chairs. boston museum of fine arts

Took a trip to Boston with the family this week. Really excited about all the inspiring design, applied art, folk art, and colonial era wallpaper in the new Art of the Americas wing.

awesome new custom Holiday cards on Hello Lucky

Today is a very special day! Hello Lucky has just released their new custom Holiday card shop, and they are featuring five new designs by Morris & Essex, made especially for Hello Lucky.

These cards are pretty cool, because you can upload your own photo of yourself and your adorable family or pets or what-have-you, and your own personal greeting message. Your photo will be placed inside my lovely border, with a delightful holiday design on the flip side. So you get an adorable photo and a stylish seasonal greeting card, all in one.

This was really fun to work on and I am so incredibly honored to collaborate with the venerable Hello Lucky, whose fantastic stationery I have long admired.

So, in celebration of this exciting new collaboration, today I am teaming up with Hello Lucky to give away a $100 gift certificate to Hello Lucky, which one very lucky reader can use to buy anything from the marvelous Hello Lucky shop! There are a few ways enter for the giveaway:

•go to twitter and re-tweet this post
•go to the Morris & Essex facebook page and “Like” us!
•go to the Morris & Essex facebook page and “Like” today’s post about the Hello Lucky giveaway.

don’t forget to share the news with anyone else who’d love to win! There will be one entry for each re-tweet, one entry for each person who likes today’s facebook post, plus one entry for every new facebook fan. The winner will be announced here on my blog, and on the Morris & Essex facebook page, on Wednesday November 9th. Good luck!

“Rustic Snowflakes” holiday cards on Hello Lucky

fun Woodland stationery items, designed by Morris & Essex for Galison Press

The way we worked together was that they picked out their favorite designs from my website, and tweaked them a bit to fit their design formats, and they also asked me to generate some new design elements (such as the hand-written script on book spines and packaging). So it’s a little bit funny to see my familiar designs in a new and different format, but it was so much fun to do this, and the finished products look wonderful! I’m so thankful for this awesome experience and really excited that my designs are widely available, at a great price point, and finding their way into lots of new hands.

fun Woodland stationery items, designed by Morris & Essex for Galison Press

first test print

I’ve been working away on a new Thank You card design. I sketched it up on paper, then copied it into Illustrator to fine-tune, printed it out and traced it onto a block of linoleum which I carved up for printing. Next week I’m hoping to do a full edition on the letterpress, I’m thinking of a dark red ink. I will post finished photos when the time comes!

carving away!

Here’s the letterpress valentine card:

this is the hand-carved linoleum block that I made and used to print the cards!

linocut plate, mounted on wood block

I started out with a plain old sheet of rubbery “linoleum” (it’s not truly linoleum, it’s a modern version that’s a little less brittle and easier to cut) and transferred my design onto it with pencil, then carved it up with special knives (which takes a long time and lots of care and focus!), then mounted the lino on a special wood block. My dad helped me make up a batch of these wood blocks a few months ago – they are made from nice hard, dry, maple which is an especially stable wood that shouldn’t warp or swell too much. Planed and sanded to a very exact height so it will fit in the letterpress. After the glue set, I took it over to Dunstan Press, where Mark printed up a big batch of these lovely valentine cards for me!

Here’s a cut-paper version of the same design:

cut-paper valentine

paper cut valentine, hand-made vellum envelope

working on a new valentine design today! I’m so excited. I hope I can get it done in time to sell for Valentine’s day – I’m afraid I’m cutting it a bit close :/ On Friday I worked up the design in Illustrator, inspired by the cut-paper-valentines that my mom and I always made together for each other, family, and all my classmates when I was in elementary school. I also just stumbled upon Hans Christian Andersen’s wonderful paper cuts, so that was on my mind while I was working on this too. Anyway, today I will transfer the finished design onto a linoleum plate and cut it out with lino-cut knives. Hopefully tomorrow I can drop it off for Mark to start printing on his letterpress!

linocut project

here’s some test prints using the finished linoleum block:

card design in process … messy work table!

aaaand here’s how the finished card turned out!

it’s up for sale in my Etsy shop now…