Letterpress Garland

I don't talk about my job here often because, well... it's generally accepted to be a bad idea. But if I were to tell you about work, I would tell you that I love it. And besides all of the fun people I see and things I do related to work, I also get to see a lot of letterpress projects being printed. Because I work for a letterpress shop. (And you probably know by now how much I love letterpress.) Yay!

We recently printed some posters designed by an extremely talented artist. They look sort of like this:

As part of the printing process, we ended up with several prints where the color wasn't quite right, or the two colors weren't quite lined up. Since these sorts of prints can't be sold, they were headed for the recycling bin.

But have you seen how cool that poster is? I couldn't let them be thrown away. And so, I must confess: I dumpster-dove. Okay, I didn't truly dumpster-dive because I'm not that hardcore. But I did grab a stack of paper from our studio assistant before she got to the recycling bin. But now what to do with that stack of mis-prints? Wallpapering my house would be... weird... so I came up with:

Recycling!

I decided to go crazy with a big circle punch. Well, more confessions: I conned Jennilyn into punching out circles of poster for at least an hour or two. Then we went after the remnants with a smaller circle punch. Add glue and string and some time basking in the glow of Netflix Instant and I made garlands for our ornament exchange over at Two Loose Teeth.

I strung up the first prototype on my chandelier, along with some silver bells (I love those silver bells and bought silver polish shortly after taking this photo. Mom, never mind those tarnished bells in the background.)

I made some tweaks to the construction of the garlands because sandwiching them around the string like that took so long. And then I was into production mode.

My camera and I are fighting right now, but I love the closeup: each circle makes the image awesomely abstract.

Scrap paper turned garland success!

And a rare photo of the garland in its natural habitat:

Up next: the packaging for the garlands. I usually am late and burned out by that point in the ornament exchanging process, but this year worked out nicely.

And one last confession: My Christmas decorations are put away, but the garland is still on my chandelier. I couldn't resist.

Want more garland-y goodness? Check it. Click here.