some more featured letterpress wedding suites

Amy and Lucas : view more of this suite here.

 Belinda and Jonathan : view more of this suite here.

 

Stephanie and Graeme : view more of this suite here.

 Sascha and Tim : view more of this suite here.

Yana and Thomas : view more of this suite here.


Today we have a few more of our lovely letterpress wedding suites that we recently uploaded to our web gallery to share with you!

It was such a joy to work with these gorgeous couples to create the perfect stationery to compliment their big day. We are so thrilled with the results of all these suites :)

new featured letterpress wedding stationery suites!

Bree and Cameron : view more of this suite here. 

 Carol and Hendra : view more of this suite here.

Melissa and Chris : view more of this suite here.

Michelle and Jeremy : view more of this suite here.

Stephanie and Wynton : view more of this suite here. 

Its been such a long time since we have featured some of our gorgeous wedding suites here on the blog, so today we thought we would give you a sneak peak of some stationery suites which we have recently uploaded to our web gallery.

Hope you enjoy looking through them as much as we loved creating them for these gorgeous couples!

we are hiring!

We've got a position now open in our busy Bowral, NSW studio for a production assistant to join our busy letterpress team one day a week! This role is suited to some one who is super crafty, good with their hands and most of all a letterpress and stationery lover! Sound like you? All the info is available here.

(Position has now been filled).

behind the red door

Hello friends, goodness me, its been quite a while between blog posts. This year has just been speeding by and we can't seem to keep up!

In January we made the big move from our home and studio in Brisbane, and 2 containers, 2 cars and a truck full of presses later we ended up at our new abode here in the Southern Highlands. It sure has been quite the adventure! The print studio is now housed in a 3 bedroom double brick cottage which we are slowly converting over into a fully functioning print shop & studio. We are based on just on 1 acre of lovely country land, and our house is down the back seperated from the studio. Although, before we could even move into the studio we had to make some pretty big changes - the first being we needed a big enough hole to get the presses inside of the building!

After some pretty stressful days - it seems that knocking into a main structural wall of a 90 year old brick building isn't for the light hearted - coupled with the slowest builder ever, we ended up with a great big hole in which the presses could be ever so gently placed through!

After some quite frightful moments with our presses lifting and heaving them with cranes and forklifts, we eventually got them on their way into the studio. (A very big thank you for my ever patient dad!).

And finally, they were safely placed into their new locations - a four of them. We had big concerns about our 90 year old Baltic Pine floors coping with the weight of 6 tonnes worth of presses - but thank fully they survived to live another day!

We then were on a mission to get our big hole all closed back up again - I found the above french doors for a bargain price of $88 on ebay. Although they were not quite as pretty as the above photo - they were covered in My Little Pony Stickers and a frightful shade of dirty cream - but after much loving they are now looking like they have always been there. We had to convince the builder to make and install the glass transom above the doors and are so happy that we persevered as it allows so much more light into the studio! We also installed some new lights and gave the studio a new touch of paint (one again, thanks parents!!).Recently we added a hit of red to our front door (many thanks to my little sister for her red choosing assistance!) and our little country studio is slowly starting to take shape! We have still got quite a bit of work to be done - but we have been giving a few sneak peaks over on our instagram, so please do come follow us - we seem to be much better instragramers then bloggers these days (poor blog, please don't take it personally).So while the studio has been taking shape, we have still been as busy as ever! Recently we launched a whole heap of new stationery products (you can find them here), we have been working with some amazing wedding clients, and our little team has continued to grow with 2 new wonderful team members who we will introduce you to shortly!Our Brisbane team still continues to do all their amazing work up in Queensland and I am so in love (is that strange?) and thankful for their amazing job and efforts - they have helped so much in the transition to opening up our second southern studio and they do such an amazing job up in Sunny Brisbane. They are beyond incredible, I could gush all day, such love.So from our new/old studio in Bowral - Hello!! How have you all been?xox

some big news and bespoke letterpress pop up warehouse sale!

Hello friends, so some pretty big news from us here at Bespoke today.

The past few months have been quite a crazy blur here in the studio, and one of the biggest reasons, is that from January 2013 Mr H and I will be packing the house and the studio (and all 6 tonnes of cast iron machinery) and making the big move back down south to NSW. We have greatly adored our last five years here in Brisbane, it has been our home, our base, our love. It is going to be very, very sad to say goodbye, I am getting teary just typing about it.

So for my beloved Bespoke, this means that we won't just have our Brisbane studio and most beautiful team, but we will now also have a second base from Bowral, in the Southern Highlands of Sydney. My beautiful beautiful Brisbane girls will be continuing our Brisbane base. All of our printing will occur from our new Bowral studio but our Brisbane team will continue all their amazing work from up here in sunny Queensland.

The beautiful girls who stand beside me, and make Bespoke happen, are the absolute treasures in life, and I know that with them by my side (albeit a little further the usual) that Bespoke here in Brisbane, is in the very, very best of hands. I am truly honoured by their support.

Our new Southern Highlands studio, will be up and ready from February 2013, and our new studio, means new opportunities - so if you know anyone who you think may like to come join our Southern Highlands team, all the details can be found here.

So as we prepare to pack boxes, we have decided to go out of Brisbane with one big last Hurrah!

For one day only, we are having a monster Letterpress Pop up Warehouse sale. To be held at the gorgeous Jubilee Hall, in Bardon, Brisbane. We will have our entire stationery range with some huge never before seen discounts, as well as lots of second stock at bargain basement prices, and lots of clearance sales across both our Christmas, and every day ranges. Come join us and maybe enjoy a sweet treat or two and some of our famous Bespoke summer fruit punch!

Sunday 16th December 2012
10am to 2pm
Jubilee Hall, 180 Jubliee Terrace, Bardon

To our interstate friends, we wish we could bring our pop up sale to you, however you can still join in with our current online sale and free shipping in our online store until Friday the 14th of December.

And finally, to my lovely Brisbane clients, supporters, customers and most beautiful friends - how greatly I am going to miss you. We moved to Brisbane in 2007 not knowing a soul, and how embraced, loved and nurtured I have felt ever since we arrived. This is such a magical, magical place, how my heart aches missing you already. xox


"There are no good-byes, where ever you'll be, you'll be in my heart." – Ghandi

catching up

Hello friends! How have you been? Its been pretty far and few between with our blog posts of late. Time seems to escape us time and time again.

We've had lots of happenings here in the studio of late - we have been gearing up for a busy Christmas season with lots of Christmas stationery and letterpress gift suggestions which are now heading out to a whole new load of stockists. We are now represented in some fabulous areas of Australia and we look forward to introducing you to some of these new stockists soon!

We have also been very busy with Summer and Autumn 2013 wedding orders. We only have very limited availability left for December this year, and our next bookings are available from February 2013, we suggest getting in early to avoid disappointment!

On the team side of things - we've had another beautiful lovely, and very talented graphic designer Clare join the team, and another mini Bespoke addition when lovely Justine gave birth to the sweetest little man last month. Lovely Lana joined us a few months ago to assist with Wedding production, and we have also had a fabulous intern Sam on board who has been helping us out with one hundred and one things around the studio. So its been busy, busy, busy around the production table of late!! We will be updating our team page soon on our website to introduce all these lovelies to you a little better.

On the letterpress side of things, we have been busy working on lots of new products for our online store in recent months - you can have a little sneaky peak here to see what you can find, but we will introduce you to them all soon!

Our box of completed wedding invitations awaiting to photograph has been growing and growing in the past few months, so I am trying to tackle a few each and every day. We have been most spoilt with gorgeous spring flowers lately, so they give us a perfect excuse to pull out all the camera equipment and photograph wedding stationery suites. The above shot was taken this morning - love the pink ranunculus so much!

We are also gearing up for a busy Spring and Summer of Market events. Mr H. has been very busy lately building is lots of new transit boxes for our goodies. We usually ship around 200 kilos of product and display to each event, so our new boxes will make the process so much easier! 

You can find us at:

Melbourne Finders Keepers: 19th and 20th October

Brisbane Finders Keepers: 3rd and 4th November

Adelaide Bowerbird: 9th, 10th and 11th November

Sydney Finders Keepers: 8th and 9th December

We will let you know all details and location details a little closer in.

So my sweets, I hope that you have all been well and I promise, we will continue to blog a lot more regularly. Pinky swear.

xox

Oh my, it is a big day!!!

Oh my, Today we have some very exciting news to share with you! We have been super busy the last few months and our wee blog has been all a bit quiet, as our exciting news is that today we've launched a brand new logo, we've launched a brand new website, and most exciting of all, we have a brand new online store!

We've popped the bubbly here in the studio, and to share the good news with you we are celebrating with a 20% off storewide sale! Simply enter the code LOVEASALE upon check out. Sale is for 10 days only and ends at midnight on Sunday 29th of July.

Over the past few months we have been very secret squirrel designing so many new letterpress stationery items. We will be featuring them over the coming weeks here on our blog, but in the meantime we hope that you can enjoy a good explore and find lots of new letterpress goodies.

Our new website also features a brand new wedding gallery, you can meet the entire team, watch our studio movie and a whole heap more!

We hope that you will enjoy our new website and as always we would love to hear from you to see what you think!! 

Much love and yippee!!!!

xox

so it is official...

So it is official - Daisy was inaugurated as "Design Assistant" into the team yesterday with her official team photo. Her role involves lap warming cuddles, advice and assistance with the keyboard and mice,  and general design quality control contributions. Welcome Daisy!

sneak peek...

So many exiting new things just around the corner....!

introducing miss daisy

Meet Miss Daisy! This little cutie joined our family last week - we had been wanting to get a new little one for a little while, and we are very excited to now finally have Daisy home and settling in. She is a Maltalier (Maltese x Cavalier King Charles) and she is beyond cute, and quite the little affectionate character, who simply adores cuddles.

Ruby Tuesday has been a most wise big sister and spent the first few days showing Daisy around and teaching her the ropes. They have now settled in very well together, and Ruby is loving all the extra treats and toys that come with training a pup, and Daisy is smitten with her new big sister!

Once Daisy grows up a little, we will need to give her an official studio title. Ruby Tuesday is the Studio Manager, and takes her role very seriously, so I think that the management positions have been filled - But seeing as many of my days are now looking like the below photos, I am thinking that maybe Design Assistant will be her perfect fit? What do you think???

missing you

Hello friends, How have you been? I've been missing you lately. Our wee little blog has been feeling quite sad and somewhat lonely. Our days have just been beyond exhausting of late.

We've got so many many new things on the go at the moment - We are working on lots of new letterpress products (an instagram shot of our photoshoot last week). We've got a mountain of new wedding invitation designs to share with you, we've got some big time changes coming soon for our online world, and we have also had some lovely new girls join our studio team in the past few months which we are still yet to introduce you to. So many, many new things.

The days just seem to be flying by, one manic frantic moment, to another. We drink coffee (and lots of it), we are forgetting to eat lunch, and sometimes breakfast too. We are working with some beautiful clients at the moment, discussing beautiful wedding plans, designing for their day, remembering our own days and wishing we could do them all over again. We have been giving the presses a great work out, chewing through copious amounts of lovely cotton paper and Polly our latest acquisition has well and truly earned her keep in the studio. Each day we are packing up parcels and sending them out into pockets of the world  - to clients, to online shoppers and to our expanding range of retail stores. It is a beautiful life, every day we are thankful for how lucky we are, so we power on, one exhausting lovely day after another.

So please lovely blog friends, don't think we have forgotten you, we will be coming back very soon, we promise.

xox

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.

hello autumn.

So it seems that Summer is now over and Autumn weather has arrived on our door step. Here in Brisbane, the days still feel quite warm, but that ever so slight cool breeze in the air and that promise of less humidity to our days. The sun is shining more then our summer rainy days, but their isn't that bite in the sunshine to burn my skin in one second flat (curse that irish heritage as a recent dermatologist recently told me). We have been getting some lovely breezes and I am relishing in opening up all the windows and giving the air conditioner a break after a very hard work out over the summer months.

I have been embracing all that is Autumn in the studio of late. Recently I mixed three gorgeous new inks of Dusty Red, Orange and Gold - They were beautiful inks to mix and even more beautiful to print. We are working on lots of new products at the moment, so it is such a joy to see them unfold on the press before our eyes.

On the home front, recently I enjoyed a gorgeously decedent Pear and Polenta cake which felt like a goodbye to summer and hello to wintry comfort foods. And even though it is not quite cold enough, I am still convincing myself that as Autumn is here the need for blankets is increasing. So one night I snuggled under my favourite mustard blanket and illustrated sweet french chateaux's and dreamed of far off romantic travels to such beautiful distant lands. Just lovely.

Hello Autumn, it sure is most lovely to see you.

found

Over the years we have built up quite a big library of photographs of all things letterpress - the presses in action, ink being mixed, the finished beautiful products etc etc. Today I have been hunting through this library to find a very small handful of images which reflect us as a studio for an upcoming book which is to be published on letterpress.

I stumbled across this picture above which was taken back in 2010 and it reflects so much of what my life is like here in the studio. The photo was taken late at night still up working, I am analysing, scrutinising and being ridiculously pedantic analysing every little character of type in the envelope print. Ensuring it is perfect, beyond expectations and intricately beautiful. I am holding it gently, carefully, ever so delicately.

I've got ink splodges on my hands, wearing my trusty black and white striped print apron and standing right under Herbies Original Heidelberg arm. To the right of me would be my stone - A sturdy fabulous old vintage high table on wheels which was once used by the Courier Mail to move their locked up printing formes around the press room, back in the days of when the newspaper was composed with lead type. To the left of me would be our second stone which is painted a very fitting army green, which would be covered with inks being mixed, letterpress cabinets of more lead furniture, and our press wash which cleans down the press after a long printing day. Under this stone on a storage shelf is my collection of Heidelberg Rollers, and propped up next to this stone would be a few letterpress chases for other jobs in production.

On the floor would be a scattering of print off cuts, bits of packing papers,  quoin keys and lots of letterpress lead bits and bobs. Under neath the Heidelberg, their would be a pool of oil which seeps out of the press onto the oil plate. Scattered amongst this oil is the small little circular offcuts of paper which get popped out when we are die cutting the holes in our swing tags. They are making a strangely beautiful confetti mix to decorate the inky oil in which they finally rest. To the back of me would be Miss Ruby Tuesday watching, waiting and keeping me company, and over the whooshing of the press in action is music blasting from my iPhone propped up on a dock - something calm and gentle during our press ready stages and then something more up beat and rhythmic to beat in time with the press as it beats and chomps its way through the paper.

Yup, that's definitely my life here in the studio - Messy, inky and intricately beautiful.

in the studio today