thank you melbourne!

The stunning Royal Exhibition Building, Carlton, Melbourne

Bespoke Letterpress

Bespoke Letterpress

Bespoke Letterpress

Beautiful ceramics by Shiko

Beautiful ceramics by Shiko

Beautiful porcelain by The Mod Collective

Beautiful porcelain by The Mod Collective

My goodness Melbourne, What a beautiful place you are! Last weekend we had the wonderful joy of joining our Finders Keepers friends for yet another amazing Melbourne event. The stunning Royal Exhibition Building is beyond spectacular, the architecture, the walls, the floors, and THAT ceiling. Breathtaking.

We had such a lovely weekend meeting old customers and new customers alike. The crowds kept us busy the entire two days, so I didn't get much time to sneak way from the store to visit many other stallholders, but I did make two very lovely purchases. The lovely Sophie from Shiko was my next door neighbour and I adored her beautiful display and beautiful hand thrown ceramics - I purchased a beautiful beaker with the slightest turquoise accent, which has become my new favourite vessel to drink from when working in the studio.

I also adored the beautiful porcelain by The Mod Collective - I spent way too long drooling over all the beautiful colours and gorgeously simply, yet stunning textural vases, cups, beakers and bowls. It was a visual overload where I spent far too much money, but worth every little cent.

Above are a few quick instagram shots I did manage to quickly take during the course of the weekend, but they do not do the venue or designers justice. It is two days of incredible design wonder! If you missed out the next Melbourne event will be on the 19th and 20th of October, all the details here.

The next event we will be attending is the Sydney Finders Keepers Winter Markets on the 1st and 2nd of June, you can find all the details over here.

Thank you so much Melbourne, we love visiting you!!

Technology!!!!

We have lost our website and emails in a great web hosting malfunction by our hosting providers. We will be back up and running as soon as possible. If you have emailed us since Thursday the 19th of April, 2012, we would have not received your email, so please do email us again at hello@bespokepress.com.au and we will be in touch asap. Our shop is still up and running here.

**Update Sunday evening**
Our website is now back up and running, as are our email accounts. If you did try to email us over the past few days, please do resend your email, as any emails sent to us between 6.30pm Thursday 19th of April, and 12 noon Sunday 22nd of April have been lost in the cyber land of technological malfunctions. Many thanks, we can then respond to you asap!

Phew.

melbourne finders keepers this weekend!

We are terribly excited to be headed to Melbourne tomorrow morning for the ever fabulous Finders Keepers Market!! We've got 202 kilos of letterpress loveliness (oh how paper gets heavy!!) on its way to the amazing Royal Exhibition building in Carlton. We've been super busy of late printing lots of new goodies which will be making their debut at the market, and we are also having a letterpress print sale, so if you've been eyeing of our prints for a while, this weekend would be a great time to come grab a bargain! And with over 120 designers exhibiting from right across Australia it is going to be one amazing event not to miss! (And if you do attend, please don't be shy, say hello, we love meeting blog readers!!)


The markets will be held on:
Friday evening 20th April from 6pm to 10pm
Saturday 21st April 10am to 5pm
and held at: Royal Exhibition Building -9 Nicholson Street, Carlton.
More details available here.

frances & craig :: letterpress order of service booklets

Images above of some super lovely letterpress order of service booklets we recently designed and letterpress printed for Frances and Craig who were wed this weekend past at the stunning Crypt at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney.

Letterpress printed on our ivory cotton stocks in a mid tone grey ink, the classic typographic is combined with a triple pinstripe for a modern take on a classic design. The internal pages were digitally printed on matching ivory stocks and printed double sided. These are all inserted into our trimmed and scored letterpress cover, and then bound with machine stitching along the spine for a very sweet order of service program. Just lovely!

lovely letterpress business cards

Images above of lovely letterpress business cards which we designed and letterpress printed for Brisbane local Laura, who was after beautiful business cards for her Psychology practice. We really enjoyed working with Laura and learning a little more about her work. She has a great passion for working with people in managing challenges and developing personal growth strategies, working with clients on a vast range of challenges including managing wellbeing and health, stress, body image concerns, depression, anxiety and injury rehabilitation.

With such a range of interests and clients, we designed Lauras business cards to reflect a classic, simple, and yet still stunning business card, all beautifully impressed to have a personable and approachable feel. Something which felt hand made, injected with tender and care, yet still very professional and trustworthy. We love the design which Laura chose from our options and these were just beautiful to print on our 300gsm 100% cotton ivory paper in a 1 colour black ink. Just lovely!

studio snapshots

My goodness, we've been super busy here in the studio of late! A new snapshots above from some of our days here in the studio over the last week. We've been packaging up lots of lovely letterpress stationery suites and been keeping super busy with all of our lovely wedding clients. Thankfully Miss Ruby has been keeping us company, and demanding the ever occasional pat to keep us in line and tell us when we are working too hard!


Have a lovely long Easter weekend my friends - Hopefully you all have a restful, relaxing and most lovely long Easter weekend with your loved ones!

xox

meet polly

So our little studio family of 1 tonne beasts has grown, again! Over the weekend we heave-ed and hoo-ed (Okay I heave-ed a tiny bit and Mr H hoo-ed a whole lot) a great new piece of cast iron into the studio.

In was a bit of serendipity how we came across this new beast. A few weeks back the Brisbane weekend newspaper arranged to come take a photo of me in the studio, so I forgot, the photographer arrived and I looked horrendous. I stood awkwardly, he took his photos and that weekend, the photo was blown up across one and half spreads of the newspaper and I died of embarrassment and decided never to mention this again. But then that week I got a call from a lovely fella called John (funny enough, two of our other beasts have come from men called John), he called, said lovely work, I've got some old letterpress stuff if you are interested.

Now for those of you who have visited the studio, you would have seen that we've already got lots of stuff, and not much space left. So we went to go see John, we didn't get to see all of his stuff as he has more stuff then he can handle and can no longer get into his shed (story of a letterpress fanatic over and over again), but he did have a 1950's beast of a guillotine that needed a new home - a Polygraph Perfecta, the rolls royce of the guillotining world back in the day.

So we contemplated it, we've already got a much smaller guillotine but had been saying we needed to upgrade for some time. So we stood in the studio, measured spaces and figured out that if we dismantled my FAVOURITE old school table and popped it in storage we might just have the space for one more one tonne beast. It would be a sacrifice, as I love this table, but how could we say no to a piece of 1950's german cutting mastery.

So on the weekend, off we went with a car trailer, two engine hoists and a lot of will power to heave this beast. It was a two day adventure, the guillotine was dismantled, moved in parts and then reassembled again.

In passing I mentioned to John that we had given our presses names. Last time I mentioned this to the seller of a press we bought, he thought I was crazy, but John totally understood and said that he had always called the guillotine Brute, but she was most definitely a girl. I was quite glad to hear that she was a one tonne girl, as that evens up our male/female relationship in the studio. Charlie and Herbie are the boys, and our new "Brute" would be joining Helga in the female side of things. But the lovely guillotine - and it is quite lovely, seemed a little too pretty to be called Brute, so we have called her Polly instead.

The guillotine is all hand operated pulling release levers, pulling down clutches and then cranking the wheel to get her into action - the good old fashioned way, just the way we like it.