Crane Stationery, A Tour – Part 3

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.

Crane Stationery Tour Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

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

Crane Stationery Tour

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:

Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour Crane Stationery Tour

{so many lovely envelope liner sheets!}

Crane Stationery Tour Crane Stationery Tour

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

Crane Stationery Tour

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

Crane Stationery Tour Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

{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!

Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

{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.

Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour Crane Stationery Tour

{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!

Crane Stationery Tour Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

Crane Stationery Tour

{that’s all glue above!}

Crane Stationery Tour

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.}

  1. 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!

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