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…

busy designing

I’ve had no time to post anything because I’m so busy working! My online Typography classes at the Academy of Art have just finished and I’m reviewing final portfolios (they all arrived in the mail this week!) and finishing up paperwork, submitting final grades. I’ve got some more freelance work (t-shirt graphics for OshKosh), and the biggest project of all, I’m working on new Morris & Essex products for the upcoming Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn, which is just one week away!

I’m developing new t-shirt and greeting card designs, so I’ve been working on new design ideas, selecting a few classic favorites to bring back, researching and ordering t-shirts, and building my new screenprinting studio so I can start working! I built a nice big wooden light table for exposing my screens, I built a new printing station with screen hinges, I found a great big old mess table in my parents’ basement to use for a printing table, bought screens and screen-making materials and emulsion, inks, squeegees, etc. I used to have all of these things in my studio in Brooklyn but when I moved to Argentina I had to sell them all so I’m starting over again from scratch, sigh. Cleaned out the studio space at the new house and started priming and painting the walls, set up shelving to store all my supplies, unpacked boxes of art supplies, set up a drying area to hang wet shirts, got the whole studio set up and I’m printing now! I’m having a bit of trouble with the photographic process, namely my “darkroom” (a windowless bathroom) doesn’t seem to be dark enough and sometimes causes me problems, hopefully I’ll figure out how to make that work a little better this weekend. I’ve printed a few of my designs already and I’ve got a bunch more to go!

And I’ve got new card designs too… two brand-new designs, letterpress printed. So I’ve ordered the paper and custom-mixed ink colors, had type-high metal plates engraved from my designs, and I’ve been driving out to Scarborough to work with my letterpress printer, Mark at Dunstan Press, each day, basically standing by the press with him and making sure each stage of the printing process is going well, colors are correct and registration is perfect, etc. It’s really fun to see it all happen! I’ve ordered envelopes and little clear boxes and sleeves for packaging the finished product. I’m hoping I’ll have time to do some screenprinted card designs too, we’ll see how next week goes. It’s going to be a crazy week.

Back to work! Photos and more details to come, probably not until after the fair is over!

sneak peek!

more nice publicity for Morris & Essex…

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.

craft fair saturday

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!

i’m working on…

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.

yaay! thanks poppytalk.

this morning brought me another nice write-up about Morris & Essex on the design blog poppytalk!

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.

Valentine

I’ve got a new card design up for sale, special for Valentine’s Day! fun!!

fun folky valentine card

printed on the gocco machine, using two screens – the pink stripes are the first screen, then the color gradient is a second screen using a carefully blended mix of a dozen different ink colors!

yay! design*sponge post

almost every morning when I start my work day, I check my email and then I take a peek at design sponge, a daily design blog where there’s always some new and fun pictures to look at. because the site has become such a pleasant part of my daily routine, i feel really excited and proud that Grace featured my new website and stationery on Wednesday! Click here to read that post.

new website, cards for sale!

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!

Renegade Craft Fair

T-Shirts for sale
Originally uploaded by elizajanecurtis.

Last weekend we took the t-shirts to the Renegade Craft Fair in Williamsburg and it was such a HUGE success!! A beautiful sunny weekend and lots of amazing stuff. I was too busy selling t-shirts to take many pictures. Big thanks for Mike for being an awesome salesman and great company. And to everybody who stopped by to say hi. The fair went so well I was inspired to finally re-post Morris & Essex online: www.morrisessex.net. Hopefully there will soon be online ordering too!