Last Thurs­day I was invited to the new stu­dio belong­ing to our friends Jen­nifer Blanco and John Ear­les at Work­horse Print­mak­ers for an AIGA stu­dent work­shop: AN EVENING of LETTERPRESS. They were lovely hosts and pro­vided a wealth of knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to guide us through the process — even for an appre­hen­sive let­ter­presser like myself.

Here’s a look at four of the seven presses in their stu­dio, arti­facts of the indus­trial era! I don’t know if that’s an accu­rate state­ment, but I like the way it sounds.

Here’s John explain­ing the mechan­ics of their big ol’ heavy duty Chan­dler & Price presses from around 1896 and 1928 respec­tively, both of which John com­pletely restored himself.

Above, John holds one of the two plates used on a poster they let­ter­pressed for AIGA’s Ellen Lup­ton event, and below you’ll see a closeup of the fin­ished print — came out very pretty indeed! The fol­low­ing cou­ple pho­tos you’ll see Jenn explain­ing the from-photoshop-to-letterpress-block process, and some of the lit­tle things you should look for before send­ing the files out.

Here and below are sam­ples of some of the cards they’ve made, includ­ing Mor­tar which you may remem­ber I blogged about long ago.

Both of the greet­ing cards above were designed by Prod­uct Supe­rior and they’re sam­ples of what you’ll find in their shop—go get some for yourself.

Paper donated by Mohawk: note­cards, mini gift tags, coast­ers and large posters, etc.

They fed us, too. Pink’s, M&M’s & gummy bears FTW!

Above, the Line-O-Scribe Sign Machine works like a gigan­tic old-fashioned credit card machine. Just set your type, apply the ink directly, lay down your paper, set the dial, then run that thing from left to right like you’re work­ing for JCPenney.

Here’s the small­est press we used, the Kelsey. She makes small scale prints like the vin­tage car block on a coaster, seen below.

John helps one of the stu­dents set the type for her first poster.

I was wear­ing, didn’t want to break any­thing. John helped me lock in my name for some note­cards, check out the result below.

Above is one of their many vin­tage plates, this one says “Announc­ing the Open­ing” and I loved it so much that I used it on some coast­ers, sans ink. Now I’m afraid to use them ’cause they’re so pretty.

I made a few dif­fer­ent posters, some sweet lit­tle gift tags, the note­cards with my name on them, in addi­tion to the coast­ers — and the whole night was a lot of fun, and an awe­some expe­ri­ence. Make sure you check back on AIGA’s site for their next upcom­ing classes, let’s go together!