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

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

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!

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…

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!

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.

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!