Twilight wedding: Your invitation’s in the mail

Written on October 31, 2011 – 7:37 pm | by Charlotte Zercho

Letterpress artists Chantal Bennett and Joel Kimmel request the honour of your presence for their invitation to the wedding of Bella and Edward.

“I’ve never even read the books!” Bennett, 29, confesses of the hyped vampire nuptials over the phone from their Papillon Press studio overlooking Sudbury, Ont.’s McFarlane Lake. “I was considering telling you that I’m a closet Twilight reader, but I am not even that. We’ve only seen the movies and we think the movies are awesome. They’re amazingly angsty and hilarious – I kind of watch it ironically.”

Last spring, Bennett watched the new trailer for Breaking Dawn: Part II online and caught a glimpse of the blockbuster nuptials invitation: a plain card with a small monogram and the Cullen family seal. As designers, she says she and husband Kimmel were “appalled” by it. “It’s just really, really boring. Very underwhelming – the kind of invitation you’d pick up at Michael’s or Staples and print it out yourself.” As invitations go, it wasn’t worthy of the melodramatic lovers.

So they decided to create their own. “We figured, wouldn’t it be funny if we basically treated it more like a collectible art item for the fans, an actual wedding invitation for Bella and Edwards – something that the fans would like. Naturally,” she continues, “all the Twilight merchandise they buy has one of the two (lovers’) faces on it.”

Working from film stills and tweaking the wardrobe a bit, Bennett rendered the iconic image of the pair, holding hands, and used a free online Twilight-style font, then polled Papillon’s Facebook fans as to the overall motif. “Let’s just say that a lot of them came back with the meadow,” she chuckles. (The invitation’s online listing also stipulates “glitter not included.”)

In 2008, the couple were living in Brooklyn and couldn’t possibly have imagined they’d ever be riffing on the vampire wedding of the century back in the Great White North. When the American financial meltdown happened, Bennett was slowly working her way up to becoming a children’s book illustrator and had two years of interning with noted illustrator Pat Cummings on her resume. “The short version is that we ran out of money,” she admits. “We had to come back home in a hurry.”

Back home, Bennett says she found it difficult to try and pursue a children’s book career in Canada, let alone from Sudbury. A fateful online browse helped her decide to “switch gears.” In 2009, she spotted a Kijiji listing for a vintage letterpress being sold by a retired printer; it had previously belonged to a newspaper in Cornwall, Ont. Most important, it was cheap. “They’re kind of obsolete pieces of equipment for a lot of guys in the printing industry.” Along with the 1,500-pound Chandler & Price letterpress, Bennett and Kimmel inherited all its lead and wood type. They trucked it 500 kilometres north to Sudbury and set to work; in June, they started selling ready-made greeting and occasion cards to shops in cities such as Toronto and North Bay, even Alaska.

The Northern Ontario artist trained as an illustrator at Parsons The New School in New York, where she also took printmaking classes, and Kimmel studied at Toronto’s Sheridan College. As a result, Papillon Press’s designs are based on the couple’s original hand-drawn illustrations. (Bennett’s personal and commercial art portfolio includes a stunning series of vintage Victorian women and many lovely pastoral watercolour scenes; Kimmel is inspired by circus art and antique frontispieces.) It’s an artful departure from the more typical, typography-based hipster letterpress that’s been popular in recent years. “We do vintage with a modern twist, but our style and drawing is based in pen and ink,” she says of their typical botanical and outdoorsy imagery like ice skates and bushels of fruit. One popular greeting-card series they plan to expand is the Troublemakers – a ragtag assortment of retro Rapscallion, Lollygagger and Whippersnapper characters.

There isn’t much call for bespoke letterpress stationery in Sudbury (pop. 157,857). “We don’t have a single client in the city,” Bennett admits. “We do everything through email and phone. So far, it’s worked really well,” she adds before signing off to finish printing a rush order for a client in Japan. “Lucky for us, people are a lot more open to ordering stuff online.”

Papillon Press’s limited-edition Bella & Edward art print invitation, $15, is available for pre-order through their Etsy store until Nov. 10.

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