In Love With Letterpress

 Saturday I bought the Lifestyle Crafts Letterpress. I love it. Seriously, love it. I kind of feel like I'm cheating on my stamps, but it's just so darn fun.

If you're not familiar with letterpress, basically it's a technique where you add ink to paper while simultaneously debossing the paper (I tried really hard to take a close up where you can see the debossing in the photo above). Lifestyle Crafts has a letterpress tool and line of inks, plates, papers, etc. that work with your manual die cutting machine (Big Shot, Cuttlebug, Epic). I picked my letterpress up at A Walk Down Memory Lane, and used it with my Big Shot. I really just wanted to get a feel for what the letterpress can do, so I did a lot of playing around. When I was done playing, I took those images and turned them into cards. I would like to note that it's really hard to photograph the debossing...these cards are a notch prettier in person because you can see the impression in the card stock.

I think what I love so much about letterpress is how well it lends itself to simple beauty and elegance. I didn't need to do much to create a card from this letterpress holly and Merry Christmas sentiment. I just added a little bit of patterned paper is from Echo Park's Dots & Stripes Christmas Collection.

The far left card has a leterpress background (green). Then I cut a letterpress ornament out and added it to the card with Pop Dots®. The sentiment was done with letterpress and put on the inside. The center card has letterpress ornaments, ornament hangers (in green) and Merry Christmas sentiment. On the card on the right, the ornaments and merry Christmas are letterpress. I created the ornaments using 2 colors of ink at the same time. The patterned paper is from Echo Park's Dots & Stripes and Echo Park's Season's Greetings.

I think these cards just might be my favorite of the bunch. The letterpress reindeer and Merry Christmas pair beautifully with Echo Park's Season's Greetings paper. Another bonus to letterpress is that it lends itself well to making multiples of an image. It's a fast and fun way to do invitations, multiple thank you's (say for a baby shower or wedding), or lots of Christmas cards.

Letterpress works the best on a cotton based paper (it's thick and squishy and debosses nicely), but as you can see by these cards, you can also use it on regular card stock.

...and just in case you thought I was only doing Christmas cards, here's a pretty thank you. This also shows that I can use stamps and leterpress together. The background words were stamped first. Then, I used my letterpress to add the green accents and the for you sentiment. The patterned paper used for the card base is Little Yellow Bicycle's Twig.

Thanks for stopping by! If you have any questions about letterpress or how it works feel free to ask. I'm by no means an expert, but I have been having lots of fun with it.