Personalizing handmade items

Personalizing an item is a wonderful service to offer and is absolutely fun to do! Customers who prefer handmade products are, more than other people, looking for something special, unique. Personalizing a handmade item turns it into the ultimate gift.

I already had a branding tool  for branding my name  in my products, but I had no single letters for this machine. Therefore a handmade monogrammed item was not possible. Consequently I hand stamped the items with initials and colored them by hand. You can see examples of the luggage tags I made for my own suitcase below. But the possibilities in size and typeface were limited and it was a struggle to align the separate letters.

Last year I met Paula (*), an artisan bookbinder, who owned an amazing professional letterpress. I  became enthusiastic about the quality of her work with this machine and she did some examples in leather for me. In the time we worked together, I learned a lot from her.
A few months ago I bought a second-hand letterpress (a Marshall) and this hot foil machine is awesome! My husband searched the internet for weeks and found some very nice sets of letters  in upper and lower case. I myself looked for more colors hot foil (other than the silver and gold I had up till then) and set out experimenting with the Marshall.

Every day I am learning and finding more uses for my new letterpress such as printing small rounds, hearts, or stripes as decoration. In a next blog I will tell more about the results.