Greetings from 2012 - Austin

The last city on our grand calendar tour is Austin. I have never been to Austin, but my husband has a number of cousins there and recently visited. He brought back many postcards, and the cousins were instrumental in finding my inspiration for the Austin sketches.

It was the postcard of the bat bridge that got me. It's proper name is the Congress Avenue Bridge and it is home to the largest urban colony of bats in the world. About 1 million bats live underneath the bridge during the summer months (they migrate to Mexico in the winter) and every dusk they emerge in this cloud to hunt for food, a sight that attracts over 100,000 tourists annually. That's 10 bats for every tourist!

The bats have become such an iconic part of Austin that many businesses have adopted the bat into their logos and below you can see a bat sculpture which sits across the street from the bridge, by artist Dale Whistler.

I've already done a second sketch of the annual kite festival. The Letterpress Library volumes will be available at the end of January. I'm very excited and can't wait to finally visit Austin!

Our 2012 postcard calendar is now for sale in our Etsy shop. There are discounts for multiple purchases. We will also it for sale at all of our holiday markets and events listed in the sidebar.

Greetings from 2012: Amsterdam

Throughout November I've been visiting the inspiration behind the designs for our 2012 postcard wall calendar, which features sketches from twelve cities from around the world.

 

I love visiting Amsterdam. I still want to do more traveling around the Dutch countryside (during tulip season would be amazing!) but there is still so much more of Amsterdam to explore.

Oh the row houses! The beautiful diversity of the slanted, narrow canal houses! The plethora of peeping windows! How could I not draw those marvelous buildings!?

Our 2012 postcard calendar is now for sale in our Etsy shop. There are discounts for multiple purchases. We will also it for sale at all of our holiday markets and events listed in the sidebar.

Greetings from 2012 - Chicago

Chicago has an amazing skyline, which I loved designing into a save the date card a few years back.

I knew for the calendar I wanted to do something with skyline in this birthplace of the skyscraper, but the sheer breadth didn't quite work for the vertical calendar format. 

Then I remembered "The Bean." Properly titled The Cloud Gate, this sculpture by Anish Kapoor in Millenium Park has become a landmark and tourist destination for Chicago.

I love that it so neatly captures the downtown skyline in its curved, distorted reflection.

The steel gray ink that I chose for Chicago was the first one I printed, and definitely helped define the palette for the entire calendar: urban, gritty, a little hard. It made it easy to choose our ribbon, though. Lucky for us, Angela at Carta, Inc. just started carrying her 5mm ribbon in iron gray - how perfect!

The 100% cotton ribbon is a must to pair with the textured 100% cotton paper, for the perfect completion to the finished calendars.

I'm still considering options for a second Chicago sketch to complete our Library volume for next year, but the El running between the looming skycrapers might just be it.

Our 2012 postcard calendar is now for sale in our Etsy shop. We will also it for sale at all of our holiday markets listed in the sidebar.

New editions of the Letterpress Library

Hot off the press: glimpses at three of our seven (yes, seven) new volumes of the Letterpress Library - Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and a tribute to classic woven fabric patterns, Off the Cuff.

No, I don't usually stage photographs on my daughter's toy kitchen, but the light was so nice I had to get a quick shot.

Palm-tastic. Until I did the research, I had no idea that Los Angeles had such a pretty sky line.

One of the four color schemes (and three of the four patterns) - aqua-lemon.

Stay tuned for our official release at the NY International Gift Fair at the end of the month (booth #4124 in the Studio Division).