I have always felt that you don’t truly possess a house until either miscellaneous charities start sending you mounds of address labels in the hopes of a donation or until you have personal stationary with your home address.  My sweet little wife has never had custom stationary and I figured that it was about time and it would give me the opportunity to spoil her a little.

Having a print shop or a high-end paper store design and print say 100 letter sheets, envelopes and thank you cards will run you about $500.  Buying a hand letterpress, a couple sets of tin/lead font, paper, ink, new rollers, etc. will set you back $1000, easy.  I am way too cheap and too handy to fork out that kind of dough for something I can do myself.

Stamps-With-Foot loves her puppy like the Pope loves Jesus.  I thought that his handsome mug would make the perfect personal seal for her.  I took a picture of him and through the voodoo of Photoshop, I made a black silhouette image – all big ears and narrow butt.  I dropped that image into AutoCAD and did some arranging and formatting.  I added to that her contact information in a semi-french script font that I designed a few years ago for my own letters and cards.

Quality stationary means quality paper.  Instead of the white recycled paper that we use for most printing, I bought a pack of 30gram 100% cotton ivory/ecru paper and matching 100% cotton envelops.  Wood pulp paper yellows and crumbles after only a few years, but cotton paper with last roughly a year per percent of cotton before showing any signs of age: 25% cotton = 25 years, 50% = 50 years and so forth.  After some diligent searching, I found some indelible archival printer ink on the inter-webs for our HP and I loaded each sheet and envelope into the printer by hand.  A note from my bride should be as crisp and clean for our great grand children to read as it was the day she sat down to write it with her glass dip pen and brown bulletproof ink.

She swooned a little bit when I gave it all to her 🙂