Smock is in the news! In the Washington Post: Laura Weatherly, founder of Engaging Affairs, a Washington D.C. wedding planning company, named Smock as one of her favorite eco-friendly invitation lines. The Washington Post calls Smock a way to “save the date (and the planet)”. Read the full article here.
The Ladies Home Journal featured Smock’s 100% post-consumer recycled gift wrap (the Veranda design) as a way to organize your life. You can use our gift wrap to wrap gifts of course, or cover wooden magazine holders with our gift wrap patterns. Cool idea!

Also, Daily Candy describes Smock as “adorable letterpress greeting cards and invites printed on sustainable bamboo paper” in the Weekend Guide of Daily Candy.

We’ve been fans of the Nest for awhile — they’re a great nonprofit who gives micro-credit loans to women artists in developing countries, and they’re funded by products sold on their web site. And we love to donate our letterpress printing and design to causes we believe in. So we were thrilled to design and print (pro bono) these lovely letterpress cards, to help the Nest with their donation campaign (the design is based on one of our new letterpress greeting cards).


The Nest very sweetly sent us these cool travel mugs – one for every person in our print shop. The red color makes up so happy while sipping our herbal tea (or, okay, we sip coffee in them too).

Read about another pro bono letterpress printing project that we donated to the Amazon Conservation Fund. And learn more about the Nest and the good that they do here.

This is the Haddington letterpress save the date printed in a vibrant raspberry ink. We often print the Haddington design in dark inks — blacks, grays — but wow, it’s so pretty and cool in raspberry. We also love the mixture of fonts (the serif Inigo font + our Smock Spencerian font). And we love that it’s a double-sided save the date too, with accommodation information on the reverse side of the card. We can easily make any of our letterpress pieces double-sided — a nice option which saves paper and saves money too, when compared with the price of two separate cards. This save the date was sent to us by our friends at Events in Houston.

Designing and letterpress printing menus is one of our favorite things to do here – the weddings become so real at this point, and our clients have really, really good taste in food. Letterpress menus generally evoke your wedding invitation design and bring things full circle. On occasion, menus double as place cards and have the name of the guest calligraphied at the top of the menu. We think these letterpress menus would be fabulous for other occasions – milestone birthday parties, for instance, or even a really unforgettable dinner party of the year. We often do cool customizations like edge painting (go gold!), corner rounding, or even back printing of patterns. Here are a few of our favorite letterpress menus of late!

(designs from upper left: Engadine, Helani, Burstell, Nevis, Nevis, Helani)

Here’s a great customization of our Rhon letterpress wedding invitation (check out the original Rhon here). The inks are a cool pewter and sky blue (pewter is such a great color to letterpress in!), and the san serif font really gives the invitation a modern elegance.

What a great idea to print the letterpress invitation in two terrific colors, and then letterpress the reply card in a single color. This keeps costs down and keep the invitation very, very special. This invitation was sent to us by our friends at the Write Image in Rockville, Maryland.

Want to see other Rhon customizations? Check out the Rhon save the date letterpressed in pewter (a perfect color!) and raspberry; a Rhon letterpress Bat Mitzvah invitation; the Rhon wedding invitation in pewter and grass; and the Rhon letterpress invitation in a custom neutral ink + eggplant. Rhon continues to be one of our best selling letterpress invitation designs this year!

Smock’s designer Amy Graham Stigler is guest blogging on Design Mom this week about how to host kid-friendly dinner parties. Lots of smart, practical inspiration and advice. Check out some general tips, how to set the stage, the food, and the food and drinks. Also check out a a sweet post Design Mom did on Smock a few months ago, featuring some of our letterpress social stationery and letterpress fill-in invitations too. Enjoy! And then go out and host a dinner party of your own!

Here at Smock, we were all thrilled to see our Aberdeen letterpress wedding invitation mentioned as a wedding invitation trend in Brides Southern California magazine by one of our favorite stores, Urbanic Paper Boutique. Urbanic’s owner Audrey writes, “I’m seeing a lot of repeating patterns in the fashion and interior design worlds, and that design treatment is starting to appear on wedding invitations, too…using a repeating, graphic motif is a more subtle way to achieve a modern look than using a single icon or a monogram.” Well said (and thanks for the mention, Audrey!). By the way, Urbanic has a fabulous blog of their own, filled with pretty things, and they’ve also down some terrific guest blogging for the Brooklyn Bride.

(Want to see more Aberdeen letterpress designs? Check out this really cool save the date!)

We’ve had many inquiries about letterpress Bar Mitzvah invitations, so we’re happy to feature this classic and masculine Bar Mitzvah design. All of our letterpress wedding invitations can be customized for any social occasion – including Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah invitations – or we can easily create something letterpress and custom, by choosing your favorite fonts, inks, and patterns. This design is letterpressed in midnight ink, and features slate edge painting + slate envelope lining (in the Windermere pattern). Sent to us by ORRganics in New Hope, Pennsylvania.