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

Galison Press and Morris & Essex!

Hooray! I am SUPER excited about this news, because I have been a big fan of Galison Press for ever and ever! Last year they invited me to collaborate on a set of stationery products, using my designs and produced by Galison. Their products are always beautiful and I’m so so so thrilled that these awesome goodies are finally on store shelves nationwide! They’re also available from the Galison website.

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

new linocut

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!

Valentines completed!

All finished and ready to go! They are for sale in my etsy shop!

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

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!

Happy Birthday card

I would like to note that it just happens today is the birthday of one of my best friends in the whole world! Happy Birthday EBD! Anyway, I came here to share a new card design! Here are some process photos – I started with a sketch and then transferred it to linoleum, mounted the linoleum on a special block of wood, and cut the design into the linoleum block:

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…

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!