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Letterpress at the kitchen table

A few years ago, I took a letterpress class at the San Francisco Center for the Book (lovely center, I recommend it to anyone in the SF Bay Area!) and that’s when I fully realized why letterpress costs the ka-ching! amount that it does. It took me nine hours on one Saturday to make one thank you card design, one envelope design with my address, and print over two hundred copies. And this wasn’t some complicated design, it had a bird and “Thank You” written on it. My eyes were basically cross-eyed by the time I got out of there, and my hands and clothes were totally filthy from playing with ink. Letterpress is labor intensive and crazy detail-oriented, and I bow down to all the masters of it!

So you can imagine my skepticism over this brand new product from QuicKutz. The examples are gorgeous, and the price is pretty decent at $150, but can something this small and affordable churn out the same quality as a Vandercook press? I don’t know myself, but I’d love to get my hands on one and play with it!

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[Examples made from the QuicKutz Letterpress Machine, available at Paper Source]

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[Buy your own letterpress machine for the kitchen table here]

Has anyone experimented with this new table top letterpress machine? What do you think of it?