For the Jedi or Treekie love of your life, don’t miss getting one of these this Valentine’s Day! Letterpress printed on Arturo’s blush, mint and blue papers. Sized as an A2 card, blank interior and matching envelope.

Designed by Emily Gilmore for Dingbat Press © 2012

Custom die-cut with our own pattern on 80 lb text weight paper. Scored, glued and assembled ready for some gift card or business card awesomeness! Sized 2.675×2.675″ – Fits perfectly a 2.5×2.5″ business card.

The letterpress collection will have flexible pricing so you can choose your paper weight, number of inks, and add in additional wedding suite pieces as well as liners, corner options and edge painting.

Don’t you just love this pretty sparkly ribbon? It is velvet/glitter. Doesn’t get much better than that!

A great way to save money on a letterpress suite is to do the invite as the central piece will all the bells and whistles, followed by the inserts on an economical paper with a single ink color.

Tags are a great way to thank your guests or escort them to their tables.

Here is that sparkly ribbon in plum this time around. Great substitution for a belly band!

We LOVE handwriting and think it is sooo fabulous. If you would like us to use yours that would be really fabulous, just send us a scan of some samples in how your letters connect as well as a few alphabets in upper case, lower case and small caps.

In case there was hesitation with the gold/plum combo our letterpress wedding line can be done in any color pairing that suits your fancy. This suite was printed on 110# Lettra paper, two inks – plum and matte antique gold, and paired with ribbon and plum envelopes.

Sold as singles as well as an assorted set of 6 (one of each pattern) for those hard to buy for friends or family members.

They are fun to get cheeky with too!

By the way, did you know that photoshop CS5 won’t let you open an image with more than 50% of a United States dollar on it for counterfeit reasons?

It recognized my hammered out $20 bucks!

Apparently my husband was sometimes called blueberry (I can’t remember why). People are SO smart…or at least they think they are! After Hazel was ruled out, I defaulted to my next favorite, Evelyn, and the minute she was born she was my sweet Evelyn Marie.

In a world of perfect pregnancies, painless labors, mental stability and anti-aging bodies – I would love to have a few more babies. Wouldn’t it be so cute to have a little Frankie and Georgie (Francis and Georgia) running around the house making a wild rukus?

Usually I’m not a fan of the boy name for girl thing but I think Frankie and Georgie have got to be the cutest twist on a vintage name (and that would continue our unintended alphabet of names in the family : Adrienne, Brian, Charlie, David, Evelyn)

What are some of your favorite vintage names? Do you even like vintage names? Available with the rest of the alphabet in the Etsy shop, check out the rest of the letters. They’d be great for first names or last names!

I’m excited to introduce some new offerings as well to go along with your beverage of choice while the weather gets cooler – COASTERS!

There are five different patterns based off our holiday cards from last year: Peace, Love, O Come let us adore him (above), Sleep in heavenly peace, and a new Hanukkah letterpress coaster.

All coasters are letterpress printed on 110# cotton paper with 2 waterfast inks per coaster. Packed as a set of 10 in a beautiful 4″ tin with a clear windowed lid.

To see the rest of the patterns head on over and grab a set for your coffee table for the holidays. Reusable, they’ll last you through this holiday season and into next!

I feel like we’re playing the name game here with these monogram cards! B, C & D (among a few others) are now available in the shop – OR if you want another chance at winning a set please comment a favorite B, C or D name. You can tweet for an extra entry as well under hashtag #BCDMonogram and we’ll draw a random number in 24 hours!

Ready to score a letter “A” set for yourself for FREE? Leave a comment with your favorite “A” name, or the “A” name of someone you’d gift this to. Tweet for an extra entry with the hashtag #BestAName and a random winner will be selected and announced Tuesday morning 9/20. Or if you are ready to buy, head on over and grab a set for the perfect holiday gift! I can’t wait to show you the others – stay tuned…

Printed on 110# cotton paper, scored and folded – blank interior. Sold as a set of 6 notes, letterpress printed in gold and silver ink & paired with matching metallic envelopes. Packed in a silver box and finished with 1″ grosgrain ribbon – ready for gift giving!

update!! And the winner is : Lorraine!

Part of me feels like I just want to keep things undercover. I’m having a hard time blogging because there are so many elements demanding my attention – it is just hard to focus. With that said, my doctors told me to continue to get work done and be a mother. I’ve been working at the computer, and printing orders and wrapping up wholesale orders. I think its time to pop up around here again. I can’t guarantee I’ll be regular for the next month or two but I’ll be sure to check in and share some new product and projects.

Bear with me, it’s been raining a lot over here metaphorically. Thankfully I have my wonderful project manager Emily to help out around the studio, and Lorraine my wonderful intern just finished up an awesome job for May and June.

To brighten my day (and hopefully add to yours) I wanted to show you some awesome notebooks that debuted at National Stationery Show. I’m listing them in both shops tonight.

These are 3.5×5″ notebooks. Great for recipes, grocery lists, notes really whatever suits your food fancy. Each journal is printed on Italian Arturo mouldemade paper. (Lavender, Blush and Avacado). The covers are on 250GSM weight paper and letterpress printed in 4 ink colors. Interior text pages are 70# sheets, saddle-stitched and there are 20 pages per notebook.

This card was fun to research and find an appropriate saying to pair with it. In the end I decided that religious or not, we can all agree that its not easy being a saint – especially when there is work to get done, or beds to be made, or children that need feeding. But having the right attitude can sure make a difference in the outcome of any chore or task. Saint or not, what are your dreaded tasks that could use a morning prayer or glass of wine at the end of the day?

This card makes me chuckle. When designing it, I intended to portray the image that good kings are best served when they serve their people. But when it came off press I kept wanting to read it instead of true kings serve their people well but as true kings serve their people hell. Because really; what king hasn’t served hell  to some degree on a silver platter throughout history?

However, after it was all said and done, I feel like we landed some amazing accounts for wholesale and are continuing to write orders from contacts made at the show. Not only were there great buyers but we’ve had some incredible press as well. Thank you everyone who has stopped by and supported Dingbat Press. Whether I met you at NSS, you’ve been a follower of the blog, an Etsy buyer, a twitterer, or facebook follower, or DEVOTED CLIENT, we really love you and wouldn’t be here without your continued support.

I’m preparing an NSS recap but that will have to wait for Business Friday as I’m still waiting on my camera to arrive (I shipped it home, gasp)! And I need to organize my thoughts. I also wanted to ask before I post, WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT OUR NATIONAL STATIONERY SHOW EXPERIENCE? I’m going to bear it all because it really was 9 months of hard pregnancy and a hell of a baby to birth ;)

Upon hearing back in the comments section, I’ll make notes and blog about it Friday.

In the meantime – as stated in the post title, I’m bursting at the seams. What has been a labor of love this last year, can now be introduced to the world: our brand new every day collection by Dingbat Press (all original designs). To kick it all off, what better way to show you than with our Dingbat notes.

A little back story behind this one. David our six year old has recently developed a love for the game of Chess. Brian has played and played with him, teaching rules and strategy. I wanted something that naturally reminded me of this time in David’s life and thought it would be a great launch for a Dingbat collection. After all, if you don’t know what a dingbat is (besides being a simple minded person ;) then now is a chance for education.

DINGBAT : n. A typographical device other than a letter or numeral (such as an asterisk or ornamentation), used to signal divisions in text or to replace letters in a written word. They became quite popular in printing and as ornamentation in the mid 19th century during the Victorian era.

I’m sort of a romantic at heart, and although I’m stand-offish (especially pre-NSS) I really respect an honorable man. My husband has to be the pinnacle of honor, and I love every gentleman-like quality that he has. While I was in New York with my brother Matt we were talking about great gentleman qualities. He asked me what one of my favorite gentleman moves that Brian had mastered. Immediately I thought about “the passover”.

Brian always ALWAYS walks on the outside of the sidewalk. But its not just him positioning himself there, its how he gets me on the other side that is so great. He does this smooth arm-around-the-shoulder move that switches me from the outside to the inside. It is truly a gentleman’s masterwork. No one had ever done that for me before. Even better when followed up by a tight waist squeeze. He’s letting me know he’s there but not being overly invading which is just the way I like it.

Over the next few days I’ll be introducing the whole new collection to you along with their back stories because everything has a beginning and an end and I thought I’d shed a little light on what the Dingbat has been secretly up to this last year.

So to work this baby out – we had to shorten our dead area (usually there is a dead bar at the front of the press which keeps the grippers from hitting the printed form and damaging not only the grippers but the type as well). To shorten our dead area we had to be extra cautious, and a small piece of furniture was inserted in replacement of the dead bar (see that wood block on the press? that’s called furniture in printer’s speak).

Next we had to FLOOD the press with ink. Printing large image area is a totally different ball game than business cards. Business cards require the most minute amount of ink – too much and the ink will muck things up and make your type horribly ugly. However with large areas, a lot more is required – and when doing multiple prints (without an ink fountain that automatically feed the ink on the press) I had to ink up quite a few times.

In the end, there is an amazing variety that happened with these prints. Both the X and O had unique wear to them so when over-printed (the process of laying one image area over the other) those details came out in this fabulous western wood type way. Distressed and tasteful and beautiful! On some of the prints we added a third color (pink) which was under the gold and offset by about a 1/4″ to give a drop shadow effect – those we kept for valentine’s gifts but were equally cool.

I can’t believe that after all these years of my X and O sitting on the shelf that I never made time to get them on press! Finally they are ready and I’m giving one away to a lucky reader/tweeter/FBer!

The Specs: 1 (one) letterpress extra-large poster of the XO. sized 13×19″, 2 inks (red/matte antique gold). Signed and numbered of an edition of 50. unframed – and shipped in a tube for safe mailing.

TO ENTER:
You can comment for 1 entry,
tweet for another entry with hashtag #XOposter and make sure you metnion @DingbatPress and comment back here with your tweet,
and for a third entry post it in your feed on Facebook (and again come back and provide a link :)

You have until Jan. 14 midnight MST to enter. A winner will be selected at random and announced by the end of the week!

Or if you want one RIGHT NOW, just hop on over to the Etsy shop and get one. These babies are ready to ship!