Sunday, January 15, 2012

Marriage, a Journey

This project has been long in coming. In truth, I'm skirting the statute of limitations for getting my gift to the couple within a year of their celebration. The quote here by Frederick Buechner used to be at the bottom of the bride's emails, sent during years abroad with the Peace Corps and the Foreign Service. She now signs her emails with a new quote, but this one seemed apt in relation to marriage.

The gift needed to be small, as the couple moves every two years, and the wooden cutting or cheese board beneath the frame, made by Russell James Ooms, is a small piece of California that can hopefully travel with them.



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Friday, January 13, 2012

Portraits from the Past

It's that time of year again, and the Vintage Paper Fair came and left Golden Gate Park's Hall of Flowers the first weekend in January. I was able to swing by for an hour Saturday morning and found many, many postcard vendors, but not much in the way of other ephemera. This year I was mostly looking forward to sorting through boxes of unlabeled, lost-in-time images. My interest was piqued by these two. What, do you imagine, are their stories?



It would be wonderful to sleep in a bed, in a tent, filled with light, no? 

Monday, January 2, 2012

Our 2011 Christmas Cards

The idea this year was simplicity. I was thinking about printing white on white, and I was thinking about snowflakes - perhaps because I began designing our Christmas card while in the mountains over Thanksgiving, where it snowed ever so briefly one afternoon. Our card was nearly finished when my laptop decided to stop working.

Still, perhaps this hiccup was fortuitous. I'd chosen a lovely quote for the card ... lovely but not quite right, the result of a Google Search, and for the rest of our stay in Tahoe, I was forced to stay offline. Instead I walked, took some cooking lessons from my mom, and read. I was doing some research on St. Francis of Assisi and his good friend, St. Clare, when I came across the words printed on the inside of our card. The phrase is attributed to St. Francis, some 800 years ago. The words rang true. They are simple. And it never hurts that they're in Italian. The association with St. Francis is perhaps why I added a bird; I'm not sure. That happened rather last minute when I scrapped the previous card design and started over a few weeks later - at home, with a repaired computer. We got the cards printed and out in the nick of time.






















































































The holidays always feel like a long time coming and then pass so quickly. I hope everyone had a merry, joyous Christmas and holiday season.

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