oink.

These piglets were a fun departure from the rest of the custom stationary I printed over the holidays. They are printed on 100% cotton A6 flat notecards, packaged with charcoal envelopes.

simple thank you's

These thank you notes were printed on high quality ivory, textured Italian paper stock sold by Cavallini & Co.

Custom Stationery

Before printing our holiday cards this year, I printed eight sets of custom stationery as gifts (not all pictured), packaged as boxes of 10 envelopes and flat cards.

The majority were printed on 100% cotton A6 flat notecards, using fonts by Emily Lime Design.

2012 Holiday Card

Hopefully our holiday cards have all reached their destinations. I didn't intend to wait until the last moment to design and print our cards this year, but due to some circumstances beyond our control, we spent much of the Christmas prep time away from home - and away from the letterpress.

I wanted to create a letterpress photo card (much like what Apple offers here), as it was Izzy's first Christmas, but I wasn't sure where I could order only the photo print, on nice card stock.

So we went for an A6 flat card on Paper Source's lovely new Savoy Cotton paper and sent a separate photo of our daughter. We were trying to keep it simple, and were hoping for a sort of modern vintage feel. I'm not super thrilled with how the cards came out, but they made it into the mail before Christmas!

Photographing the Everyday

The lovely Kate of JetKat Photo offered a morning workshop for photographing children at her home this past Sunday and donated all proceeds to charity: water. We spent a lovely morning breakfasting, learning new techniques, and practice-shooting in Kate's beautiful home.

The workshop was the perfect opportunity for me to finally spend some time with my Nikon D90, which I didn't have too long before my daughter was born. I spent the time playing with the aperture and manual focus settings so that I can finally start achieving the kind of images I've been after: more light-filled and with blurred backgrounds, hopefully to the benefit of my daughter, and also my letterpress work (which I've been quite busy with as of late!).

Here's a few of my practice shots:

Conveniently, I went from the workshop to lunch with my family and got a little more practice with my main subject these days:

Moveable Type: Kyle Durrie's mobile print shop visits SF

Yesterday I went down to the San Francisco Main Public Library to visit the Moveable Type truck, womanned by Kyle Durrie, founder and owner of Power and Light Press. In November of 2010, Kyle launched a Kickstarter campaign to outfit a Chevy step van with two letterpresses: an 1873 Golding Official No. 3 tabletop platen, and mid-twentieth century Showcard sign press (which was really cool).

Kyle spent a year traveling across North America in her mobile print shop before returning home to Oregon. Luckily for me, she recently took the van out for another spin and I was able to visit her shop and make a print. Given my love for books, our library-themed print will definitely be finding a home on our wall.

Putting the Book back into eBooks

Made by the oldest bookbindery in the U.S. - using heavyweight cloth, recycled materials and traditional techniques - these hard covers have been pimped out inside with a rubber cradle that will fit an iPad 2 or 3, Kindle Fire 7" and soon, the Nexus 7.

Even more rad, the company will donate an actual book to a community in need with each eJacket purchase. Available from Out of Print.