Slow mail

I think the ongoing demise of the handwritten letter & the ‘snail mail’ posting of cards or notes to mark occasions (special or otherwise) is rather sad. A txt msg or email will never be a good substitute for receiving an interesting piece of post – you can’t beat the excitement and anticipation of finding an intriguing envelope waiting for you in your letterbox! And what about penmanship?! Do the kids still handwrite… you know, with ink and actual pens?

I love this postcard, found a couple of years ago at the wonderful (but now sadly closed down update: open again! see comments :) Bowne & Co. Stationers in the South Street Seaport area of Lower Manhattan
(postcard © John Derian Company, Inc)

As I appear to be a confirmed (and grumpy!) Luddite when it comes to the ubiquity of digital communications I’m very happy to have some of my work included in the screen printing and papercutting sections of this nifty new book by Charlotte Rivers (published earlier this month):

‘A wolf and a bear in a winter wood’ – screen printed cards

papercut ‘snowflake’ cards

And I’m delighted to find myself sharing its pages with a super-talented friend…

Jesse Breytenbach, Cape Town, South Africa (letterpress & block printing)

… and a whole host of other great, old-school stationery practitioners. The book is divided into eight sections: hand-drawn illustration, screen printing, letterpress printing, block printing, digital illustration, calligraphy, papercutting and collage/3-D/sewn, and includes brief but informative descriptions of each technique followed by inspirational examples from around the globe. Here are some of my favourite discoveries from the book:

MrYen, Leeds, UK (papercutting)

Sesame Letterpress, New York, USA (letterpress printing)

Winged Wheel, Tokyo, Japan (letterpress printing)

Karolin Schnoor, London, UK (hand-drawn illustration)

Katharine Watson, Washington DC, USA (block printing)

If you’re looking for some inspirational stationery eye-candy the book can be found online here (Amazon UK) or here (Amazon US) >

Dutch Design Week

I’m thrilled to have some of my work represented by Etsy (thanks, Etsy!) at Dutch Design Week, which starts in Eindhoven today (22 October) and runs until 30 October 2011.

I’m up to my eyeballs in work at the moment so won’t be able to make the trip to attend any of the exhibitions or events, but if you’re near Eindhoven in the next week pop along to DDW – it looks like there will be a lot of good stuff happening. Here’s a taster…

from top to bottom:

> Haak Aan! (‘Get Hooked’ urban knitting/yarn bombing exhibit)
> *SMD – Living Data (graphic design)

> Anne Varekamp (“CupCakeCup”, ceramics)
> Architecture.ehv (graduate work from TU/e‘s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning)

> Duurzaam en Ecologisch Viltwerk (ecologically sustainable/animal friendly feltwork by Beatrice Waanders)
> Tim van Cromvoirt ‘Thermophores’ (work by recent graduates from The Academy of Art & Design, AKV|St.Joost University of Applied Sciences)

NYC menagerie

Some of the things I particularly enjoy about Amsterdam’s urban landscape are the multifarious beasties that can be found adorning many of the buildings and canal bridges (some can be found here). So I was very happy to find a similarly vast, varied and handsome menagerie in ‘New Amsterdam‘…

approximate locations/descriptions, from top to bottom:
deco owl, detail on elaborate nickel silver & bronze entrance to 20 Exchange Place (1930-31), Lower Manhattan | exceedingly handsome lion (‘Patience‘), guarding the staircase of the main branch entrance, New York Public Library (1902-11), Fifth Avenue | sea creatures, detail of bronze frieze (‘Evolution’), Chanin Building (1929), at Lexington Avenue & 42nd Street | fierce wolf, 20 Exchange Place | Pegasus, Rockefeller Centre (1930-39), Sixth Avenue/Avenue of the Americas | sleeping greyhound, Green-Wood Cemetery (est. 1838), Brooklyn | ducks in flight, detail of bronze frieze, Chanin Building | griffins, Guardian Angel Church (1930′s), Tenth Avenue at West 21st Street, Chelsea | squirrel weathervane, near Washington Square, Greenwich Village | sole, detail of bronze frieze, Chanin Building | steer skull, Engineers’/Runners’ Gate, Central Park | nouveau peacocks, Brooklyn Heights | sad lion, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn | ocean faring beasties, Williamsburgh Savings Bank building (1927), 74 Wall Street at Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan | gargoyle, Broome Street, SoHo & ram, West 23rd Street, Chelsea

… and a pale blue bear

Once again December is almost upon us, so I’ve been hard at work on the ol’ annual production line!

These cards are the result of last week’s screenprinting session and an extended rendezvous with a bone folder and a sharp blade (oh, to be able to hand-print a full bleed and thus make trimming superfluous!).

I find that this time of year can get a little unnecessarily frenetic so I always aim to create a ‘festive greeting card’ that is a small oasis of calm in the midst of all the busy-ness we make for ourselves or have thrust upon us. Since moving to the Netherlands I’ve noticed bare-branched winter trees have become a recurring theme for me. It’s strange, because there are plenty of bare-branched winter trees in London at this time of year… but they apparently didn’t make the same impression?

As is so often the case at this stage in the process (or any process of ‘mass-production’) I’ve become most interested in the abstraction that is the inevitable result of multiplication and repetition…

I’ve been enjoying the zigzagging chevron shapes created by the rows of cards as I trim, score, fold and stack ‘em up. Those shapes combined with the yellow/golden colours of a pale autumn sun low in the sky transform them in to something entirely ‘other’… and when given the ‘Pathological Puppy’ treatment in Photoshop a repeat pattern quite unrelated to the original design can be arrived at:

But back to the actual cards…

This year I have made a few more than we’ll use and several packs of four cards each are available in my shop, should you wish to have your festive (or any other) messages delivered by a pale blue bear…

… or a pale blue wolf.

Winter valleys

This project has been a l-o-n-g time in the making!

I block printed the fabric at the end of April, after being inspired to do so by a ‘happy accident’ encountered when I made these at the end of last year.

After heat setting the printed fabric I put it away and forgot about it for a time. In mid June I hauled it out again, cut some of it to size for a 50×50 cm (± 20 in) cushion cover and started to embroider a sparse little forest of winter trees (once again, as per these, and perhaps inspired by these).

I haven’t attempted embroidery for many moons (apart from adding details to the faces of a peculiar little gang of reprobate cats I made several years ago – which, against my better judgement, I’ll show you tomorrow :)… but I digress) and wasn’t sure how I’d take to it. I remember hating embroidery when made to do it as part of ‘needlework’ classes in junior school (a long time ago!) but this time around I found it a very enjoyable activity – the gentle process of (essentially) drawing with hundreds of tiny stitches is very meditative and relaxing… as I hoped the finished design itself would be.

Once the trees were all stitched I braced myself for the final hurdle – inserting a zip! I’m an extreme novice sewer and have never worked with zips before, and for some reason I’d built this up in my mind as an impossible and insurmountable task.

I won’t say it was a breeze but will say, for anyone reading this who might’ve similarly convinced themselves of the impossibility of inserting zips, that it wasn’t that bad. *

Zips!… not as gut-wrenchingly terrifying as I thought

 

‘Winter valleys’ cushion cover… finally completed!
And (below)… looking almost summery :)

 

* Zip help:
I followed instructions in the ‘New Complete Guide to Sewing’ (which is a great resource, albeit with some dodgy 80′s styled photos) and a photocopy, which my Mum brought when she was visiting in June, from (I think!?) the 1977 publication ‘The Reader’s Digest Family Book of Things to Make and Do’ (I have very fond childhood memories of this book! Sadly long out of print). My Mum also talked me through the process while she was here, which was no doubt invaluable in making the actual doing a few weeks later less scary.
Thanks Mum!