Hello Lucky collaboration, and giveaway!

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

Pinterest

I’ve been using this sporadically for a while, but just recently have gotten into checking in every day. I don’t know which is more fun, pinning things on all of my boards, or poring through all the awesome stuff everyone else has posted. I’m mostly just using it for visual inspiration but I love seeing other folks use it for collecting recipes, places to travel, plans and dreams. Fun stuff. Here’s me: www.pinterest.com/elizajanecurtis/

geometric patterns on pinterest

beautiful

salvation army paintings.

I really really wanted to buy both of these but I was on a budget so I had to pick just one. You’ll have to come visit our house to find out which one I got!

nesting boxes project

I made a set of nesting boxes for BCO craft swap project. I used some of my favorite patterns that I’ve designed lately, and printed them on colored papers which I used to cover the lids. Used chipboard under the printed papers for the tops, and used mat board for the bottoms. I cut strips of kraft paper and glued them over all seams, inside and out, for extra strength and neatness. The final product seems excessively sturdy. Hopefully the recipient will find them delightful and useful and durable.

valentine

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!

picnic holiday craft fair

Picnic holiday craft fair, 2010

Picnic holiday craft fair at the Irish Heritage Center in Portland, Maine. December 11/12, 2010. music, crafts, friends, awesomeness! It was really snowy out but the place was jam packed despite the weather. I had an awesome crew of booth neighbors (and because space was tight, we really got to bond!): Cassie Bouton and her awesome hand-printed housewares (and her beautiful and very well-behaved newborn baby), Allison of Drawn Onward, Dunja of DoonYaYa, and a very nice vintage dealer whose business card I have misplaced. Thanks, Picnic, for being awesome again!

Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago

Morris & Essex booth. Renegade Craft Fair, Chicago

Just a few weeks after our Maine craft show extravaganza, we packed up the suitcases and headed off to Chicago for another round! I printed up TONS of new t-shirts and packed them ALL into suitcases (heavy!) and was forced to get my whole craft-fair routine significantly more organized in order to fit myself and all my stuff into an airplane and not frazzle my brains too much in the process. I think I am getting better at the craft fair routine every time we do it. Renegade Chicago is a huge event! It started out a little rough on Saturday, it was raining and I wasn’t feeling well and setting up was kinda not that fun. There were LOTS of shoppers but most of them turned out to be browsers and it felt like we weren’t selling that much. But by the afternoon the sun was peeking out, things were getting funner, people started buying stuff, Mike brought me a nice cup of sangria, then Dan and Kristi and Julia stopped by to visit… by the end of the day it was all just great. Sunday was a fantastic day from beginning to end, sunny and lovely and kind of overwhelmingly busy. I did manage to slip out of the booth and wander around the fair for a while and saw all kinds of awesome stuff. I’m sure I am forgetting lots of exciting things but here are the favorites I can remember:

Shapes & Colors

Shapes & Colors. These guys were super cute, their printed pillowcases and bags are simple and bright and perfect (great color palette!) and of course I was attracted to them because that is the name that Julia and I picked out last year for the awesome website that we never really made. But that’s another story.

up in the air somewhere

beautiful ceramics from up in the air somewhere

Beau Ideal stationery

Beau Ideal whose work is a lot like mine, only awesomer!

Maryink tees

I’ve admired Maryink t-shirts for years, but never bought one – I got to meet Chris and I bought this one, only on a dark blue t-shirt.

Winter Session booth

really cute canvas bags and aprons by Winter Session

La Familia Green

La Familia Green, whose awesome cut-paper mexican folk-art posters caught my eye on some website years ago – it was exciting to meet Mollie and of course she is really nice and sweet.

Greyhound rescue

And Mike of course made friends with the great folks at the Greyhound rescue.

renegade handmade storefront in Chicago

At the end of the fair I went over to chat with the folks at the Renegade Handmade shop, and they took a bunch of my cards to sell in their shop year-round. Awesome!!

Picnic Craft Fair in Portland, Maine

Morris & Essex booth

August 28th. Perfect weather, amazing and beautiful day in every way. Thanks to everyone who stopped by! And special thanks to my sister Amy and to Paz, who both stopped by to help out! And to Mike, who worked all day long at the booth with me! We sold tons of stuff, had a fantastic day, and ate the best pulled pork sandwiches and iced teas from the food carts. Highlights: met and traded with fellow vendor Colleen Kinsella, who is a friend of my sister and makes really great prints; we traded some of my shirts for some of her prints! Erin Flett, who makes gorgeous pillows and prints, and who I met via Etsy – she lives just a few minutes from my parents’ house in Gorham!

Erin Flett Booth – Picnic Portland

And I got to meet and trade work with Jennifer Judd-McGee of Swallowfield, whose work I have admired since I stumbled across it on the internet a few years ago and thought “that’s so cool, she’s from Maine!”

Swallowfield

Plus Diane of Ferdinand, of course, who is awesome and makes awesome stuff and helped to organize this perfect day.

t-shirts from Ferdinand

There was great music all day too. And nautical fun times with Meghan, Emily and Kit at the after party. Best day. Only downside? I came down with the worst cold the next day!

Isle Au Haut camping trip

Western Head trail. Isle Au Haut camping trip. Penobscot Bay, Maine

Way back in April we reserved a campsite for a weekend at Isle Au Haut, a little island off the Maine coast, an hour out from Stonington by ferry. It’s actually an outpost of the famous Acadia National Park, which is mostly located up the coast a bit on Mount Desert Island – but there is a less-known snippet of the Acadia National Park land located on Isle Au Haut. We heard the campsites are hot property and it’s hard to get a reservation in the summertime, so the thing to do is send in your campsite request as soon as applications open in April. We just closed our eyes, pointed at a random date on the calendar, and mailed in a request for it. A few weeks later we got our camping permit back in the mail! August 6th and 7th. It turned out that Mike’s friend Paul (from San Francisco) came to visit us that week, so we all went camping together. And by some crazy coincidence, in the week before our trip, two different shopkeepers at different stores in mid-coast Maine randomly happened to contact me and ask if they could buy some of my goods for their stores. So I packed up my stationery and t-shirts and made plans to stop and sell my goods along the way!

along the drive: one of many grand old houses in Wiscasset; lobster traps at the flea market, route 1 in Searsport

It was a nice opportunity to take a leisurely drive up the Maine coast and show Mike around some of the most famous coastal destination spots in the state. We headed out on Friday after lunch, north on Route 1 through Freeport, did get stuck in traffic for an hour or so (Route 1 is a two-lane coastal road famous for being a) beautiful and b) jammed with tourists in August). It turned into a beautiful drive along the jaggedy coastline, over bridges and across peninsulas and through pines and salt marshes. We stopped in Camden to check out the town and meet Amy at Sugar Tools, a new shop on Bay View Street with a very sweet and sophisticated selection of items from around the world – home goods, stationery, gardening stuff, etc. She took some rooster cards and greetings! cards to add to her stationery selection. And then on up the coast to bustling Belfast, Maine, where we arrived downtown in the middle of the Friday evening Art Walk. All the galleries and shops had their doors open, there were performers out on the sidewalks, there was a parade of antique cars, free wine and snacks, it was a surprisingly festive moment to arrive in town. We made our way to Roots and Tendrils, a really sweet space in a gorgeous old building down on the waterfront, where we met Meg and Bub and sold lots more greeting cards and enjoyed a bit more wine and snacks in the festive pre-show atmosphere – they were setting up for a live music night on the corner stage. It’s a fun multi-function space with art on the walls, a great selection of exciting and artsy goods (all made in Maine, but not your predictable selection of blueberry jams and watercolors – awesome t-shirts, journals, cards, zines, bright jewelry, etc etc), and live music playing on the stage every weekend.

Roots and Tendrils

Then we moved on to the famous Belfast Food Co-op, which is the state’s oldest food coop or something like that. It’s an AWESOME place. We were really hungry but I can objectively say that it was not just the hunger, this place is incredible. We stocked up on fresh veggies, trail mix, all kinds of camping and hiking treats, and some wholesome snacks to nibble on the road.

view from bridge leaving Belfast, headed north

And then we had to head northwards again, on up through Searsport in the golden evening light, and across Bucksport’s two bridges in a blazing sunset. We stopped at about eight places trying to find a little fuel cannister for our camp stove, finally found one and headed south down the peninsula towards Deer Isle in the twilight. It was kind of a tough road to drive as it got darker, we were on these crazy twisty windy hilly coastal backroads so we were relieved when we finally made it across the bridge from the mainland to Little Deer Isle, across another bridge to proper Deer Isle, and across the last bridge to Stonington. Of course it was dark and we were groggy from hours in the car, so we got all confused and lost and had to ask for directions to find our campground in the dark. I set up both tents while the boys started a campfire and we had a tasty late supper around the fire.
Early in the morning, up and off to the ferry landing in town, for the 10 am ferry out to Isle Au Haut.

Stonington

It’s around an hour’s ride, I think. I dozed through it because I hadn’t slept well in the tent. Arrived at Isle Au Haut and disembarked at the Duck Harbor campground landing. Dropped our packs at our lean-to, had a snack, and headed right out for a nice big hike! We headed up across the Duck Harbor Mountain Trail, which goes right up to the summit of the island. It was a fantastic hiking day, crisp and clear and sharp. Beautiful piney trail that opens out onto ledges. We had to do a few challenging scrambles over sheer rock faces around the summit; I had to tie my water bottle to my belt and use both hands and feet and sometimes knees. Fun! But we passed a few other hikers who were like “THIS IS CRAZY!” We were rewarded with lovely views out across the harbor and out to sea, scattered with lobster boats, islands and bright sunshine.

Mike hiking up; Paul at the summit

mushroom, flower, pine cone

Squeaker Cove

We descended to Squeaker Cove and then followed the Goat Trail to the Cliff Trail and then the Western Head trail looped back to Western Head Road which took us back to our campsite. Here’s a trail map.

mosses, ferns

The trails run through fantastical magical-looking mossy woods, and then out onto beaches made up entirely of rounded, fist-sized sea-washed rocks that make an amazing echoing hollow sound when you walk across them.

tiny cairns

The whole hike was something like 5 hours. Got back to camp tired and hungry and happy to see we’d brought along a bottle of wine.

dinner, lean-to

sitting on the rocks and watching the sun go down

Next morning: sat on the rocks watching seagulls, knitting and reading. Took a picture of the rusty woodstove sitting by the trail in the woods. Packed up camp, sat on the dock til the ferry came. I stayed awake for the ride back, which was lovely… we passed this awesome lighthouse down by the town landing in Isle Au Haut. It happens to be for sale, in case anybody has $2M sitting around and wants to own a lighthouse!

waiting on the dock; our ferry was named Miss Lizzie.

Isle Au Haut lighthouse