Here are a few shots of my new business cards, hot off the press:
I’ll be including them with all purchases and handing them out. Super excited about them and so happy to finally have gotten a chance to print them.
For a post about the design check out this previous post.
Every year since Alex and I started dating, we’ve spent a couple of days between Christmas and New Years in a cabin (perhaps as a way to relive our early days of falling in love in his old cabin in Sandy Mush). While this is usually a joyous event for us, the 2010 New Year cabin trip was full of anxiety and stress on both sides of our family. The harsh winter froze these feelings into me. Instead of claiming my new year a week late, or a month late, I somehow decided not to start over until the next new year. This was not the best personal decision I’ve ever made, but I have been anticipating this opportunity to begin again for months now, bracing for another long, cold winter, and trying to take steps toward living the life I envision for myself. By the time 2010 was all said and done, it was, indeed, a worthwhile year, but I’m positive 2011 will be a fabulous one.
Ten things I am thankful for in 2010:
1. Celebrating my first year of marriage with my beautiful, wonderful husband, Alex.
2. Having my amazing family close.
3. Finding a press that I love, and seems to love me back.
4. Having wonderful in-laws who have welcomed me into their family.
5. Discovering that Alex and I have the same goals to travel someday.
6. Having a day job.
7. Having a night job.
8. Finding various people and businesses with the same beginnings and dreams as I have, through this beautiful thing called the interweb.
9. Making back my money for initial studio costs and press through letterpress sales.
10. Realizing that I really do love my dog.
Eleven things that I look forward to in 2011:
1. Quitting my day job (???… ok, maybe 2012)
2. Finding a perfect paper cutter.
3. Seeing the work of Erik Minkin on TV.
4. Seeing Alex Minkin’s Thesis Photography show.
5. Lizzie and Ben’s wedding (posts with their save the dates and invitations to follow in the coming months!)
6. Celebrating Melanie and Scott’s engagement all year.
7. Working on the wedding invitations and other projects I have been entrusted with designing and printing.
8. Martha Stewart knowing my name (I’m ok with this one carrying over a year or two).
9. Learning more about printing.
10. Drawing more.
11. 11/11/11
For now, for the first few glittering moments of 2011, let’s believe that there will be a time in the year that I don’t slave away at a law firm, that I have more time to devote to the things that I love, and that I continue to grow as a person.
2011 is not the Year of the Rabbit. At least for this dreamer, it is the Year of the MINK.
The first batch of the Pohtzee sets are finished! A lucky few will be able to give them as gifts this holiday season. Unfortunately (and fortunately) the first batch went fast and we are backordered until 2011. BUT we went to Greensboro this weekend to fire the gas kiln at Guilford which contained a few more sets, some of which are not spoken for. We will post them on Etsy after the firing is complete.
Ninety percent of the credit goes to Alex for making these happen, but it was still a fun way to work together and combine our mediums. Printing is a solitary process that yields a product usually given from one person to another, an intimate process resulting in an intimate transaction. Pottery, on the other hand, requires a community to complete the entire process and yields a product that is often community based, like eating, drinking, serving, and in the case of Pohtzee, playing. Our mediums certainly say a lot about ourselves, but its nice to delve into someone else’s every now and then.
We were in the pottery studio at Guilford all day tending to the kiln, until 2 a.m. Fortunately it’s given us a forced block of time in a stressful, busy time of the year to relax and work on some projects that we have been putting off (which I can’t share until after Christmas!).
{My sweet, talented husband checking on the kiln}
I’ve never been super into girly things. Well… I say never… when I was very young I did have quite the penchant for pink and princesses and would later develop a unhealthy obsession over the late ’90s boy band sensation, N’Sync. But most of the things in my life that have shaped my aesthetic have been natural and ancient things. A significant part of my childhood was spent on fields belonging to farmers that my dad had made friends with, looking for arrowheads or geodes. He would send me out of the car on runs to pick a pretty flower or retrieve butterflies that had been hit by a car so he could preserve them. My business cards were inspired by these things, and vintage cologne labels and merit badges. With this card I’m expressing my inner boy scout.
The yellow will be gold ink that I just ordered. BE PREPARED to see only gold cards from me from here on out.
Alex and I have a love of Yahtzee that dates back to the infancy of our relationship. Many of our evenings over the last 5 years have involved Yahtzee and Carlo Rossi, and finally we collaborated on a set to make it a beautiful and functional piece in our home. The lid of the jar has a foot on it, so that it can be flipped over and used as a bowl to roll the dice into. The bottom half of the jar houses the scorecards, dice, and dice shaker. We made a couple of prototypes last year, but now the jars are taking on a different look, and I will be letterpressing the scorecards. Here is the old version:
Alex throwing:
The first new batch:
Slightly redesigned scorecard I am working on. I would love some feedback before I have a plate made, particualarly on the Yahtzee category. Right now it is 5 thumbs up for 5 of a kind, but I think we can do better than that while still fitting with the vibe of the scorecards. Any ideas? If you click on the picture you should be able to zoom in to see details.
I will be sure to share the final product after the pots are fired and the scorecards are pressed. We will be selling them in my Etsy store when they are finished.
I want to give a big shout out to Grace and Tristan at A Mystery In Common for tweeting about and stirring up some business for Mink Letterpress. They are doing some awesome things with silkscreening, and are getting ready to open their studio and store in Charlottesville, VA. Their business is a huge role model for me, and I hope someday this can be true: A Mystery In Common: Screenprinting:: Mink Letterpress: Letterpress. (and my apologies if I just gave you flashbacks of taking the SATs).
Anyway, they spread the word, and Cary from ByCary contacted me about printing business cards for her craft business. She provided me with the design and plates for her super cute cards, and I printed them up. I love the color combination and the smart, simple logo of the birds, illustrating her “Unique Goods” tagline. Check out her Etsy site! 
Here are some photos of the process… The first run: 
And the second run: 
The rejects… (I recycle): 
Every time I print something I get to know my press better, learn how to communicate with it and am starting to be able to anticipate its moves and tricks. It is also sometimes impossible to read, moody and curmudgeonly. We are still getting used to each other’s idiosyncracies but, as with all new relationships, if you love each other and you are able to learn from your struggles, you can grow.
Now comes a new chapter in this blog… I’m not only going to be sharing the things I’ve been doing, I’m going to try to sell things to you (you: my three followers, or you: the entire world, depending on how you look at it).
I’ve posted my first cards in my new Etsy store. They are available in singles, or in packs of five. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfectly printed, but you want to be a part of my printing history, right? I did a very small run of these cards, so a limited quantity is available. Better hurry!
My nest cards are also available on Etsy in singles and packs of six. Please contact me if you are interested in larger sets.
I posted one of each last night just to get the shop set up, and they both sold within the hour! And the buyer wasn’t even my mom, but a stranger in Maine. I’m pretty psyched about getting these into hands and mailboxes across the country.
When couples have their first wedding anniversary, the traditional gift to give one another is one of paper. It has now been a year since Alex and I got married. He gave me a leather bound book, each page with a year-defining photo and beautiful little written summary of each year we have spent together, and he vows to continue adding to it each year. Of course, I cried. It was so sweet and special.
I made him these portraits of our little family. I printed each color on a different layer of velum, and when I layered them together, they appeared very faint, and kind of ghostly. I wanted to maintain that feeling to some degree, but I decided cut shapes out in various spots to expose more of the colors from the layers underneath. Then I sewed them together and mounted them in these deep frames, pinned to the mat with gold eyed needles from Alex’s grandma’s sewing kit. I made them separate to leave our family room to grow, maybe someday there will be a couple more frames on the wall.
Bet, my sweet and awesome mother-in-law, (how many people can say that and mean it?) has a house that’s full of beautiful things, like old books and quilts, collages of family photos, Alex’s pottery, and approximately a million nests. This little nest is on her new screened-in back porch, and I drew it while enjoying her porch and a cup of tea.
The trucks that came with my press were old and worn down, and one of them didn’t fit on my rollers for some reason, so I bought some new ones. I tested the nest print with just the two rollers, which did not provide the level of saturation I wanted. Also because the trucks were worn down, the rollers were hitting the plate harder than they should have, making the lines blobby. I went back and worked on it again today with three rollers and was able to get much closer to the result I’m going for.
Before: Two rollers, old trucks
After: Three rollers, new trucks
Difference in saturation and line definition before and after.
I still feel like it has a ways to go, but I’m encouraged to see that with a little patience and experimentation, the press will do what it was designed to do – even after 100 years of hard work. I’ll post the final product as soon as I’m done with it.
I spent all weekend making this:
A semi ovular blue blot of ink, sort of centered on a piece of paper (though, I must say, the paper is gorgeous. Oatmeal Speckletone from French Paper with tiny hairs and wood chips in it). Sweat, and a little bit of blood, have gone into this meaningless smudge. A nest will be printed over it, and the moment the nest plate kisses the paper, it will transform from nothing into something. A blob into an egg. It feels like working in reverse. It would have been much more natural to print the egg over the nest, but because of the black spots on the egg are a part of the nest plate I had to do it this way.
In a past life (college) I was an oil painter, and I had a never ending palette of colors to choose from. There were so many points in the process that I could change my mind or decide to emphasize one thing over another. Painters are allowed to be wishy washy, to change their minds halfway though an idea, and to leave visible evidence that hours, weeks, even months went into one piece. With letterpress, I think it has to look effortless to look great. I’m finding that I like feeling confined to a limited palette, I like having to brainstorm my way through a problem rather than just feel my way through it, and most of all, I like MULTIPLES. How novel. How refreshing.
Since finishing college, the idea of investing so much time into a painting that only a handful of people will see has been exhausting. Having multiple products come out of one idea and one effort feels like a huge turn away from the part of the art world that I never wanted to be involved in. I can send a card to everyone I know, and they can send one to everyone they know. And they’re not copies, each one is an original. Original art that doesn’t hang in a gallery, that can be scribbled on and handled by anyone who encounters it? That’s my kind of art.
