Need we say more? We LOVE to print!

www.tuttalou.com | 206.801.0498

Hello there!

Lately we have been quite honored to be written about in the local press! I thought I would share a few links with you:

The Seattle Times wrote about Tutta Lou Press and our neightboring artstis in the Central District. Be sure to check out the great photo gallery associated with this story, Alan Berner (the photographer) has a great eye!

We were blessed to meet the lovely, new-to-seattle, Lyndsey last week of The Stationery Place and she was kind enought to do a write up about us on her sweet stationey blog!

Handmade Rain of Western Washington inculuded us in their “Meet the Makers” Series. It is always fun to work with these amazing ladies!

My Partini also interviewed us this spring. Be sure to check them out the next time you are looking for party vendors, they have a great collection of top talent!

Thats all for now! Tutta Lou!

Complete with a Steam Roller Smack Down!

It is a fun way to spend a few hours: print a giant poster, have a treat, listen to some music, see all of SVC Letterpress equipment, and shop for some great letterpress goodies.

It runs from 1-6, but I would stop in around 3: that is when the building starts to get covered in huge posters!

All the info can be found here:

http://wayzgoose.svcseattle.com

http://www.facebook.com/svcwayzgoose

Tell me you saw this post and I’ll give you a special TLP gift!

We are very lucky around here! The lovely Kathleen bought her first press and invited me over to help her set it up! We had a lot of fun (and wine!) putting it back together (it was shipped slightly disassembled). It is a small table top press and we printed coasters! Here in the studio we would love to have a tabletop press for small project and classes- Chandler is lonely!

We are very excited to see all the project Kathleen comes up with and will share them with you too!

Kyle Durrie of Power & Light Press, Portland, Oregon, is living our dream. Really! Traveling and letterpress- what could be better? When I heard about her kickstarter project last year,  I thought “she toooook my idea!” Not completely true, she just got to it before me! So what is she doing? She has packed her presses into the back of a delivery truck and is driving around the country teaching people about letterpress- in parks, on stoops, in driveways and on the street. In Seattle she is stopping on our street-Cherry Street! Our lovely friend Karina of Miss Cline Press is hosting Kyle and her truck of presses for a letterpress extravaganza in the Central District:

THIS Thursday, June 16th, 2011

5-8pm.

2370 E Cherry Street. Seattle, WA 98112

From Kyle’s website: I’ve converted a 1982 Chevy step van into a fully functional letterpress print shop. I’ve outfitted the back of the truck with built-in cabinets and workspace, a sign press from the mid 20th century, and an 1873 Golding  Official No. 3 tabletop platen press. I’ll spend the next nine or so months driving all over North America, teaching workshops, doing demos, and generally spreading the good word about printing the old fashioned way.

Tutta Lou Press will be open until 6:30, so be sure to stop in!

We will be sharing a booth with 4 other local Seattle girls- more to come on each of them later this week!

I know most vendors spend months and months preparing for shows and we are going to do it in 4 weeks! Wish us luck, cause we are going to need it!

It is PREVIEW weekend!

Be sure to stop by and visit our friends at the Central District Art Walk on Saturday from 1-5.

If you are interesed in showing your work, be sure to chat with:

When a design is given to us, we review it carefully. Our vintage press is cranky sometimes, so we try to reduce or re-design anything in the design that may not print well. Typically this means no fonts less than 6 points and no lines less than .25 points. Our press exerts thousands of pounds of pressure into the paper and can break the finer points off a printing plate!

After the design is finalized, a negative is made, which is then placed over a piece of photo polymer and is exposed to black light.  The plate is then washed in water for around 5 minutes. After the unexposed areas of the plate are washed away, we are left with the raised design on the plate. One plate is made for each color in the design. We use photopolymer plates instead of wood block or type, like talked about in Part I.

A while back we mentioned we were putting together a series on letterpress printing. Our first topics covers, you guessed it, the basics and the history!

Letterpress printing is a type of relief printing. In the 1400s Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type- little lead or wooden blocks, each one containing a letter or punctuation symbol. The little blocks (called ‘type’) are carefully set by hand and can be reused to write anything. The face of the block are then inked and impressed into paper. Johannes’s very simple idea revolutionized how we could communicate and share ideas. Pretty powerful stuff!

Here in the Studio, we still use the same basic method, but with a few modern improvements! Each project starts with one little idea, a flash of inspiration. Over the next few days we will be covering how these ideas are turned into a beautiful piece of work. We hope you will join us!

Image credit: Philip via Briarpress

One unbelievable offer from Tutta Lou Press on Oh Hello Friend Blog today!

75 cards for just $68  -or-  150 cards for $98! (Retail is $200 for 100 cards!)

Choose from 10 (!!!) fun designs and six ink color options!

These make great birthday gifts or use them as a fun business card!

What we love most about this promotion is the exceptional value: Letterpress printing, customization and great paper! You won’t be seeing an offer like this again anytime soon! We are only offering 50 of these, so you will want to hurry over and say, oh, Hello!