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

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.

renegade craft fair

June 5th and 6th we headed to Brooklyn to set up the Morris & Essex booth at the Renegade Craft Fair – it was a great time and a big success!! Thanks a million to everyone who stopped by and visited, bought stuff or said hello, and ESPECIALLY to EP and Caroline who hosted us and all our stuff at their beautiful apartment AND put in tons of work helping us set up the booth and sell things and bringing us snacks and generally making us happy! (and a special thanks also to Leslie who stopped by to feed us freshly-baked strawberry rhubarb pies, just at the very moment when I was about to die of hunger!)

Morris & Essex booth -photo by Lisa! thank you!

this post is a work in progress, more details to come, about our trip and the fair…

Maine Maple Sunday

cauldrons of boiling maple sap steaming in the cold morning air

Sunday was Maine Maple Sunday, a day when all the maple farms open up their sugar shacks for visitors to come see the steamy maple-syrup-making process. They use taps and hoses to gather sap from lots of trees, and pour it all into a giant vat, then build a fire underneath and boil and boil and boil and boil until the watery sap cooks down into a concentrated, sticky, tasty syrup. It takes around 30 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup, and 1 cord of firewood to make 25 gallons of syrup! We went to visit a few neighborhood farms, Merrifield Farm in Gorham and Morin’s Maple Farm in Limerick, which is close to our new house in Limington. Our friend Paz came with us to visit Merrifield’s. Over the course of the day, we tasted pure shaved maple sugar, warm maple syrup on vanilla ice cream, maple cream on crackers, leaf-shaped maple sugar candies, and chocolate cupcakes with maple cream icing.

inside the steamy sugar shack

at Merrifield Farm in Gorham

a pail of sap, Paz and Mike

old maple syrup tins at Merrifield’s

Midge’s Ice Cream

just opened for the season!

This cute little place is right down the street from our house in Limington. Perfect for biking over there on a warm summer evening. We’ve driven past it a few times and I always think “I can’t wait til they open!” So as soon as we saw the lights on, we stopped in for a taste. I had a “moose on sugar,” that is, Moose Tracks ice cream on a sugar cone. I believe Midge herself took my order.