Amazing quality!!! Fair price and quick turn around. Order some tee shirts. Shirts were high…read morequality!!

Couldn't say enough good things about Shelissa! She was quick, communicative, and so kind. Would…read moreabsolutely recommend her to anyone! Our spoons turned out so nice

I've done the stickers-on-laptop thing for years. But with my latest machine, a 12" MacBook, it was…read moretime for something different: Laser engraving. How does one choose an engraver for an expensive piece of electronic equipment? I found several engravers on the web, and visited a few in person. In the end, I chose Chicago Award Source. Firoz, Christan, and Jenna did an outstanding job with my engraving. Christan and Jenna were meticulous with the laser machine, double- and triple-checking the alignment. They even did a practice run on scrap acrylic. It was clear that I had placed my trust in the right team. I strongly recommend Chicago Award Source for any engraving you may choose to do. They handle laptops especially well.

Excellent experience with their engraving service! Friendly and very pleasant. We will use their…read moreservices again.

After interviewing a few calligraphers, Mike was the stand-out…read more Getting married the day after Thanksgiving and ISO a creative calligrapher to convey our particular pizzazz, we found Mike on a list of Chicago-local calligraphers recommended by the Paper Source, a local, excellent, well, source for paper. Mike worked with us to create the perfect invites for us. Each is as unique as our invited guests, including the recipients names on the invites, envelopes and enclosed RSVPs. They are entirely hand-written, nothing machine-printed nor stamped about them, except for the postage stamps (we'll be using the 2014 Jimi Hendrix). Our wedding is a second wedding, a small affair for which there's only room for 30. We had to be draconian when it came to whom to invite. However, we had substantially more room for a planned Thanksgiving. So, half of the invites included invites to both our wedding and Thanksgiving, while the others were invites for Thanksgiving alone. Mike worked to customize the invites and RSVPs for each guest, they turned out as well as we'd hoped. For the amount of attention he paid to us, and work he put into the invites, it was a remarkable value. Plan to recommend Mike to friends and family ISO a responsive, professional and considerate calligrapher. So you can see his work, uploaded a scan of some of the items, with the names/address/locations blurred for privacy. Cream, orange and brown colors. Mike came up with the handwritten turkey himself, we love it, very cute! Also, he illustrated a seven-pointed star, only a bit of which is shown in the scan, sorry. These star were drawn on round cream stickers with which to close the envelopes. Well done!

Mike is creative, patient, prompt. The finished product is wonderful,, exactly what I wanted. I…read morewill definitely use him again.

One of my best wedding finds throughout the entire process was Stephanie to do the calligraphy for…read moreour invitations, the place cards and a few other fun decor items. In a sea of craziness, Stephanie was the sweet, kind calm calligrapher who gave me exactly what we wanted with her modern and contemporary style. I truly lucked out with this Yelp find. She was amazing. But that wasn't all. She went above and beyond. A couple weeks before our wedding, we lost one of our labradors suddenly. Obviously our labs were important to us and Stephanie knew that since we had about 200 black and chocolate colored mini lab place cards that would be set up with a dog house and other related items. Each of our labs was also going to get their own card and be positioned near the dog house just for fun. Well, Stephanie took it upon herself to create lil gold wings for the lab we lost and did the same for another lab we lost earlier. Both were set up on a mini rainbow bridge. Fab calligraphy aside...she won me over with this act of kindness. xo

Stephanie was incredible for so many reasons! First, she was able to match our invitation fonts…read morePERFECTLY! Second, she was quick, reliable and amazingly priced! We gave her 55 invites to do, which included not only the inner and outer envelopes, but personalized invites for each guests name. She did it all within 48 hours. We had so many comments from our guests about her calligraphy and how that touch was elegant and beautiful! Also, we had a big snafu with our vendor for the first set of invites. The vendor spelled a simple word wrong that none of caught until after Stephanie had completed the invitations. Well, not only did Stephanie not charge me for the horrific mistake on our vendors end, but when our vendor fixed the mistake, Stephanie got them back to us within 48 hours again! Because of her promptness we were able to send out invitations on time! The best part about Stephanie was how she sweet, understanding, and flexible she was! When we picked up our invitations she had a hand written thank you card and some amazing homemade bread. It was such a delightful surprise! She is incredible and I greatly encourage anyone who needs any calligrapher done to go to her! I only wish I had more things to get personalized with calligraphy! I cannot recommend her enough. She was truly amazing!

This review is long overdue, so let me start at the beginning…read more.. A couple years ago, my boyfriend (now fiancé) purchased a vintage locket for my birthday from Stella Blue Design. Despite not offering it as a service, Angie helped me laser cut and set a picture of him into the heart-shaped locket, only charging me a small fee. I really appreciated her generosity and knew I would return to her shop. About a year ago, I decided it was time to purchase a new gold chain for a pair of cloisonné pendants that belonged to my grandmother. Angie makes her own chains, and she was so patient while I looked at the various patterns and tried on different lengths. I originally planned on buying a single chain to share, but after reviewing my options I decided to purchase two of different pattern and length. The cloisonnés vary in color, shape, and size, and the chains we chose reflected their differences. Angie even added my grandmother's birth stone (peridot) to the clasp of each one! To use her words, these necklaces are now truly "heirloom quality" that I hope to pass down to my future children. Finally, this past fall. My fiancé worked with Angie to create a custom engagement ring. It has the Art Deco style that I love, and it's absolutely perfect. The ring is everything I wanted, and I have received so many compliments. The fact that Angie designed it makes it all the more special to me. Angie is kind, patient, and honest - every quality you would want in a jeweler. Her cozy little shop is welcoming, and everything is artfully arranged. You can feel Angie's passion in her craftsmanship, dedication to quality, and ability to make any project - from a gold chain to an engagement ring - incredibly unique and personal. We will be lifelong clients and will of course be asking Angie to design my wedding band. I will update this review with more pictures as we continue to work with Stella Blue Design. Thank you Angie and the team for all of your help! - Maureen & Tim

Angie was able to repair my rope chain which required some intricate and detailed work. She is…read morepersonal and detail-oriented to work with. She explained the details of the process with me and made sure I felt comfortable with timing and intricacies of the repair. Best yet, she's super talented--the repair is flawless. It's amazing to find a jeweler you can trust!

Stacey is a magical paper fairy. Stationery and paper goods feel like an easy thing to overlook…read morewhen wedding planning, but you have no idea what Stacey can do. Steracle's services from Save the Date envelopes to our wedding invitation to all the day-of goods made a tremendous impact on our wedding, and we had numerous guests praising the attention to detail throughout our events. A large credit for that goes to Steracle. First off, we were trying to use Minted for our Save the Dates, and when they messed up all of our envelope addressing, Steracle was able to quickly turn around custom envelopes. That remained a constant theme throughout. The team was extremely responsive, turning around many many revisions very quickly as we proofread every single comma. Second was our wedding invites. We had this crazy idea to try and create a book for the invite, similar to special editions of famous books that evoked memories of fairy tales. It was just a vague concept, but Stacey and team took that idea and ran with it, creating the invitation of a lifetime. We actually cried when we saw it, and it will be forever placed on our bookshelves as a memento. Numerous guests sent personalized praise for these invites. A quote from one of them: "This is so refreshing in the days of e-invitations. Very very beautiful and elegant design. What a GORGEOUS wedding invitation!!!!!! The invitation reminds me a lot of the fairy tales I used to read growing up. The invitation brought back the romance of weddings. Nowadays people try to save time and (especially) money by sending e-invitations and those make me sad because there is something special about receiving an actual invitation. And this one blows all invitations out of the water. It sets the stage for a royal wedding." Needless to say, the bar had been raised for the rest of the paper goods, and somehow Stacey and Steracle met them. We had four separate events, and the team crafted unique feels for each event. They took certain themes and motifs and blended them across all events while maintaining the unique identity of each of them. Stacey kept coming up with brilliant ideas that made every element feel personalized, creative, and completely unique. Our wedding menu somehow had a 3D butterfly effect, and she took our love of fantasy books and created a completely custom fantasy-inspired map for the food stations at our reception. There were so many other brilliant design choices that we can go on and on about the quality and craft that Steracle illustrated. We want to keep all of these items as mementos, and we are probably going to be using our bar menus in our home going forward. It might be easy to overlook stationery as a crucial part of wedding planning, but trust us, if you go with Steracle, you will see the impact it can have and how it can elevate your entire wedding. Plus, you'll get to work with Stacey, and that's reason enough.

We loved working with a local stationer for all of our wedding paper goods. From start to…read morefinish--Stacey, Ruby, and Dvorah helped make the design process easy and created an invitation suite we were really happy with! Our day-of paper goods were also perfect - everything had a cohesive feel to it. Everything felt bespoke with the use of their original artwork and custom monogram of our initials! Already looking for another reason to work with them!

Very engaged received a quote within the hour. Very reasonable. Definitely recommend.read more

I contacted Amber's Engraving about engraving a lighter that was my brother's who had passed away…read more I was given a quote for about twenty dollars. When I got there the price went up to $65. The old bait and switch. It seems to be happening and a lot these days.

I love small letterpresses. I love the creativity; the history; the art; the passion of those who…read moremake this their craft. Every once in a while I do a search online to see if there's one I should follow on Instagram, because I love buying cards, and I like to support small businesses, so that works out pretty well, right? I've searched for letterpresses in Chicago more than once. More than once in the last couple months, even, when I was trying to decide where I wanted to purchase my holiday cards. Somehow I've only come up with one or two, and Starshaped Press was not one of them--though I live less than half a mile from where it's located. I lucked out and found Starshaped two days before their annual open house. Perfect timing. The studio is in this really awesome Art Deco building that of course I've seen in the neighborhood but have never had reason to enter. We got there right at noon so we could beat the crowd, and Jen was a gracious host. She had samples of her work out, consisting of pieces decorating the studio as well as prints and cards for purchase. (I ended up spending... way too much money). She also had delicious cookies for us too! She was so open to any question we had, and showed us how the press worked. She had set up many examples of the letterpress dies set in various designs, and they are so incredibly intricate. There may be hundreds in a single print of all sizes. I loved seeing those set up with an example of the pressed item next to it. Starshaped Press also has a print club, which is a subscription service where you get printed goodies from the press on a monthly basis. There are a few different options so you can choose based upon your budget. I signed up for the print club and will get my first this month (January 2022), and can't wait! It was suggested that I might want to get my own holiday cards printed at a letterpress--perhaps Starshaped Letterpress--and I find that idea quite intriguing. Review 641 - January 23, 2022 22/2022

A bit of a belated post but still highly relevant. We came across Starshaped press during an art…read morewalk in Ravenswood. I did a secret project / present for my 1 year anniversary, "the paper anniversary " . I wanted to give a surprise Christmas present to my wife and had the idea for a concept. Reached out to Jen and she got back very quick, and we had a call to price out . I was able to give her a proof of concept to develop the unique paper print and she turned it into a forever treasure that is hung up in our home . A very cool unique thing but we gave our Chinese characters of our last names and she made it into a press and we got to keep it as a keepsake. Please consider her for projects like that but also cards and invitations . Wonderful experience