Tag Archives: soy based ink

A dinner for The Hollywood Farmers’ Market

When the production of The Cooking Channel series “He Cooks She Cooks” asked me to create a printed menu for a benefit dinner cooked by Suzanne Goin and David Lentz, I jumped at the opportunity.

I LOVE cooking (well, baking mostly but more top of the stove lately) and I LOVE the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. So it was an easy “YES”. They gave me the menu which was based on locally available ingredients, and I typset and printed the menu in a jiffy. Hopefully the letterpress was helpful in raising money for the Farmers Market!

The show aired this past Sunday, but hopefully will repeat so everyone can see it!

Oh, follow this link to a better description of the show and the recipes for some of their creations….

Letterpress of Pray (for Japan)

About a month ago I got an inquiry from Bluemoon Letterpress – a letterpress studio in Japan. Takuma Nakagawa is organizing and exhibition of letterpress work titled “Letterpress of Pray” where she will show and sell in a few different galleries with 100% of the proceeds benefitting orphans of the tsunami.

I was unsure about what my printed prayer would look like until I went to a vintage stamp shop in New York on my vacation. There I dug through a pile of vintage Japanese postage stamps and found my inspiration. Mine would be a sort of letter, using Japanese stamps for the recipients and United States stamps for the senders (I suppose I was speaking for everyone in the good ole USA… is that weird?)

I found out from some special Japanese fluent helpers that one of the stamps portrayed Fukushima, which isn’t where the tsunami hit, but was badly injured as a result. 

I particularly loved the coloration of the two palm tree stamps. I think they really showed the similarities between that area of Japan (not sure!) and California. This was an instant match.

Then in my not very practiced handwriting, I wrote what I wanted for Japan. I chose green ink for growth, and printed away.

I sent off 17 prints today to Japan with hopes that my message will reach far more than 17 people and that the beauty of communication will be translated.

Inhale Peace. Exhale Joy.

I love and support the Joyful Heart Foundation. This year the theme for their gala is “How will you join?”

I was meditating one morning and I found inspiration. It’s an action that everyone can do, in that we breathe. We can inhale for peace, and exhale for joy. It somehow seemed so obvious in the moment to me.

This was the concept for a new Joyful Heart letterpress card. I printed a giant light pink heart and then used typewriter for the inhales and exhales, and my handwriting for the peace and joy.

The press was inked up in the same color scheme as the Gratitude cards. and I hand printed in two letterpress print runs, packaged the cards and sent them off to the foundation, all the while breathing peace and joy. This kind of work seems less like work and more like yoga, honestly….

I hope one day to have a whole line of Joyful Heart cards…. all communicating the messages that the foundation efforts to spread… peace, joy, reunion, gratitude, love….. the list goes on!

(everytime I print for the JHF, I get reminded of the heart pins on the back of the ink fountain…)

a little antiqued and a lot lovely.

I was so happy to be mentioned on Style Me Pretty for Negar and Peter’s wedding invitation… We worked together last summer to design the perfect invitations that would set the tone for their romantic nuptials at the California Club in Los Angeles. What they really wanted, and I think we delivered, was a very timeless invitation that was subtly romantic…. and not at all “cute”… something that they will love as time passes…. something very classic.

To get there I used hand calligraphy for print for their names and charcoal grey ink (I liked the idea of it being grey instead of black as if years had taken their toll and faded the print) with just a little bit of victorian floral embellishment… popped in my inked up press and mashed on a textured but cleanly cut stock…. et voila. It did just the trick.

thanks to Gia Canali for taking the pictures… again! check out Gia’s blog for some other photographs of this wedding and invitations…

blog times = good times

especially when it’s Martha Stewart’s Wedding Blog!!

I was so so super excited when Yifat Oren gave me the word that Kristina & Jesse’s Wyoming wedding invitations were shown by Martha this morning. HOORAY! I felt like Tiny Pine Press hit the wedding blog jackpot!!

I love this invitation. It’s classic Tiny Pine. I mean, there are pine needle clusters stitched on every invitation. Can you get more piney?

The save the dates were also one of my favorites… with the tinted photograph of the property delivered to the guests, giving them just a peek at where they would be traveling to.

So now a new goal has been reached, and I can rest a bit before working towards a new goal of getting Martha Stewart to follow me on Twitter……

Thanks to Yvette Roman for the pretty photo of the stationery!

my favorite typewriter…

This week I finished a sweet trifold letterpress save the date cards in my favorite tyepwriter font. As I was feeding the press, mashing the letters all at once, I thought about how much easier we have it these days, that I only had to type these letters all out one time (or actually, copy and paste) and the ink up the press, just passing them through the clam shell individually.

Not to dismiss the work! these  cards were all scored, hand torn, and hand fed, scored, and the tied with two colors of thread. Still a lot more organic than just pushing print.

Plus sustainable on cotton paper, with soy ink. these cards may look charcoal and ivory, but they are really green! and look soooo vintage.

too many good things to choose just one.

When Gia Canali and I sat down to figure out her new business cards, we instantly fell in love with a few different combinations. She wanted to have something very organic and earthy feeling, but Gia’s photography really is magical, so we needed to get that in there too….

This amazing amazing tree free faux leather paper showed up…

so earthy and l0vely but not sturdy enough to make a card out of (but definitely durable enough to make an outfit from… that’s coming soon). we would have to mount it onto a thicker card.

A Super AWESOME bonus about this faux leather is that the dark brown side is pretty great, but the reverse side is a delicate soft pink color. Here begins our dilemma. We will end up using both sides.

For the cover weight base stock, we used one of my very favorite handmade papers in this muted plummy color. This is where we get our “magic”. This cottony stock is full of sparkle.

Mounted, trimmed, and printed in two runs… Gia wound up with 4 variations or so for her business cards. Isn’t that fun?!

ps… these photos were taken by Gia… of course!!

Tiny Pines + Hipstamatic = The new old fashioned

Whenever I hang out with Gia Canali, I get bitten by the photography bug. She was showing me her iphone photos using the Hipstamatic App, and I took a notion to download that myself. I was hoping that all I needed was a program to make my photos look like hers…

Well, turns out that taking good iphone photos not as easy as just paying $1.99. BUT I was able to start learning how to use my new took as I stitched this weekend.

These photos are of an invitation I am working on right now. My client wanted to have a similar look to this invitation which i designed almost 6 years ago. (I used a black and white “film” to convey the idea that this is the OLD invitation, just so you know )

This new bride is getting married near a pine forest and really loved having that visual element stitched on.

For her, we brightened up the paper a little bit, freshened up the typeface with an added script element, printed letterpress on handmade cotton paper with a slight shimmer – using a cool grey ink color and stitched in a subtle green since her wedding isn’t in the fall… (though you can’t actually tell from my old fashioned photo…… hmmm….)

Every invitation was stitched with the sewing machine but guided by my hand which definitely requires complete concentration, and lots

of tunes in the background.

Since I am quite fond of pines so the hours of stitching breezed by as I concentrated on each one and their limbs.

Obviously, some are taller than other, wider than others, etc. but together they make an elegant stitched tiny pine forest.