IMG_9842.JPG, originally uploaded by theHandmaiden.

I think I met Kyle on Twitter, no really! Then one day she just called me and we formed an instant friendship. After she survived C screaming in the background through most of our conversation and still wanted to work with me, I knew she was one-of-a-kind. The energy she puts out in the world is nothing short of amazing.

I recently whipped up some stationery for barley & birch, and even did a little experiment on a few of them – my first attempt at edge painting {see photo above} I still have some work to do on my technique, but my color matching was pretty right on! Trying new things, collaborations and new angles is part of what makes my job perfect for me, and a toast to that statement – an even more exciting project with barley & birch is in the works – you’ll hear more about that later.

Back at ya, Kyle, the feeling is mutual. You are brilliant with quotes like these, “Owen didn’t sweat the big bad wolf, it was deforestation that kept him up at night” Unabashedly organic, planet-saving clothes? Yes, Please.

Now that you’ve heard all about our opinions on ink, here is the lack thereof! A popular technique in the art of letterpress these days is to actually print “blind” with no ink at all. How’s that for green? It creates a wonderful texture on the right type of paper and is something that the world of offset printing cannot reproduce.

This is from an engagement party invitation that I printed late last year. Weddings are on the forefront of our minds these days and we have to point out how lucky we are to have such wonderful, innovative, out-of-the-box thinking clients this season. So much to share coming soon!

Continuing on my stream of consciousness, since we mentioned ink colors yesterday, I want to bring up something about the inks that we use in the studio. There is such a buzz with the whole soy ink thing and I like that consumers are demanding that businesses be earth conscious. However we have found that soy is not necessarily better than some of the other inks we use. We have inks in our studio that fall into each of the Oil, Soy and Rubber categories. We have what we like to think are educated opinions about all of them and have decided that what works best for us is actually at Rubber/Soy combination, here is a synopsis on how we have arrived at this conclusion:

Soy inks dry when exposed to air much more quickly than Rubber-based inks. This means two things, they crust over and dry up, which results in wasted ink AND if they dry on the press, we have to use harsh chemicals to clean the rollers. How green is that? Rubber-based inks stay open on the press longer allowing us to use our favorite Crisco & Seventh Generation cleaning combination and the inks are not wasted in the can because they don’t crust over. We have found a happy medium with using a half-soy/half-rubber concoction that seems to be the best of both worlds and keeps our letterpress rollers happy.

Also, here’s what Spark has to say about the subject, It seems that they have a similar sentiment : INK: Soy vs. Oil vs. Rubber