About Gingerly Press

Gingerly Press creates colorful, modern and earth-friendly letterpress printed artworks & stationery products with vintage metal & wood type, hand-carved blocks and 100% recycled paper on a SP15 Vandercook Press from 1962 and a 10x15 C&P Press from 1915. Each original print is carefully crafted by artist Lindsay Schmittle in her Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania studio with the intention to brighten your home and empower you to explore nature’s beauty every day.

We believe that when we immerse ourselves in nature regularly we not only feel more at peace with ourselves but we also develop an appreciation for and desire to protect the planet’s natural ecosystems in whatever way we can — and we need more of that positive energy in this world!

Meet Lindsay

Hi! I’m Lindsay Schmittle, the creative brain and doer-of-all-the-things for Gingerly Press! I began practicing the old-school art of handset letterpress printing using vintage metal & wood type with antique printing presses as an undergrad at the University of Delaware. As a Visual Communications Major tired of an abundance of screen time, I immediately fell in love with the hands-on medium of letterpress printing.

I began Gingerly Press in a one-car garage in eastern Pennsylvania in 2013 and moved it across the state to the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh in 2019 where I currently enjoy designing & printing my collections of artwork and teaching hands-on letterpress & bookbinding workshops to my local community. 

Inspired by my adventures in nature, both big & small, I create colorful & playful original artworks that share nature’s simple stories. I have created collections of artwork inspired by my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, my ACEER Foundation Artist Residency working with the Maijuna Indigenous Community in the Peruvian Amazon, as well as the most simple of strolls on trails local to Pittsburgh. I create to share nature’s small and often overlooked beauties to encourage others to slow down, be mindful, and soak up the simple joys nature has to offer all around us.  

I have exhibited my work, taught workshops and given artists talks all over North America from Birmingham to Seattle to Nova Scotia, have been published in multiple international publications and books, and have both public and private collectors of my work all over the world, with work that lives in various Special Collections Libraries, including the U.S. Library of Congress.

1. Gather Inspiration

I believe inspiration is everywhere but the majority of my inspiration comes from being out in nature on a hike, whether that be a stroll through a city park, a weekend backpacking trip, a long thruhike or a wild adventure abroad. My inspiration mostly focuses on the little things often overlooked on these hikes: the texture of a bark, the variety of mosses, a pop of color from a tiny fungus and so much more.

2. Creative Play

My creating process often starts with creative play in some form to get into a flow state. I will either pull a bunch of type and carved blocks out of my type cabinets and “sketch on press” with a quick-stamping technique, creating one-off rough prints on scrap paper in the studio or I will play with cut paper collage. Either way, the goal is always to make as many compositions as possible and not let judgment and editing happen too early in the process.

Once I have some solid play time under my belt, I’ll scan in prints of various blocks in my studio used in those playful compositions and take the creative play to an Adobe Illustrator document where I can tighten up compositions and test various color combinations.

3. Compose Vintage Type

Most all of my finished designs involve typesetting vintage metal or wood type, ornaments or border rule for the smaller elements of the composition. I use an antique composing stick (pictured at left) to build these forms with the individual pieces of type, spacing and leading. Pictured at left is a tree branch created from vintage ornaments and parenthesis.

4. Make Blocks

For the larger color forms in my compositions I carve MDF board and/or oak plywood, make torn paper blocks or experiment with mounting found natural textures like tree bark on MDF board to print. All of the handmade blocks are then raised to “type high” (.918”) to print on my antique presses.

5. Print Vandercook Press Layers

I start the print production process by printing the larger carved blocks on my vintage SP15 Vandercook Press (“Velma the Vandercook”). Only one color can be printed at a time on my presses, so I build up the color layers one print run at a time, printing one color on all the sheets of paper in the print edition before cleaning the press, locking in the next block, and aligning & printing the next color layer.

6. Print C&P Press Layers

After all the bigger blocks are printed on the Vandercook, I move to my 10 x 15 Chandler & Price Press from 1915 (“Sullivan the C&P”) to print each of the smaller type forms, one color layer at a time. This press allows me to more accurately align these tightly registered layers to the rest of the blocks already printed on the edition of paper — and at a faster speed too, which is very helpful in this slow medium!

7. Finishing touches

Once all the composition’s color layers are done, I trim down the print and print my signature “G” logomark in the bottom right corner on the edition of prints. Then I count the finished edition, pulling out any seconds prints (prints with minor flaws) and number the final limited edition in the bottom left corner. Then I sign & number the letterpress printed certificate of authenticity that pairs with each print and package it so it is ready to head to a loving home!

Sustainability

Sustainability is one of the core values here at Gingerly Press and we are always working on improving our efforts to be the most earth-friendly small business we can be. 

We print all of our products on 100% recycled paper from Michigan-based French Paper Company which runs on 100% renewable energy, and we have developed an in-house reuse, recycling and composting process for all of our paper scraps.

We also are a part of the Sapling Program, a Small Business Partnership with the National Forest Foundation where we plant one sapling tree in a US National Forest for every full-priced product sold in our shop. So far we have planted over 3,200 trees for these reforestation efforts since starting the program in 2020! We also have various prints in our shop (see our Lungs of the Earth Collection and BLM poster) that donate a portion of the proceeds to social justice and climate justice initiatives.