Calling All Brides!!!

First, we want to congratulate you on your upcoming wedding and wish you the very best. Marriage can be a wonderful thing with the right person. We also hope that everything goes smoothly and at least low stress. We don't know much about flowers or tablecloths so we can't help you there.. but we can try to offer some advice on the inks for your wedding invitations. Which, by the way, good on you to do your own letterpress invitations; we're sure they're going to be amazing and only shadowed by the bride. So, for what it's worth from an old twice-married ink man (took me 2x to find the right one) my biggest piece of advice is to give yourself plenty of time to do the printing. If you're already past that, it's okay, we can still make this work. The reason I say to give yourself time is that printing is a fickle thing. Sometimes everything goes just right, and sometimes it really doesn't. We'll get your ink to you pretty quick, usually ships within a couple of days of you ordering and freight time is usually 2-3 days almost everywhere in the states. Sorry to our friends in Canada, it's usually a week or so for you. So, allow time for the learning curve that printing is likely to throw at you and just be calm and work through it-it will so be worth it when you look at what you've created. Now when it comes to your ink, the call I get from brides most often is that the color is "too dark". And 99% of the time (not exaggerating!) it's because they are putting too much ink on the sheet. Density can be very difficult to control in letterpress, even for those who have experience doing it. We can help you with that and save you a lot of frustration and hair pulling in the process, by weakening the ink for you if it's a PMS Blend (I mean we're already mixing it) or by suggesting that you order a PMS number a shade lighter than one you want. For example, if you are wanting PMS 340, we would advise ordering PMS 339. At the very least I would suggest ordering a small container of transparent white to have on hand in case you need it if you don't trust ordering the lighter shade. I hate when I know what needs to be done when a bride calls because she's fighting a color, and I have a 55-gallon drum of it just feet away from me, but they have none and are in Kentucky, or Canada, or California (you get what I'm saying). Now before you say: "Well Charley, why don't you just make them weak automatically?" there's a whole 'nother blog about that and its way too much to go into now. It's the one titled "The PMS mix I ordered doesn't match*#" 

I want to end this on a positive note and with some encouraging words. You can do this; it might test your patience a bit, but the feeling of accomplishment you'll have will make any feelings of frustration just fade away when you are holding that beautiful print letting the world know of your upcoming day in your ink-stained hand (we sell some really good hand cleaner for that!).  And we at Southern Ink are so very happy for you.