick's booth. As you can see, she's a very talented clay artist with a quirky imagination.

Xylocopa! I wish there was more room around the booth to take a pic of the entire booth. The craft area gets more crowded every year and it's starting to be a real turn-off since there's very little breathing room.

There's something uniquely beautiful about paintings on wood.

'Nuff said.

Two birds with one stone: healthy lunch + supporting African self-determination.

The Poco Dolce booth was giving out samples and we ended up buying some espresso toffee. All of their bittersweet chocolate covered toffees are absolutely divine.

Maker Faire is an event that one should experience at least once in their lifetime. It is inspiring on so many levels and what you see there you may never see anywhere else. That said, it’s getting increasingly crowded every year and it can be too overwhelming if you value personal space and the ability to walk from point A to point B without dodging fifty obstacles along the way. Sometimes I felt like I was both a rat in a maze and trying pick a needle out of a haystack at the same time by attempting to locate one booth in an expanse of hundreds of booths. It can also be pricey if you don’t buy your tickets in advance for a discount or park a mile away for free parking.

Today I’m going to start on a project that may possibly lead to me being a vender there next year. If the experimental phase turns out to be a success then we’ll see. I’ll post up details later on.

Have you ever been to Maker Faire or fairs like it? What’s your favorite area and/or maker? What are some of the things that you like to make as a hobby?