Eleven hundred cards, a borrowed letterpress, and ink on both of our hands for most of a weekend.
The invitations were meant to be simple: a card, an envelope, a reply slip, printed somewhere and sent somewhere else. Amara found a letterpress course instead, and by the second lesson had decided the whole run should be done by hand, which is how a Saturday became a weekend and a weekend became most of a fortnight of evenings.
What the letterpress actually involves
More patience than either of us expected, and considerably more ink. Each card goes through the press once per colour, and the gold line around the border is its own pass entirely. Eleven hundred cards at two passes each is two thousand two hundred movements of a heavy metal arm, most of them made by Amara while Ellis fed paper and complained, fondly, about his wrist.
Two thousand two hundred movements of a heavy metal arm, and most of them were Amara's.
What we would do again
All of it, honestly, though we would start a month earlier. The texture of a pressed card is not something a printer can quite match, and the two of us now know how to run a letterpress, which was not a skill either of us expected to end this year with.
The envelopes were addressed by three separate people over two evenings, with tea and a great deal of complaining about handwriting consistency that nobody could see from a normal reading distance.
