Tag Archives: wedding invitations

Local letterpress love from Salt & Cedar

by Steph | 1 Comment

Last week I had the privilege of interviewing Leon of Salt and Cedar, one of Detroit’s fine letterpress companies! I knew that Salt and Cedar produced quality letterpress but did not know anything about their event space used to host locally sourced dinner events.

Read on and take a look at some wedding invitations!

About Salt and Cedar

Salt and Cedar recently celebrated its one year anniversary, but Leon has been involved in paper-making, binding, distributing, and letterpress for two decades. He loves that with letterpress printing, “we have control over all aspects of production.”

Leon wanted to incubate a business in Eastern Market where he and his partner have lived since arriving to Detroit in 2010. One of his favorite things about living in Eastern Market is finding great local produce on Saturdays. Leon says it “feels wonderful to be part of a community of merchants” that have been here for decades. The print shop was imagined as a space for collaboration and it has grown tremendously over one year.

So what is letterpress all about?

Letterpress presents an opportunity for “deep engagement with hands-on processes as a designer.” Letterpress designers are not governed by pre-established fonts because the letterpress uses movable type and each letter is set by hand. Designers control the quality of the paper. The charm of letterpress may come from the “practically sculptural” metal type and tactile nature of letterpress. Sean and I had letterpress invitations for our 2011 wedding (click here to read Sean’s blog post about the process of designing the invitations) and can testify to the amazing creations that can result from letterpress!

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salt and cedar 1

What is the role of the kitchen at Salt and Cedar?

At the back of the letterepress print shop, Salt and Cedar developed a market studio kitchen, which hosts five to six dinners each month. Leon is “interested in the power of the dinner table” in cultivating community and loves to work with the farmers selling at Eastern Market, artists, and papermakers.

salt and cedar dinner

Weddings in Detroit

Let’s say you’re a bride or groom exploring the idea of letterpress wedding invitations. If you contact Salt and Cedar, you’ll enter a collaborative process for design. You can view 30-40 invitation projects and an incredible font selection. You can discuss the quality of paper you would like and personalize, personalize, personalize. As a couple, you have creative control. Leon “can really cultivate an invitation or packet of materials that is distinctive to your tastes, ethics, and aesthetics, similar to a custom built bicycle.” After you choose which paper you prefer, you can choose the ink color, perhaps based on the flower arrangements and other details of the wedding Salt and Cedar will actually hand mix your batch of ink in front of you, and allow you to take the metal plates as keepsakes!

stamphere2Photo credit: Miranda Clark

stamphere5Photo credit: Miranda Clark

salt and cedar letters

Photo credit: Renee Sandoval

Salt and Cedar is teaming up with Trinosophes to host a Detroit wedding in October at the Trinosophes space on Gratiot. From custom cocktail drinks and thirty roasted organic chickens to letterpress wedding invitations, this wedding is chock-full of local Detroit goodness.

Leon has noticed that couples wish to be more and more involved and hands-on in all aspects of the wedding invitations and printed materials. Engaged couples want to be involved in the process!

Detroit’s “image repertoire”

Leon notes that Detroit has an incredibly powerful and provocative image repertoire — from the landscape to antique maps of the city to old photographs of Detroit homes, Salt and Cedar has spent some time looking at Detroit images. One Salt and Cedar customer wanted to use a photo of their parents dancing when they were teenagers, so Salt and Cedar created a black and white line drawing based on that photo. Whatever image emerges as a priority, Salt and Cedar will find a way to translate via metal onto your invitations.

Readers: Are you a fan of letterpress printing? What has your experience been with designing wedding invitations?

[groom’s view] Creating one-of-a-kind wedding invitations

by Steph | 13 Comments

Hooray! It’s the first groom’s view post by my husband Sean! Check it out and consider leaving him some blog comment love. Note: It was I, not Sean, who linked words like “sartorial” and “audiophile” to their definitions. He has a bigger vocabulary than I…

Planning a wedding can be a very stressful process for a couple. There were times during the planning phase of our wedding when I wondered if surviving the planning process was the first test of our potential as a married couple. While every couple will have its own internal dynamics that are usually not apparent to friends and family, those reliable guidelines can go out the window when previously undisclosed wedding traditions and expectations come to the surface.

Fortunately, I’m a sartorial traditionalist, an audiophile and have an interest in design and art so I took the lead in designing invitations, hiring a DJ, arranging music, and selecting tuxedos (and a dress) for the groom’s party. Of course this planning process did not happen in a vacuum and Stephanie was my chief collaborator and the inspiration for everything that is commendable in the abovementioned areas of responsibility.

Selecting an initial design for our invitations was actually very easy as I had given Stephanie a painting of us by Matte Stephens as an engagement gift. We were certain that we wanted to use it on the invitations; however, I also had my heart set on a letterpress element and avoiding anything too elaborate. One challenge was that most letterpress shops do not also do giclee printing (high-end, high-resolution inkjet). The other challenge was that letterpress paper is not engineered for giclees. After consulting with Detroit letterpress shops I was aware of at the time, I could not find one that was interested in the job. [Salt & Cedar is the relatively new letter press shop in Eastern Market that did not exist when we were planning our invitations.]

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After weeks of internet searches, I reached out to the Elevated Press in Ann Arbor. The owner, Michelle, was willing to discuss the project and help us develop a layout that simplified the project. I borrowed a giclee printer and printed the image per Michelle’s layout and then delivered them to her for her to press. I made sure to reach out to Matte for permission before sending Michelle the image and he was honored that we were including his artwork in our wedding invitations.

After a great deal of trial and error and reading some technical documents on using Photoshop and printing on a printer with eight separate color cartridges, I was able to reproduce the image with the level of accuracy and nuance I had hoped for — no simple task when using ivory paper. Michelle then printed the letterpressed portion and RSVP cards. We ended up with an opportunity to visit the White House in April 2011 and actually present President Barack Obama with an invitation to our wedding.

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His response was that ours was “the coolest wedding invitation he’d ever seen.” President Obama also said that he would try to make it if he was in town. It turned out that he was in Detroit on our wedding day to meet with then-President of South Korea, Lee Myung-Bak. Good thing he didn’t show up as tapping one’s glass to elicit a kiss between the newlyweds could have been grounds for a cavity search.

Michelle ordered beautiful navy envelopes from Paper Source to coordinate with the ink on our invitations. I ordered a custom return address stamp from 2impress on Etsy. Stephanie hand addressed the invitations in silver ink due to her talent for writing legibly.

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