Gobble gobble

With many thanks this holiday to our suppliers, buyers, retailers, clients, interns, fans, bloggers, followers, family and friends and everyone else who has helped make Albertine Press what it is today.

Warmest wishes for a warm, delicious, relaxing holiday.

Getting down to business

Lately much of our work had been for commercial clients - business cards, promotional pieces, hang tags. It's rewarding to form relationships with other small companies and be a part of their growth and success.



Earlier this year we printed some folders for Grazier Photography to house their cd and brochure for prospective couples. Last month, Matt (of the husband-wife team Matt & Enna) approached me about doing some matching envelopes to complete the set.



I adore the way the scrolls wrap around from the front to the back flap of the envelope, it's such a wonderful touch.



In fact, let me say another few words about Matt & Enna; their work is absolutely stunning. I was fortunate enough recently to be at the receiving end of a portrait session with Matt where my husband and I roamed from the Science Museum to the back streets of historic Boston, hunting down perfect backdrops for us. It was casual, fun and really let us be us. They pay just as much attention to each of their wedding couples, and Enna's baby portraits are too precious. For more of their images visit the Grazier Photo blog.



Speaking of babies, another young company, Toby + Rei, came to me in the spring for some hang tags for thier new line of organic children's wear. The original order was for 300 tags (at the time, printed on plantable seed paper), but it wasn't long before they were asking for 300 more. Only last week I shipped them this newest order for 1500 tags. You've come a long way baby! (by the way, their bamboo & cotton baby blankets are the softest, most delicious fabrics I've ever held - we'll definitely have one for our baby when the time comes).



Lastly, one of our favorite local(ish) stationery stores, Scribe Paper in Marblehead, just reordered some business cards. They opened shortly after we started fulltime here at Albertine Press, and it's been our great pleasure to grow alongside Grace, Colleen, Eric and their crew (now in two locations).

So thanks to Matt, Enna, Alanna, Kate, Grace and all of the other businesses out there who choose letterpress to really stand out, and for choosing us to make it happen.

Seeing Green

Several months ago I was approached by the Friends of the Public Garden to design and print the invitations for their annual Green and White Ball. It's an ambitious project consisting of many pieces, and one of the challenges was to redesign the cumbersome set of invitation, sponsor cards, reply card, thank you notes in a more elegant and simple fashion.

The final design was a single book structure, each piece of which had a different original illustration from the Public Garden (swan boats, statues, bridges).







I used Italian, cotton, loose-weave ribbons from Carta, Inc. This is what a mound of over 700 cut ribbons looks like:



Each step took a day or more. After the ribbons were cut they needed to be threaded through the outer book leaf. This is just a few hundred of the be-ribboned covers:



Of course, while cutting and ribbon threading were happening on one side of the room, on the other I had The Beast churning out invitation pieces.





Invitation panels then were affixed onto the inner leaf of the structure, which involved many fine hours and a newfound love-hate relationship with our tape gun.



Though the timing of the project set our Stationery Show preparations back a few weeks, I am so utterly delighted with the result. I can't wait to hear the responses from the invitees...

A humongous thank you must go out to Daphne, Becca, Melissa and Will for their tireless (though not un-complaining) help in creating these amazing invitations. Until next year.

Paper & Chocolate

I can hardly believe it's been a whole year since our first Paper & Chocolate, yet here we are having finished our second "annual" celebration of Valentine's Day. Our traffic has more than doubled with over 500 visitors to the event last weekend.

After the success of sharing space in December, I again invited some other paper artisans to join in the fun. Here's Melissa of Press Bound with her super-cute, super-tiny, hand-bound books with Polish paper cut designs [kindly ignore my awful office clutter in the background].



I was happy as ever to be joined by Kelly of May Day Studio, who made the trek from Vermont (even though it meant a canceled class). It's always refreshing to talk shop with Kelly: pros and cons of papers, various business concerns like teaching and marketing and what in the world are we going to do next...



Emily (a.k.a. E. B. Goodale) sold nearly all of her incredibly sweet etchings. I snagged one of the new chicken heart prints below.



And while I manned the press demonstrations in the back, my trusty salesman held down the fort.



Thanks to Becca, Kelly, Melissa, Emily and Jacob. Thanks to the gang at Taza for making sure the tour didn't end with the Chocolate but kept everyone moving onto the Paper. Thanks to Brandon for the much needed cocoa boost, and Brendan for a great collaboration. And especially, thanks to the 500+ friends, neighbors, compatriots, young and young at heart, who came in, talked, shopped, and spent a bit of their Saturday afternoon sharing the Paper & Chocolate love.

Block and white

This past weekend I'd scheduled two wood block type holiday card letterpress classes. Due to random circumstances, only two of five students could make it to day one. So Kerry, Haven and I had a grand old time designing and printing new year's cards.



Above, Haven navigates the intricacies of setting wood type, and printing in two colors.

Below, two of the funniest, cleverest new year's cards ever:



Since it was such an intimate class, I joined in the fun by setting a card of my own. Surrounded by such uber-cleverness, here's my contribution to the day's efforts:



What a most fun and wonderful day - thank you Kerry and Haven!

Sadly, due to this:



I had to cancel Sunday's class.

Playing with the wood type was such fun, though, that there's definitely a wood type valentine's class in the works for early next year.

If the weather allows.

Back in black

Earlier this week I received a most welcome package - new art from Marisa!



Consider this a preview of some new cards for 2008 (particularly Snow-merican Gothic there).

Thanks, Meish!

Hot Chocolate!

How to even begin???

This past Sunday we held our third celebration of Paper & Chocolate, a collective open house with our neighbors Taza Chocolate. This time, however, I invited five other paper artists to share my space and their work. All I can say is wow.

In the end, more than 600 people came through the shop over the course of the afternoon. Yes, that's six HUNDRED. How do we know? Taza had the brilliant idea to give out stickers to every single person to come through (everyone started off with a chocolate factory tour) and was thus able to track the traffic.

After each half hour tour, the group of forty to fifty people filtered into our space, and if I do say so myself, it was marvelously organized with tables and people flowing naturally around the room.

Below you can see Angela of Carta, Inc. on the left with her ribbons and stamps and beautiful hand-bound books and things. On the right (behind that person in the blue jacket) is Kelly of May Day Studio with my ever-favorite Bingo books, gorgeous journals, and a snazzy set of new holiday cards. On the wall behind them are the incredibly sweet etchings by Emily Goodale.



To one side you'd find Becca Wasilewski with her giclee prints and a series of white-glove-only artist's books on display.



Across the room Melissa Gruntkosky was showing and selling her adorable teeny, tiny, hand-bound books.



Jacob was at the center island manning the Albertine Press sales while I stayed in the back at the Vandy, giving press demonstrations. Which means I helped everyone run their own keepsake on the press, even and especially the littlest visitors (photo courtesy of Angela). After explaining the process two hundred times, (quite literally) I was a bit horse at the end, but I never got tired of the "wow!" that happened the first time a new group saw a print hot off the press.



Sadly, I don't have any photos of our own display. Hopefully one of the other's will pull through and I can link over to them. It's a shame, since I finally got the display right. [They came through! For more pictures and takes on the event, click here, here, or here.] Angela's family came to visit, and here she is with her daughter Nada holding one of the keepsake prints.



The day was an overwhelming success - not only did everyone have great sales, but I met so many new people, and saw many many old faces. So thank you to all of the friends, family, students, colleagues, neighbors and curiosity seekers who came out in the first snow to share a most wonderful afternoon with us. Thank you to Angela, Kelly, Emily, Becca and Melissa for joining me in this venture. Thanks to Brendon at La Tene for the super bonbons. And especially, thank you to the whole gang at Taza for being just about the best neighbors a girl could ask for.

Toast-ed

Honestly, I was skeptical about how our first holiday fair would go. I'd been moved inside (after signing up for an outdoor spot) to a basement lounge without much lighting, and awkward spaces. I was worried about how it would look, and I was worried about people even finding the place, forget about coming downstairs and looking around.

I was wrong.

Living up to every previous Union Square (Somerville) market, this one was thriving. Toast Lounge was the perfect spot with eclectic yet charming spaces (one soap vendor displayed gorgeously along a wavy bar), a great mix of vendors, fantastic live music, and it was hopping with people the entire time. In short, a smashing success.

Here's the initial setup - holiday cards on the table, and non-holiday cards on the shelves (for the most part) allowed me enough room to splay out the calendar for everyone to see.





My table was directly across from the stage, and each of the four acts throughout the afternoon kept me toe-tapping and happy (though at the very end everyone was too engrossed in the music to turn around and shop...).



And at the end of the day (notice the dearth of coasters...) :



After all this I dropped everything off at the shop, had a quick dinner at home, and then returned the the shop to clean and organize for the big event the next day - Paper & Chocolate - photos to come.

Thanks Toast. Thanks Mimi and Union Square Main Streets. Thanks Somerville. You all rock.

Pretty as pie

Angela of Carta, Inc. was so incredibly kind as to share some of her Italian cotton ribbon for the calendar. It arrived today and in such amazingly lovely packaging I had to share it with everyone.

It starts with Angela's beautiful handwriting.



And then supercute tape measure tape.



Then inside another super charming package.



I adore this ribbon.



And finally my cotton ribbon, wrapped around letterpress coasters by Sesame Letterpress.





Thanks, Angela, for a package that just made my day.

A Pair of Pretty Printers and their Pretty Printed Pair

I spent the bulk of today in the studio with Angela. Together we editioned a series of holiday cards she designed with very talented illustrator Susy Pilgrim Waters. These cards will be for sale by Angela at our collective holiday Paper & Chocolate open studio in December (stay tuned for details) as well as Angela's other fairs this season.

We printed Susy's bird in the transparent ink first, which looked subtle, shadowy, snowy, delicate. But after printing "Season's Greetings" in red we both thought the contrast was just too much. With a Tim Gunn determination to "make it work," we decided to try overlapping another bird in red which brought it all together perfectly.

Here are the finished cards on lovely, textured, deckled, Fabriano medioevalis paper:



It is incredibly satisfying to fan out a long line of identical finished prints (just one of the many reasons why I so love printing).



What a perfect combination - a red and white card to accompany a gift wrapped with red and white twisted twine (which Angela was so kind to bring me).



What a pretty pair.



And Angela printing. You can see on the feed board that in addition to the Fabriano, we were printing the birds on many piles of miscellaneous papers that she brought or I scrounged from around the shop (the blue Pescia was especially nice).



Though we were both pretty pooped by the end of the day, it was wonderful to spend it printing and talking and collaborating together. So thank you Angela for being such a delightful printing companion and I'll look forward to our future work together!

Hot off the... electrons?

Decor8, one of the design blogs I read daily (and Boston-based to boot!), has posted about Albertine Press! Click here to read all about it. Thanks, Holly!

Cookin' the books

This past weekend Albertine Press hosted a two-day letterpress/bookbinding extravaganza.

On Saturday, five lovely ladies typeset and printed a small edition of bookplates. It was such a great group - writers, teachers, designers, illustrators, crafters and an engineer - very patient, hardworking, quick to pick up the craft, and creative to boot!

Everyone really blew me away with their designs: elegant illuminated letters, great overlays, free-form clustering, retro woodcut play, and a snappy end-plate.



Yun and Angela working the Kelsey's.



Andrea mastering the block form.



And the finished goods (pre-crop).

After a quick table shuffle and the addition of two new students (plus me!) we were ready for Sunday. Angela Liguori of Carta, Inc. took over and taught us all a binding technique called "sewing on tapes". It's a really beautiful, exposed binding, and Angela brought only the best supplies to make everything even more beautiful (if possible) - German laid paper for the text block, hand-dyed asian stock for the covers, plus her specially imported cotton ribbons in a variety of colors.



Here she demonstrates how to sew together the signatures:



And everyone with their finished books (bookplates and all)



For more pictures and perspectives of the event click here and here.

Such a successful weekend, and I loved the collaboration of printing and binding. It was the first of what I hope will be many such collective classes. Thank you to Angela for bringing such a calm and easy way of teaching (and all of the gorgeous samples). And thank you especially to Roxanne, Angela, Andrea, Yun, Susy, Pat and Ylenia for being such willing and able students - it was a pleasure working with all of you!