blackbird letterpress

Great Horned owl washi tape! We had this made this spring and have already reordered! Available in our online shop and wholesale.
*tape

The next few weeks are going to be wild. 🦊🐻 We’re moving to North Carolina at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Blackbird is packing up. We’re reprinting like mad trying to boost our inventory before the move. Here’s the bear hug card, an old favorite who jump started our wholesale side of the biz many years ago. I think we’ve printed this polymer plate over 30,000 times, original plate and original die.

Our online shop will pause in late June/early July but we’re fully open right now. And then we’ll be back rocking and rolling. More to come. Sign up to our newsletter (on home page) so you don’t miss out on some special specials over the next few weeks. And local Baton Rouge folks, need paper scraps? Reach out! We’ll have some things to give away.

I started Blackbird in 2003 and slow and steady we’ve made it 23 years and counting. Here’s to many more in the mountains.

We’ve got cards for all the grads! Slip a 💵 or gift card in and send them out to the world. Congrats grads, hope you’re headed out to spread peace and truth. ❤️🧡💚

Rekindling my first love of letterpress type: lead type. Over 20 years ago flew with me to Illinois to bring a whole bunch of type back to Louisiana. The type grew to more type plus image cuts from New Iberia, LA. As I’m preparing for the big move to North Carolina this summer, we’ve started some big long overdue type projects.

1) I donated a lot to Nichols state university via to their budding letterpress space in the printmaking studio
2) distributing type that’s been set in galleys for a loonnngggg time
3) pulling all spacers out of type drawers and organizing them into bins (thx for the never ending letterpress inspiration for so many things)
4) moving 10 fonts of type into other drawers BECAUSE all the Caslon I have is in drawers in a homemade cabinet that don’t fit the cabinets I’m keeping - moving the type either by hand or with this vacuum I bought that has a hepa filter and museums use that told me about. Works great just really loud. We put window screen over the hose. And yeah I’m keeping some 6pt and some 8pt cuz yeah I’m keeping it…
** note: no cabinets are being refinished, old drawers are being reused and dusted out plus cleaning out 🐁 💩, drawers are all mixed and don’t match each other, but it works!!
5) finally I mean finally we’re proofing all image cuts and putting the proofs in a binder so I actually know what I have (it took 23 years to do this…..)

If you’re a letterpress peep that can use these Hamilton drawers with the tall front (I don’t know appropriate term for them) give a shout, you can have them. They may only be semi-clean….

Tedious work…. But is that an ironic statement since most of this is lead type? 🤪☺️ or maybe it depends on your patience level with lead type.

When we move and you’re in the area of western NC (or if you’re coming to - cuz we’ll be close) reach out, come visit, come print, whatever, they’ll be space and room.