Some dates
refuse to be
forgotten.
We press them into permanence.
Hand-set type. Archival ink. Cotton paper. For the dates that changed the shape of everything.
Violet Iron Gall Ink
Archival permanence. 200+ years.
Grief doesn't want to be managed. It wants to be witnessed.
Every memorial we make begins with listening — to the date, to the name, to the particular weight of what was lost. Not a template. A conversation that takes as long as it needs to take.
Type locked in the chase. Every character placed by hand.
Paper holds memory in ways that screens cannot.
Cotton rag paper made to last four centuries. When you press your thumb to the embossed numerals, you feel the date the way the press felt it — with resistance, with permanence, with the full weight of a loaded form.
Impression depth: 0.4mm into 300gsm cotton.
The act of making is itself a form of mourning.
Violet ink rolled across a brayer. The slow descent of the platen. Each impression is a small ceremony — and we perform it with the attention it deserves, for someone we will never meet but whose absence we can feel through the date you gave us.
Iron gall violet. Mixed to archival standard.
Forgetting is the thing people actually fear.
Not the loss itself — they've survived that. What haunts the second year, the tenth, the twenty-fifth, is the thought that the world has moved on and taken the memory with it. This object says: not here. Not this date. Not while this paper holds.
Completed memorial. The date will not fade.
"We've made memorials for first anniversaries, for decade-marks, for the quiet private days that no calendar acknowledges."
Three memorials.
Three dates that
refused to be forgotten.
We share these stories with permission. Each family chose to let their memorial be seen, because they wanted others who are carrying the same weight to know that something exists for this.
Margaret O.
Portland, OR
Her husband of 41 years died on a Tuesday in early spring. She commissioned a single broadside — just the date, his name, and the words he said to her every morning without fail for four decades.
Violet iron gall · 300gsm cotton · Edition of 1
Thomas & Diane R.
Charleston, SC
Their daughter died at twenty-six. For the decade mark, they wanted something the grandchildren she never met could hold. We pressed her birth and death dates flanking a single pressed wildflower from the field where she grew up.
Pressed botanicals · 250gsm laid cotton · Edition of 3
Hargrove Funeral Home
Nashville, TN
The Hargrove family has offered Etch keepsakes to bereaved families for three years. Each one is different. Each one is made the same way — slowly, with the weight of the date in mind, for someone who needs something to hold.
Custom specification · Archival tissue · Variable edition
"Every piece leaves this studio with a certificate of archival standard, a record of the press run, and a letter from the maker."
The date you're
carrying
deserves a home.
Tell us the date. Tell us the name. We'll take it from there — slowly, carefully, the way this work demands. The commissioning process takes fifteen minutes and produces something that lasts two hundred years.
We are a two-person studio. We accept six commissions per month. Each one receives our full attention.