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!

On Monday Design*Sponge ran a little set of photos of our house. It’s part of a weekly series called Sneak Peeks where they show photos of different artists’ and designers’ homes and spaces. I’m a regular reader of Design*Sponge, it always perks me up to look through Grace’s daily picks of interesting and inspiring designs. So I was really honored to be asked to send in pictures of my home!!
It’s also exciting because I really totally love this apartment, I feel so much at-home here, it’s like a physical manifestation of my colorful, convoluted, cluttered and drafty mental space, I still feel really lucky we found this place!… so I am psyched to be able to show off our fabulous apartment to the world… But most of the interiors they feature are so very clean and tidy and smooth and look like they belong on glossy magazine pages… so I was a little apprehensive about whether our, uh, rustic apartment would fit into the series.
To do the photo shoot, I decided I could really use professional photography help and our friend Stephen put me in contact with his friend Caitlin, who turned out to be very nice and absolutely professional and talented. I made some cute new curtains for the kitchen, bought lots of flowers, Mike and I cleaned the heck out of the apartment. At the last minute, frustrated by a few unsightly objects and stacks of clutter that I couldn’t find homes for, I did hide piles of junk into the oven and the bathtub.
In all, it was a ton of fun doing the photo shoot and the pictures came out looking beautiful. Caitlin has a great eye and knows what she’s doing.
In truth, the apartment was furnished when we moved in so we aren’t really responsible for most of the design decisions here. The only thing that’s ours is the art on the walls. It’s a little weird reading all the nice comments directed towards me, since most of the credit should go to Adrian and Laura, our landlords who furnished the place with all these fun colorful flea-market odds and ends.

had a table at a really cute craft fair in Colegiales on Sunday.
it was sponsored by this shop: www.ca-nas-ta.org
it was tons of fun, gorgeous weather, met lots of nice new people, sold lots of cards!

new card designs! updating my website! organizing my hard drive!
i don’t have any freelance projects right now :/ which is something that i kinda always want – because i love having creative time to myself!! – but also scary because i need the paychecks, ya know. and i don’t know when i’ll have work again. freelance life is such a constant roller-coaster. anyway, this down-time is filling my mind with lots of fun project ideas. but for now, i’m trying to focus on Morris & Essex. I’ve made some sweet new card designs (see above!) and i am now updating my website with the new designs, and thinking about how I can sell more cards! publicity is the hardest part, but it’s also probably the most important. of course, i’ll post all the new stuff when it’s ready to share.

poppytalk is a fun blog, I love her current series of interviews about collections and collecting. the pictures below are from the collections of San Francisco artist Lisa Congdon.

This last picture, the typewriter ribbon tins, is from the collection of Calgary designer Janine Vangool, and it caught my eye because of the Webster tin in the lower right-hand corner, I have the same one! It was a gift from Alicia and Kathy, I’m pretty sure that Kathy found it somewhere in her mother’s amazing house full of stuff and it’s one of my favorite items in my studio. I use it to hold my huge supply of extra x-acto blades.

These stories about collections make me a little nostalgic for all the cool junk I used to have before I gave away all my stuff and moved to South America.

my new project is making hand-printed greeting cards… and now they are available for sale through my website. www.morrisessex.net
Right now you need to sign up for a (free) etsy account to make a purchase. If you make an order, your cards should arrive on your doorstep in about a week.
i’m so excited that I finished my website! yay!