Weddingpress: Handmade Notebooks

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Now that the chaos that is The Wedding is over, we're going to start posting up some of the details of how the whole damned thing shook down. To say "it was an amazing day" would be a lazy way of putting it. It was the kind of day you wish you could have made longer or hit the loop button on just to do it all over again. Since neither were possible, we'll just be posting some of the finer points here over the next little while.

Make Notes

About two months before the wedding date, we flew up to Vancouver for our last-ditch run to ​get some things done for the wedding. "Things done" included Katy's final dress fitting, organizing shipments of goods and decorations to be brought back down to Mexico, and a wild handful of other items that took most waking hours.

One of those items was a shift on the National Press letterpress in Chris Swift's basement, our brother-in-law, graphic designer and all around good guy. We decided to hand make 80 notebooks that people would receive as a part of their welcome kits (post on that to come). The book would be called, Make Notes​, with the subtitle, To Remember the Best Days.

It's a more upbeat version of a cheers we've been using almost exclusively for the last decade, "To remember better days. It won't always be this way."

A toast that eventually became shortened to, "To you know what." ​

​Chris had some plates made of our wedding logo for the letterpress, which Tyler Quarles hand designed. The logo would be used in a scaled down version at the base on the back cover of the notebook to tie it in with the rest of the kit. 

First step is to set up the plates for the front and back covers in separate runs, and press them on the card stock you see in the images above.

After that, there's a lot of stacking, folding, stapling and clipping of corners. To round all of the corners of these booklets, the clipping tool could only take care of five pages at a time, which Katy spent several nights doing. With 80 booklets that are 24 pages each, that's almost 400 clips in an already tedious process of duplicating book after book after book.

​To spare you the step by step on how you can burn hours upon hours of your life hand making notebooks, I'll just include some images here so you can see the process. If you are a designer or some kind of bride/groom-to-be, and want to know how to do this, feel free to use the contact form here and say, "Hi!"

All photos were taken by one of the closest friends a person could hope to have, Tom Nugent. ​

Here's your gallery, click the first image and use the Left​ and Right​ arrow keys to navigate through the process.