Happy Mail & Roben-Marie Smith

There is nothing more fun than getting gorgeous mail! In the our techie world of texting, face book and emails, we seem to get less and less interesting tactile mail. So when a note from Roben-Marie Smith arrive, I couldn't wait to open it. Not only was it gorgeous on the outside but such wonderful color on the inside.

I love that she stitched together paper and fabric for her note card. (upper left)Here's a sample of a couple of the postcards she sent. You can get a series of four of her post cards for under $4.00! Roben-Marie is the proprietor of Paperbag Studios where she blogs, teaches on-line classes and has nice video section on how to make several projects.

Roben-Marie is also doing a year-long collaboration call "Points of Two". The project explores two points of view in creating art. Nice!

New prints from the Tacoma Wayzgoose

You can never have too much letterpress work! We picked up a couple of prints at the Tacoma Wayzgoose. There was lots to choose from so it was hard to decide!I love this bear print by JR Adler. He was in letterpress at PLU. I love the composition and color. You can get this print on JR's new etsy site.

I put the print on our metal door to photograph it. When I stepped back, the whole scene struck me as funny--because the print says "go inside" on our door that leads outside and the pinhole photography piece to the left is by Chandon Thorell which has a dressed up couple sitting on a couch in their yard. All the juxtapositions made my day, I'm leaving the print on the door!As I mentioned in the last post, the Beautiful Angle letterpress booth was a mob scene at the wayzgoose. If you haven't heard of them, they are graphic designer Lance Kagey and writer Tom Llewelleyn who create and distribute letterpress posters around Tacoma. Their work is wildly sought after and hard to obtain via the seek and find route. Thankfully, they brought prints to sell. Here's the print we got based on the 7 deadly sins.

The printing is lovely and the writing sublime. Again, I love the juxtaposition of image and text.

Check out Beautiful Angle's website. Really cool stuff!

Tacoma Wayzgoose April 2010

I'm a little late in posting this--it happened at the end of April! But I want to post some photos of the Tacoma Wayzgoose. A very well attended event with lots of activities with the highlight being steamroller printing. The event was held at a local bookstore - Kings Books - so if you see a wayzgoose in your area, definitely attend! It's a great way to see some fine printing, book arts, papermaking and even make some stuff for free!

Steamroller printing was the big deal of the day. (Literally!)
That is a LOT of linoleum to carve!The bird print is so lovely!Screen printing your own tee shirt was wildly popular!These guys brought some very heavy equipment to sell!Nothing says fun like Pie on a Stick! See, I made this print at the Springtide Press booth. Note the bear print hanging on the line in the background. I'll talk more about this in my next post.This is the calm before the storm. The Anagram Press booth was swamped with people from start to finish!

Also more discussion about Beautiful Angle's booth. It was definitely the busiest booth--they had folks making posters on Nolan press! People were lined up all day.

There were also local book arts groups and a book arts display by the PLU students.You can see more photos of the event on our flickr site.

Washi Eggs - The Paper Studio in First Magazine

The March 26th issue of First Magazine has a nice project doing washi eggs using our papers! The eggs are really beautiful and so light & delicate. Our origami packs work great for this and so so all our beautiful yuzen/washi papers!

So the next time you are whipping up breakfast, baking cookies or getting ready for Easter - save your eggs for this super fun project! Click on the article below to see a larger version.

Vandercook Maintence Class

Here's some pics of the Vandercook Maintenance Workshop with Paul Moxon. These photos don't do the session justice. There was so much going on--I was too busy taking notes!Nice to meet our fellow vandercookers from Tucson!Testing rollers.

New nyliners.

Oh please go back together correctly!

We had to readjust the carriage which practically took about every tool we had plus a village to get it done.Ian's pals.

For the Love of Letterpress

I participated in a coaster exchange over valentines day. It was a delight getting this sweet box of coasters!

I love the simplicity of the blue letters and red birds

The little heart beings and the "hey mambo" are such fun!

New Papers plus sale!

We just loaded over 30 gorgeous new papers online this week! To see the new papers, just click the image.

Also, we are continuing our amazing India Prints Paper sale for one more week. We are making room for all the new styles that will be arriving! Click the image below to see the sale papers.

Happiest of Valentines--letterpress, chocolates & books!

I love valentine's day because you are practically expected to eat chocolate!

Here's a sampling of letterpress valentines from our card class. So fun!

In the letterpress valentine class, some folks also did some tee shirt printing.

Yay Denise! Her shirt is for valentines, breast cancer and healthy hearts!

This is the other reason I love valentines day! The annual VNSA book sale. Over 600,000 used books on sale at the state fair grounds. This is an all volunteer effort and the money from the book sale goes to local charities.
So many books, not enough arms to carry them!

Every area has a sign for their book categories. This is my favorite sign at the books sale--not sure if you can read it: Book on terrorists, espionage, disasters & sneaky people!

We definitely did our part donating to charity as we left with a cartload of books.

Support your local park district!

In this day and age where city budget cuts are happening like crazy, we all need to get out and support our local parks department! Lots of their programs help fund their budget and they are incredibly fun, informative and reasonably priced.

Gary and I with our friend Lisa recently went on a dusk hike at the Rio Salado Habitat. It was amazing that you could look to the west and see the sun setting and to the east to see the full moon rising. Of course, I forgot to bring my camera! But the weather was fabulous about 68 degrees and it was great to be outside for 3 hours. We just had a bunch of rain so the river had just receded and washed out a lot of the vegetation. Lisa sent me before photos (above) when she was there in December--so lovely and below is how the habitat looked at the end of January--all washed out.

In the washed out state, you could see the debris that flooded in from all the storm drains. So important not to pollute--it winds up in the river bed! The rangers said that the habitat will revert back to the December pre-flood state in a couple of months. Amazing.

Here's the added bonus on the night--we learned about cooking in dutch ovens and made three dishes before we left on the hike.One of park rangers stayed and oversaw the dutch ovens. When we returned from the hike, we got to eat the yummy food! Three hours of fun, education and food for $9.00. Such a deal!