We’ve had the opportunity lately to print a lot of beautiful letterpress programs, tiny little books detailing order of events, wedding party members, and more. We love the personalized touch that letterpress programs bring to a celebration and can’t wait to print more.

This gorgeous letterpress program is our Lashar design with hand calligraphy accents printed in blind deboss and garden ink, printed for clients of our friends at Paper & Chocolate in Dallas. The inside pages are flat offset printed on our text weight bamboo paper.

A customization of our Vettore design, we printed this letterpress program cover in periwinkle and pewter inks for Paperwhirl in San Francisco.

This pocket-sized letterpress program was printed for Deborah of RSVP Today in Manhattan. The letterpress cover features the motif from our Rousseau pattern with flat offset printed pages. The cover and the pages are hole punched so they can be tied with ribbon.

This program was printed for the folks at Michelle’s Memos in Potomac, Maryland and features our Smock Spencerian calligraphy font. Both the covers and the insert pages are letterpress printed on our luxury bamboo paper for a beautiful stand-out program guests are sure not to leave behind.

We printed these charming little letterpress escort cards for Write For You in Washington, DC. They’re a customization of our Rhon letterpress invitation design, printed in spring and pewter inks featuring our Smock Spencerian calligraphy font and corner rounding.

When we print letterpress dinner menus, we can’t help but marvel over the great food we know guests are going to deilght in enjoying – cinnamon and port wine poached anjou pear? Sounds declicious! Brought to us by Aileen’s Invitations in Miami, this letterpress menu is our Kurai design printed in rich raspberry ink. The vertical orientation, in combination with the border around the edges, makes this customization quite different from the original design. This customization is the definition of sophisticated elegance.

A big thank you to our lovely friends at Aileen’s Invitations for allowing us the pleasure of printing these great letterpress menus!

You probably already know that here at Smock, printing gorgeous letterpress invitations makes us absolutely giddy. With that said, the opportunity to print the letterpress invitations, escort cards and menus for the recent Modern Bride Trendsetters Awards Dinner was a sincere honor and so much fun! Printing beautiful things is what makes us excited about what we do everyday, but being able to print the invitations for such a fabulous event, honoring amazing wedding professionals we truly admire, was especially exciting.

The letterpress invitation to kick off the event was our Aberdeen design in grass and black inks paired with an envelope liner in our sottern pattern in a custom hot pink ink. Ensuring no detail was forgotten, the invitations were also corner rounded and edge painted in grass ink to make for a truly show-stopping invitation. How exciting would it be to get something this fun in the mail?

The letterpress menus and letterpress escort cards were also our Aberdeen design, printed in black and the same custom hot pink color. They were edge painted in gold and all of the pieces, including the invitation, featured pattern backing in our oesa pattern. We loved working with the editors of Modern Bride to create these pieces and love the final look – perfectly sophisticated, cheerful and undeniably celebratory.

This photo by Bee Kim, founder of Weddingbee and a Trendsetter honoree, shows the beautiful table design at the awards dinner where you can even see the letterpress menus at each place setting – talk about thrilling! You can read all about the fabulous time had at the awards dinner on Weddingbee PRO and on Wedded Bits, the Modern Bride magazine blog.

Having first printed beautiful letterpress wedding invitations for Cathy and Tom in our Cavall design, we were sincerely thrilled when No Regrets in Newton, Massachusetts contacted us again about printing letterpress event schedules for the couple’s guests. Using the same size booklet as our letterpress program covers, we created a completely custom piece where we letterpressed the exterior and offset printed all of the weekend event information on the inside so guests would know where to be, what to see and what to wear the weekend of Cathy and Tom’s celebration. The exterior is letterpress printed in raspberry and peacock inks while all of the details inside were flat offset printed in peacock. We also corner rounded the booklet to give it that perfect finishing touch, making it a truly special way for the couple to welcome their guests and invite them to join in on all of the weekend fun.

Thanks to team at No Regrets for the great opportunity to print something so special and fun!

These beautiful letterpress place cards are one of our new favorite Smock customizations! Based on our Lashar letterpress wedding invitation design, they feature letterpress printing in gold paired with gorgeous custom hand calligraphy by Smock’s Master Calligrapher, Debi Zeinert of The Blooming Quill.

The bright raspberry ink of the calligraphy coordinates perfectly with the raspberry pattern backing in our Taihu pattern for a look that is truly elegant. What guest wouldn’t love to arrive at an event and see their name displayed in such a luxurious fashion? Add personalized letterpress place cards to our list of must haves!

We were thrilled to learn that the Amazon Conservation Association, one of the environmental groups that Smock supports, has started encouraging couples to bypass traditional wedding favors at their receptions and go eco instead. Instead of candied almonds, personalized mix CDs or other traditional less-green “keepsakes” for your guests, why not help save the Amazon rainforests (and help slow global warming) instead? For a $5 donation per guest, you can thank your loved ones with a contribution to help protect the Amazon. Couples will receive one beautiful favor card per two guests, sustainably letterpressed on our bamboo paper, to display on tables at their reception explaining how your donation has helped create a better livelihood for local communities and to help conserve the biological diversity of the Amazon basin. Because Smock wants to support the good work that ACA is doing, we donated the design and letterpress printing of the favor cards, which are based on our Engadine letterpress wedding invitations. Smock will gladly personalize these favor cards for free for those couples who have chosen Smock for their letterpress wedding invitations.

The Amazon rainforest is home to 30% of the plant and animal species on Earth and additionally, 20% of all fresh water on the planet flows through the basin’s rivers. Recognizing the importance of the Amazon rainforest to the greater ecological systems of the world as a source of countless foods, fibers and potential new medicines, the ACA works to protect these invaluable forests as they are facing increasing threats from slash and burn agriculture, wildlife poaching, mining, illegal logging, oil prospecting, and large development projects. Rainforests are also a vital force in shaping the world’s weather and climate patterns with the UN citing that 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions are related to tropical deforestation. It is estimated that at current rates, more than half of the Amazon rainforest may be destroyed or severely damaged by 2030. ACA is working together with local communities and partner organizations throughout the region to protect these precious forests.

How does your tax deductible donation help?

Your $25 donation can:

• Help a Brazil nut harvester achieve organic certification
• Plant 50 trees in a highland Andean community

Your $50 donation can:

• Help a community build a tree nursery for reforestation projects
• Help a Brazil nut harvester get legal title to the land they manage
• Sponsor an environmental education program for Peruvian schoolchildren

Your $150 donation can:

• Help protect the habitat of the giant river otter
• Support research on sustainable forest products such as natural dyes
• Fund a field expedition to study the Bolivian pampas
• Outfit a park ranger on the front lines of Amazonian conservation

Your $500 donation can:

• Train the next generation of Amazonian scientists: sponsor a Peruvian student’s research at one of our field stations
• Support clean power for Amazonian science: buy a solar panel to boost power at the Amazon’s most active research station
• Track long-term trends in Amazonian animal communities: support a month of surveys in the Los Amigos Conservation Concession

Your $1,000 donation can:

• Protect forest habitat for jaguars
• Help an indigenous community preserve its ancestral lands
• Buy a laptop for the Amazon’s most active research station, providing a young Peruvian researcher access to the Internet and online scientific literature
• Strengthen the front lines of Amazonian conservation: provide two months of salary and benefits for a park ranger at the Los Amigos Conservation Concession

You can learn more about the ACA’s environmental partners on their website and for more information about wedding favor donations and receiving your own letterpress favor cards through the ACA and Smock, contact Gena at info@amazonconservation.org.

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)

We love this vintage-modern letterpress menu from our Nevis wedding invitation suite. Gold edge painting and a true black letterpress ink. Sent to us by Real Card Company in Seattle, Washington. Enjoy!

This letterpress favor tag, a customized piece from the Kurai letterpress wedding invitation suite, is a great idea instead of the traditional candied almonds or other material gift. You make a donation to your favorite charity, then leave a sweet little keepsake card at each guest’s place informing them of the donation. Very sweet and very green too.