Oh So Beautiful Paper

As promised, I’m back with a third installment of our tour of Crane & Co stationery.  After visiting the platemaking and printing facilities at Crane Personalized Design Services, we moved over to the Crane Stationery Division, located in a separate building in Dalton.  This is where all of the non-custom stationery orders are filled, from boxed stationery sets to holiday cards to designs in the Crane Studio Collection, as well as where envelopes and packaging materials are assembled.

{I love that so many of these buildings date back to the 1800s – the building architecture alone is completely fascinating}

Our first stop in this building was a large warehouse room, where Crane keeps all of the different sheets of paper used as envelope liners for stationery and wedding invitations:

{so many lovely envelope liner sheets!}

From there, we went to the envelope room – with the biggest paper cutting machine I’ve ever seen!

{stacks of paper waiting to be cut down to size}

{if you look closely, you should be able to see the outline of the envelope template above}

In the next room, another huge machine – this one takes the envelope-size paper and folds it into actual envelopes.  The envelope machines are truly enormous, I think each one was about 25-30 feet in length!

{finished envelopes coming out of the machine and being counted}

From there, we went into a larger room, similar to the printing floor at Crane Personalized Design Services.  In this room, all of Crane’s boxed stationery sets and stationery collections are assembled and packaged for delivery.

{a cool installation and painting on the wall as you enter the main room}

Most of us probably don’t think much about the actual stationery packaging, but Crane makes all of its own boxes.  The box machine (I’m sure the machine has a formal name, but I didn’t catch it) is probably the biggest machine that we encountered during the entire tour!

{that’s all glue above!}

I tried to capture the entire process, but static images just can’t really give you the full effect – luckily the folks at Crane have captured the process on video!

After gawking at the box machine for a few minutes, we moved on to another room where hand borderers create the colorful borders on personalized stationery and writing notes.  I took photos of a hand bordering demonstration at the National Stationery Show, which you can see here – it’s truly an amazing skill.  Again, Crane has helpfully provided a video of the process:

Up next, the final stop on our Crane & Co. tour – the museum!

{all photos by me | video courtesy of Crane & Co.}

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1. Tanya says:

   09/22/2010 at 9:19 AM

   Thank you for sharing such an incredible experience. I just watched the hand-bordering video in awe as those experts hands handled that stack of stock so beautifully!