Oregon Art Beat; #302; Oblation Papers

kind of answered a little bit and then anything else when I add feel free but I was wondering I wanted you to just tell me a little bit more about what you like about what you do yeah the texture is the first thing that leaps to mind the textures of the paper and getting to play with them in different ways I love being able to take a couple who's getting married and setting out on a new path in their life and help them to use design and texture and color and you know type and put together a look that really represents who they are to put out there to their family and friends and you know that along with the tradition of holy matrimony which we really like a lot it seems like the wedding the wedding scene is more interesting than it you might think at first glance my responsibilities usually aren't up here with the customers and

I'm usually in retooling our business run you know an ongoing basis and learning about the tools and the materials and I'm trying to advance us into a more production friendly model and we're always thinking in processing ways that we can do things better and that will often require me to build a new tool or rebuild a tool and that's that's why that's what I enjoy doing I like I like making the process easier for the people who work for us and more friendly and more consistent over the you know over the long term okay so anything else you guys would like to add I think that's probably all I need to ask yeah I think that's kind of sums it up being able to you know being able to

gather things from different places is just you know from the fibers of the cotton and the the pens from Harris and the papers from Italy and and just to make that available to people here is fun whenever we go to different places we like to explore those kind of paper -related items and so it's fun to gather them all in one place and and to let other people enjoy them as well okay just sit tight for a couple minutes just okay did you hear anything but I missed any chance okay good just everything I don't think there's anything that I've missed you told me that the store has been open for two and a half years and you have between my gate and employees yeah and and then

the whole sound oh yeah tell me business we how many accounts do we have well we have about probably close to 600 accounts now which are more or less active the the accounts that sell our wedding limitations are the most active you send them to other places in the country yeah and we have our sample block and we have we have spent every year exhibiting in New York at a trade show where we once a year where we exhibit our wares and people from the stationary industry buyers come to buy and and we sell our work across the country we've been a little more interested in developing our wedding the wedding invitation line we put a lot more effort there so the accounts that we've had and and and obtained in years past aren't quite revitalized those accounts with our with our new

invitation portfolio which were keen on releasing here real soon I've been working very hard on it and it's the main thing you sell your wedding invitation that's that yeah yeah we have we have our products in the store here and a lot of very unique products that are available just in very select locations and and other things that are that are available lots of locations but and the wholesale business that when we have our sample books in the different stores around the country that's it's a little more honed down to a few styles in our of invitations in our different paper colors our different petal colors or just the creamy oblition paper whereas in the shop here where I'm more free to take to do one of our kind invitations and take designs and tweak them a little bit or come up with something

really new use some of the paper that's on the wall of international papers and and combine that with either our handmade paper or machine made papers and come up with something that's a little bit more unique than what we are doing here for about a half day as I remember yeah I don't remember when they showed up probably about the same time and be a little earlier but they they really had a very tight agenda I think they had to catch a flight out that night too yeah they were filming two spots in one day yeah they had to do an afternoon shot in morning yeah

yeah there are three three gentlemen there yeah they were they were press they were pushing lunch they were going up to the next day and they since they ran a little bit late here they weren't going to get a lunch so I think I was McDonald's oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that's something like that sometimes yeah sometimes we travel and others as I've worked on travel nationally and it's sometimes it's like that oh you just get really tight yeah yeah because you're you know you've flown all the way somewhere so you're yeah yeah it's it's kind of hard on you times yeah and did have you done any the I've seen a couple of the segments in eastern Oregon that we're gonna be done have you gone out I haven't done any of the eastern

Oregon say do the hosts of the show go out and do that or is it do they have other it's amazing isn't it I know yeah those are really these leads to have the plastic

taken off maybe in this little info thing going yeah and we can start and stop so don't worry so I'll just start over again you want to just kind of line the way through there okay and then over to the photo albums yeah that's great maybe I should get a bigger photo okay that'll we'll just do okay okay so whenever you want let's give it a try okay so this isn't a child shop we have lots of handmade cards actually let's start again and and we'll have a talk to me right so go ahead and just talk tonight we'll sort of pretend like John's not here okay so this is our retail shop we have lots of handmade cards that Portland artists have made and people from different places in the world we sell a lot of fountain pens and we have glass dipping pens from Marano Italy

wood turned pens that are handmade in Washington state momblancs watermins lots of lots of fun pens and the fountain pen is is experienced in a revival which is kind of fun to see people like to go back to that old way of writing French schools children still use people like to sort of poke around the shop a lot of times and and find things like little flower stickers that have real pressed flower petals and better than the sticker and you can put it on an envelope or the top of a letter and that's kind of a fun thing that people like to add to invitations or little cards that they send people okay we've got an antique bed full of photo albums here a lot of the displays we use are old just because it

we feel it gives a warmth to this shop and people tend to come in and say that it feels good to them here a lot some people have mentioned that it reminds them of a of a paper store in France or Italy and we do carry a lot of those kind of papers and cards and pens many of our books are hand -bound by artists in the United States or or even closer to home here in Portland a lot of the leather we get is from Italy and for people who are wanting to do their own wedding invitations there's feeling there's invitations that you can fill your information in either on your laser printer or this is kind of a crazy one for lingerie shower

and then over here we have lots of journals and stationery this is a these are box notes of monograms that we print well you want me to pick it up after you land on it for a minute no picking up and I'll move over to you and these are our monogram notes that we print by letterpress here in the shop they have they're made on medieval us it's an Italian mold made paper which is kind of a cross between handmade and paper and machine made paper we have lots of basic crane stationery here and some French notes up top kind of fun paper lamps made by Helen Hebert

those can open and close as you've as fits here mood for the spring winter maybe this is your stationery yeah that's the crane stationery trains are the folks that print the money in the United or make the paper for the money in the United States and over here are our photo albums and guest books and journals that we make here in oblation papers and press this is a guest book with a Sparigus Fern and Burgundy pedals the inside the paper was made here and then hand bound in the back the inside

has letterpress printed pages with gold ink we also have a variety of guest books with letterpress printed covers and different designs and note cards photo albums these photo albums are all acid free and they have just creamy white pages with decal edges you can mount your photos with the traditional corner tabs or there's photo mounting paste from Italy or different kinds of glue and over in our invitation gallery just

one second okay go ahead and continue okay we have a little bookbinding section here with a few bone folders and paperalls and binders needles PVA glue some of the some of the supplies that paper bookbinders use and bookbinding kits as well if you're feeling industrious and like you'd like to have something that you've made to how's your journal and okay we're over here in the paper making in the invitation gallery and a lot of our invitations are handmade papers we do work on machine -made papers and a variety of different kinds of

stock you can sort of see there are samples on the wall and we have books of samples full of our standard and custom invitations who thinks of the ideas of how these should be laid out or how they should look well a lot of times the customer will come in with an idea or even just a feeling about what they want to express and we work with them we help them to find the right image or the right type style ink color paper and all goes together this one for example was for a bot mitzvahn Germany and they it was a wholesale order so it was sent to us from Boston but they they had the image already and we just typeset the text for them and put it on our paper with the press

it's kind of a fun process of exploring different ideas a lot of times and looking at what's been done before and giving it a new twist or just starting from scratch and looking at the papers on the wall we have a wall of international papers that you can choose wraps and there's vellum overlays there's just plain handmade paper there's a lot of different ways you can go these are some of our invitation styles here that were just just putting out a new line of invitations with three cut edges and one decal edge sometimes people have even used handwritten invitations and we can we can take a person's signature or their artwork and take it make a plate out of that and then put it on the press so if a person wanted their own little personal note with their name on it

we they could go ahead and give us a signed a version of their signature and we could make a plate and print it and at what you'd get a hundred of them that liked exactly like that we also have quite a few books of interesting invitations cranes and William Arthur are more of the traditional mainstream lines and a griffin and Clover Creek have some of the more interesting top -end invitations okay this

was from the Ponzi vineyard family they had a little girl and they made out of one label oh wow look at the announcement I think that went very well good nicely I might ask John if he wants to show a little more of the writing yeah sure I'm gonna give you that okay get get it in use I don't use yeah that was fine just like your writing a letter you could there you go it's real straight forward you can figure

out what's wrong if something goes wrong it's real easy to repair okay and you can just tell me pretend like he's not here okay this is a Chandler in Price letter press it's about 100 years old our press is here between 80 and 100 years old and we use them for all of our invitations and social announcements the way that it works you put your paper here and we use polymer plates that are back here you register them and line them up and it comes together like clapping hands when you print with it so I can spin the flywheel and run some of you'd like let's let's take a look so we do have voters originally would have been a trettle foot trettle you're doing this how does somebody get a job doing this I mean you see an ad in the paper well

I did see the ad in the paper I had a bit of prints or most of my life but not on the old cash and letter press and I saw an ad in the paper and I had met Ron and Jennifer at trade shows a few times so I was really excited to come and learn letter press of Jennifer the owner she trained and then you know Macy and some of our other printers they have a background in the book guards and in letter press printing on flatbed presses so they're it's very easy for them to learn these we're all hand fed when he's at a time and the ink is manually applied to the inking disc that rotates slowly so it keeps the ink nice and evenly distributed and

then the letters are raised off the plate so they punch into the paper and it gives a real dimensional look to the piece it is very popular with the letter press printing originally you would have tried to avoid that heavy punch because a lot of pieces were two sided you didn't want it to show through on the back but the more whoops more popular style now is to actually show that impression on the back of the paper I think it's kind of a backlash to the computer age you know this is much more textured it kind of a peaceful process originally it starts as a computer piece yeah so we're kind of mixing the modern and the old together we have

some modern convenience like us and what it is and I see I need to add a little ink so I have to stop and do that we'll watch you do that let me set these pieces out of my way takes just a very small amount of ink at a time you don't want to get too much on there that's the ink that's the ink is just applied with the palette knife and you can see that the disc now rotates slowly and distributed evenly on the 3 inking rollers in the 3 inking rollers pass over the plate and as soon as it seems pretty smooth on there then you can start and

you always wipe your plate before you start because there's a lot of ink on there I think one of the big challenges with letter press printing is to be sure that you have enough ink on it all times you have to print at the same time checking the quality of the piece and you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time

you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time you have to print at the same time