DIY Fantastic: Rose Petal Confetti

Here we go...the first of what I expect to be a veritable flood of vaguely wedding orientated diy instalments for us. Brace yourselves folks. I can barely call this a diy, it's more of a just do this and this will happen sort of post. But still, I am so excited about the results I simply have to share! :)

A bunch of roses Ben brought home the other day were starting to look a little sorry for themselves. To be honest some of them were starting to get crispy! This is what gave me the idea...rather than bin them, to keep the drying out process going and dry all the petals for confetti. So, the only thing you really need for this diy is a sorry looking bunch of roses and some patience!

I simply gently held the rose in one hand and pulled the stem out from the back of the flower. this helps loosen up the petals. Then I gently slowly peeled each petal off one by one and unravelled the layers. I placed each petal carefully on a bamboo mat keeping them as flat as possible and flattening out any kinks, especially in the inner petals.

From there on in it's uber simple. I just left them out until they were dry and crispy! Each day I gently turned the petals, flattened them out and unravel any rollers. Once I was happy they were fully dry I popped them in an airtight jar for storage with a little bit of tissue and hey presto!

And this was a lot of fun:

It was also a lot of mess to clear up, you don't think we got that sequence on the very first try do you?! Rather bizarrely our first attempt turned out to be the best, but we didn't realise that until we'd cleared up this mess a fair few times!!!

So now Ben has an excuse to buy me roses every time he pops to the shops, win-win!! :)

DIY Fantastic: Letterpress Course - Part II

As promised, here we have Part II of our epic letterpress course. And in due course I'm sure we'll continue with a part III, IV, V etc as we progress with our training and projects! So far we'd shared the key steps in preparing the type and locking it up in the press ready to print. So next we shall share a bit more of the actual printing process and the fruits of our labours!

This is the studio in East London, the home and base for the London Book Arts Centre. It's a functional but funky mix of essentials, storage and antique printing presses!

The centre has a wide range of presses, you can see some of them in action below. I would love to give you a dappled history of the various presses at the centre, but I'm afraid I don't know enough of their history (yet)! You'll just have to arrange a visit yourself instead. :)

In addition to the working presses they also have a number of these beauties dotted around. I wonder if they are still in working order, but I don't care either way - they are magnificent sculptures and works of art in themselves!

Rolls and rolls of colourful bookbinding canvas...

The first go on the printing press, that look of concentration on my face. Ha, my pesky tongue is always a clear giveaway!!

And finally, below is the result of my first attempt, yeay! I rather like the effect, the textures and variations in density it created give it lots of character! :) But it needed some tweaking to perfect the quality of the printing to the highest standard, aherm!

Making progress in the right direction...

Having a little inspection...

And here's the final print. You can see that it still has a lot of texture, as a result of the age and level of use of the wooden type, but I love that! All I need now is a photo frame so I can get this bad boy up on the wall, how exciting!

And now here's Izzy finishing the locking up of her type in the press and looking very happy about it! :p

And her prints filling up the drying rack...

These girls used a slightly different printing press and used individual small rollers to apply the ink directly to the type. The results of this vibrant hot orange were awesome and the hand rolling enables a few more fancy techniques such as a gradient of colour to be applied.

Finally, the ever so slightly less glamorous (but nonetheless essential) process of cleaning up the presses at the end of the evening. I think we were using baby oil as the cleaning fluid, cheap and effective! :)

Tah-dah! Looking incredibly pleased and proud! :p

Believe it or not, we've already been back to LCBA to add another string to our bow! This time we learnt all about the art of foil embossing so we'll share a few peeks on this next time round. Anyone else developing an addiction to letterpressing?! Welcome to Letterpressers Anonymous, lets share stories!

DIY Fantastic: Letterpress Class Part I

Have you ever heard of the London Book Arts Centre? If not then you'd best check it out, and fast! It's a fab space in deepest darkest East London that's dedicated to celebrating and keeping alive the practice of traditional book art methods. These range from printing to bookbinding and everything in between. You can read more about the concept behind the centre on the Guardian here and you can check out some of their latest events, courses and photos at their tumblr site here. Plug, plug, plug! :p

Isabel and I went along for an introduction to the letterpress printing method a couple of weeks ago and had an absolute blast. So much so that we've actually already been back to learn more! Hehe. We're still a little shakey on the technical details and jargon, but we've certainly been inspired. I'm hatching a plan to print our wedding invitations for the big day next year ourselves so we went along to find out what we could and couldn't do and learn some of the basics! Here are some of the highlights from centre and the course we took:

Letters letters everywhere! (Heaven?!) Below an introduction to the printing presses with Simon and taking notes for next time!

The stores of antique typeface below, real works of beauty. Each tray holds one set of type of a particular font and size and are actually very very heavy! The trays are split into compartments for each letter and symbol to make things easier to find.

We spent some time perusing the fantastic selection of fonts and chose one each to experiment with. I went for a bold, wide sans-serif and Izzy went for an obscure, elaborate and italic one! Such polar opposites! :p Below you can see us building our quotes out of the metal type in the composing sticks (hope that's the right term!!):

We also got to play with the wooden set (my favourite!). The have such character compared to the metal type. You can see the age on them as they've been used over and over again for various print projects over the years. This really translates into the final print through the grain, texture and density of the final print and is what really makes each one so unique.

Finally, once we're happy with the composition it was all locked securely into the press to fix it in place ready for printing.

And since this is becoming a marathon post I've turned it into 'Part I' and we'll show you the fruits of our labours in 'Part II' shortly! Suffice to say we learnt heaps in just this one session, but we clearly have so much more to learn still! The team at LBCA was fantastic, helpful, informative and friendly and they have clearly built up a community around the centre which acts as a resource, studio space and refuge for the members who use it on a regular basis. If you have even so much as a passing interest in books and printing I can't recommend it highly enough!