We love edge painting (by hand) our letterpress printing! Especially in really bright, vibrant colors. Once you start looking at enough edge painting pieces, paper just looks naked without its edges all gussied up in color. The design and color dreaming of this job comes from Pickett’s Press. Kate @ Pickett’s Press was sweet enough to send one her fabulous ribboned boxes too, so we can see how great a presentation she’s created for the notecards and stationery that we letterpress printed for her.

Something letterpress sweet (with a really nice solid, I have to say!) from our print shop.

We fell in love with edge painting a year or two ago — it’s such a cool way to add a second or third color to a printed piece, and you can still pantone match the edge color (we mix edge-painting inks by hand, and then apply by hand too). We flat printed these invitations for Talbots announcing their Spring 2009 collection, and then we did the edge painting too — we love the BRIGHT PINK edge painting they chose. They added the embossed pattern on their end. Printed on our cotton paper.

This is a save the date we letterpress printed for Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s new location in Boston. We flat printed the liners on our offset press in a pattern that mirrored the blind deboss of the save the date. There was rumor that the actual invitations were going to be cut in stone (!).

Ah, nothing as pretty as letterpress coasters in sunlight, even if the beautiful room where we’ve been doing our photography was about 110 degrees! The only thing about letterpress coasters: they seem too pretty to use, don’t they? But then again, functional pretty things are good. Designed by Don Kilpatrick III.

This is one of our favorite letterpress jobs, designed by Ben Whitla at Korn Design. It’s one of the coolest uses of a tinted blind deboss that we’ve ever seen (the darker tint we ran on our Heidelberg cylinder press — lots of coverage that beat down the paper, which allowed the white of the paper to form the words and the outline of a jungle). On a side note, we have to mention that the designer Ben was Boxcar’s first ever employee, and he kindly ran Boxcar Press for a few weeks back in 2002, after working with us for about 5 weeks, so Harold & Debbie could run off and get married and have a honeymoon).

Fresh from our print shop: we printed up and assembled this great custom pocket for an invitation that launches the NASCAR sprint cup.

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Designed by James Grieshaber. Offset flood of color on front, plus 2 color letterpress. Back is 1C letterpress.

Flurryis a new online journal that hopes to bring together the fine press and commercial letterpress world with stories about what we printers all love: the letterpress. These coasters were given away at TypeCon 2008. (head model credit: Harold Kyle)