Home Studio

Some process shots as we get ready for NSS 2009. Our home studio: burn screens in the bathroom, dry them in the window and print them at my desk. We'll post the final products soon!

Small Studios, Big Ideas 2009

Working on a comp of a new print and card for Small Studios, Big Ideas 2009 at the NSS this year. Big thanks to Shelley at Albertine Press for setting it all up! A number of small design studios are designing nursery rhyme cards for the series. Ours is The Crooked Man.

The Crooked Man
There was a crooked man
Who walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence
Beside a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat
Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
In a crooked little house.

Revolutionary War Propaganda

New print series coming out soon! This series was inspired by the imagery of the Revolutionary War. It was our idea to produce separatist propaganda that captured some of the big ideas from the times pre-war: The Stamp Act and Unification of the 13 Colonies. Look for them coming to the store soon.

NSS Preparations

We are super busy prepping all our stuff for the National Stationery Show, which is fast approaching (May 17-20). Here's a mock-up of the black tote with gold ink graphic that we will have as a gift for our visitors. Be sure to visit us at booth #1933.

Engagement Party Invites

We did an invite for the engagement party of a friend of a friend. CT & Charles are a Southern couple living in the city, so our invite drew on the NYC theme. I'm very happy with the way the invites turned out. The paint color is actually a much deeper blue/green than the photo shows.

Hinge Series

Here's a sneak preview of one of the new products we'll be debuting at the NSS this May. These are from the Hinge series, and hopefully there will be six different designs in total. I'm pretty excited about them - I love the wraparound design of the hinge on the backside. They were screen-printed on 100 lb. recycled cardstock paper with metallic gold ink.

We'll be posting more previews here as we get closer to the NSS, so stay posted!

Mapping the Way, Part 3

Finally, a few more images of the prints we're exhibiting at Artstream: A Casual Theory of Time, and two of three Celestial Extinction prints.

Mapping the Way, Part 2

Two pieces for the Mapping the Way exhibit: From Here and Back Again, and our popular Abyssal print.

new work

We've got some new work out - limited edition cards and prints over at the Shiny Squirrel. The Kingdom Spirits Series (above) draw from ancient mythologies of supernatural animal-beings that roam the land, sea, and air. I really like how they turned out (we used metallic gold ink for the first time). The cards below are from our Bloom Series. Thanks to Design*Sponge, Paper Shop Ink, and Design This Design That for posting about our new work.



Now we're hard at work on some new pieces for our upcoming show at the Artstream gallery in Rochester, NH. We're taking part in a group exhibition that opens November 2 and runs until January 1, 2008. The theme is mapping, something we can always get excited about.

Pair Tees

I'm so excited! We've been imagining these Pair Tees for ages, but my place (which is where we do all the printing) just isn't set up to do textile screening properly. We found someone who could print them for us, and got them back a few hours ago and I'm really happy with the way they turned out! The image isn't very good, but you get the idea - it's a t-shirt for mom and a t-shirt for baby. There are three designs for now: Emu, Jellyfish, and Echidna with plans for more on the way. We're going to photograph the designs properly this weekend and will be selling them at Renegade (and shortly after in our shop and on Etsy).

Magenta Abyssal

In honor of the fact that our first edition of the Abyssal print is almost sold out, we silk-screened a new colorway last night - magenta and tangerine! I like it. I like it a lot. For now it is only available in our Etsy store. We will also be selling it at Renegade Craft Fair, too.

PS. Thanks so much to poppytalk for featuring the print! That was a pleasant surprise!

Tying 135 knots

We printed all of our wedding invites this weekend after finalizing the design and colors. As you can see, they took up the entire living room! We wanted to keep the invite a little less formal and try to link it to the outdoor and sunny atmosphere we're hoping to have at the wedding.

Besides completing the graphic, the string ties the various cards (info, rsvp) and envelopes together into a little bundle.

Lesson #1

Sean and I learned a lesson this weekend when mixing colors for our invites. We printed a digital proof of the invites and mixed the paint at my kitchen counter top, under a fluorescent task light. We got the colors pretty close and printed the first layer of all the invites...It wasn't until the next morning when all of the prints were lying in the sunlight that I noticed that they were a much brighter orange than planned. We brought out the proof and compared it to one of the prints in the natural light and voila! Check out the color difference (above)! To make sure we weren't totally color blind we compared the same two images under the fluorescent task light - and the colors were a much closer match (below).

The moral of the story? Mix your paints in the natural light, so that you can really see what they look like!