flea market find: vintage letterpress drawer

This summer, Ryan and I have become strangely obsessed with flea marketing.  There was an article in Time Out NY a couple of months ago outlining the city’s best markets, and it’s been our mission to check them all off the list.  (We’ve almost done it!)  Just after we got engaged, we spent a Saturday morning at the Hell’s Kitchen Market in Midtown, and stumbled upon a man who was selling drawers full of vintage wood letterpress blocks.  We immediately fell in love.

He let us run around like crazy people, picking and choosing our favorite letters, numbers, and symbols.  The sun was beating down on us and we were hot, sweaty, sticky, and our hands were black from picking up the letters.  But in the end, we went home with our masterpiece!

We ended up getting both of our full names, the numbers of the date that we were engaged, and some other fun words, and then mixing them all up and hiding them so it looks random.  The guy threw in the drawer to hold our letters (it’s about 16 inches wide and 32 inches tall).  When we got home, we experimented and ended up with it tall rather than wide:

It’s now hanging on the wall as a piece of art.  One of my new favorite things!   xoxo