I’ve always loved Mrs. Panda’s invite posts! I think they’re so informative of DIY letterpress and how incredibly involved some wedding things can get! She obviously put so much time and effort into learning it and doing it, and I love how her invites turned out. We’ve decided to do a letterpress vow display using her DIY as our instructions! It’s a three part post, but here’s the first.

~ Miss Dove
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So, now that you’ve seen the final product, let’s talk about how we got there. This is going to be a two-, maybe three-step guide to letterpressing. Today, I’m going to focus on getting the plate made, which was, at least to me, one of the more daunting tasks. I think it was mainly because of the limited information I could find online for doing it.
In order to make the custom KF152 photopolymer plates, I submitted a large Illustrator document with my design on it to Boxcar Press. The design needs to be in vector format, which is necessary to allow for the design to maintain its integrity, no matter the size, unlike Photoshop, which uses pixels, and thus doesn’t resize well.

Thus, I first made mock-ups of the invitation and reply cards until I got them to a point where I was happy with them. This took longer than my little paragraph makes it seem. I must have gone through 10–20 iterations and showing everyone the drafts before I was satisfied with them. Each time, I would print them out in the exact size ...