weekend wrap-up: saturday

Saturday was the Queen City Craft Bazaar in Burlington...and the first of three (yes, three!) craft shows I participated in last weekend. It was a very blustery day out, which may have prevented the foot traffic from getting all the way down to us at the waterfront. The booths all looked fabulous, though. Here's a shot down my aisle on the ground floor. (Check out the new table sign. What do you think?)

















Below are some new displays--for Bingo Books and for the complete holiday card line.

































The best part of any show has to be meeting people. And, of course, scoring cool stuff in trade. Saturday was no exception. I met Victoria, whose husband makes lovely pottery here in Montpelier (if you need a sake set, check his out!), and Sarah, whose recycled and vintage-inspired home linens are right up my alley! (As a sidenote, Sarah's husband Richard is a world-renowned papermaker. He stopped by to check out my wares, and we had a lovely talk about handmade, local, and letterpress. I'm hoping to take a visit to his studio--Langdell Paper--this weekend as part of the open studios in Topsham.)

Mandy makes yummy yummy bath treats in the next town over, and will be carrying a selection of my gift cards in her online shop. Next to me was Loretta, who was showing her collection of drool-worthy and oh-so-functional pottery. Those are my new tumblers below!


















Thanks to Sara and Kacey for organizing the bazaar!

handmade holidays

First, a little bit of sad news: last night I received an email from Sara at Made Boutique in Burlington, letting all of her consignors know that Made will be closing as of December 16. And with the very recent closing of Studio STK, where are the masses going to buy their handmade goodies and gifties?
Well, start in Burlington, VT, this Saturday at the Queen City Craft Bazaar. It's a juried show, so you know everyone there is pro. (I'm not rhyming on purpose, I promise.) Don't forget to stop by my table and say hi!Or if you're down in the Boston area, take a trip to Somerville on Sunday for the Paper & Chocolate open house and trunk show. Shelley at Albertine Press (and her neighbors across the hall, Taza Chocolate) have thrown one or two of these now, and in the spirit of the holidays, they've invited a few friends along for the ride. You won't regret it, I promise.

And if you haven't yet stopped by buyhandmade.org, do so now! Make the declaration, and tell the world why you will only buy handmade gifties this year.


Thanks to Sage and Amanda and Will at STK, and Sara at Made for great conversations and rockstar support. I'm sad to see your cool places vanish, but I wish you all the best of luck in the future!

i'm dreaming of...

...a white holiday season. And it's coming true. Today it's snowing in Montpelier--only an inch or so, but it looks white-white-white outside. But that's not really what I want to blog about...

Last weekend's holiday card workshop was a blast! Rik, Asma, and Jenevieve (my fourth student was stuck in the first snow of the season in Ithaca) totally took my hazy outline of the day and ran with it. But don't listen to me, check out the photos for yourself:

Asma jumped right on to the Vandercook to print the first lockup of her four--that's right, 4--step card. She used the Vandy for her wood type "XMAS" before moving on to the Kelsey to finish up the last three lockups.












In the meantime, Jenevieve got busy with her two-color cards, and found the time to print little gift tags for all of us, too.





Rik said that he was trying to avoid the "holiday-ness" of holiday cards, but I think these are pretty traditional....

Rik also found time to make a wood type exclamation-point sculpture to print on the Vandercook. It was a pretty challenging lockup, but Rik pulled it all together and came up with an awesome little decorative print!

Ah, the happy class. It was a full day's worth of work, but I think these three could have printed for another 8 hours if I'd let them. Thanks for the good work--it was a great first class! Check out the rest of the day's adventures here.

monday monday

How's this for the breakfast of champions, eh? Coffee and kettle stitch.

I'm up a bit later than usual today, having picked up my housemate Tara at the airport at 1 am. So I'm having my coffee and working...and listening to old Prairie Home Companion podcasts. Happy Monday!

P.S. I'l post photos from this weekend's letterpress holiday card workshop later--there are a lot of photos to go through!

week(s) in pictures

I'm finding it hard to keep up with the blogging lately. This is my first "busy season," and while I'm not totally unprepared, I am a bit underprepared. And very nearly out of time.

Here are a few shots from the past few weeks:
That's new friend Emma and old friend Meagan having a private bookbinding class in my studio. Here're the finished products:For Meagan's book, she brought fabric that she'd silkscreened, and Emma chose from my voluminous stash of pretty papers.

Last weekend's "Experience" workshop was a lot of fun! Sina, Jinkyung, Jenn, and Sarah were very laid back, and ready to experience whatever the day had to offer.
Sarah getting up close and personal with the Nolan proof press.Sina experimenting with layout on her prints.
Jinkyung, Sina, and Jenn locking up chase after chase after chase...

I stayed late after class to try to get the Vandercook #4 ready to print for this weekend's workshop: success!!
And while all that was going on, I got my first custom order on etsy--and it was shipping to Australia!
Two Bingo Albums, to hold 100 photos each...they're quite fat little books!

Coming up this week: Holiday Card workshop, printing my line of holiday cards, more prep for the Queen City Craft Bazaar and Paper & Chocolate trunk show, and hopefully not flubbing my first day as film projectionist at the Savoy!

procrastination station

(view from my living room window)

So there you have it. I've been stuck at procrastination station for a few weeks now. It could be the weather, as it's been gray and yucky here in Vermont--welcome to fall!

Or that it's just starting to dawn on me: the enormity of the preparations that I need to be making for the holiday season. I've been accepted as a vendor at the Queen City Craft Bazaar's holiday event (December 1) and Shelley at Albertine Press is having another Paper & Chocolate event on December 2, and has invited Angela at Carta, Inc., and me to participate in a little trunk show. It's going to be a busy weekend! Not to mention that I have workshops to teach between now and then, holiday cards to design for myself and few friends, and lots and lots of books to make!

Back here at procrastination station, I've been, well, procrastinating. And finally getting around to:
(a) making pretty things to hang on the wall (from purl soho's the purl bee, via little ida)(b) posting pictures of my most recent workshops, and two amazing groups of new letterpress junkies (click here to see the September class, and here for the October class)and (c) finding new blogs to get hooked on. Read the new letterpress blog of Chrysanthemum Press (by my student Sarah) and the blog by veteran bookbinders Rag and Bone. And don't forget to get yourself some patches! I saw these on the Green Chair Press blog, and was delighted to find that Ms. Jennie Hinchcliff (a super cool, creative chiquita, who I met at the San Francisco Center for the Book) has launched a project called PodPost--and is making grown-up Merit Badges for the Girl/Boy Scout in all of us. As a 12-year scout, and former GS leader, it's about time to update the sash. And now you know what to get me for Christmas!

new shops and nice words

The summer has been a slow selling season, I can tell you that. But when followed up by a busy fall, I have no cause for complaint.
First of all, Montpelier finally has an indie-handcraft boutique. Super-crafter Emily moved to town only a few months ago, and got to work while the rest of us just kept talking. The result: Swingin' Sphere! It's a pretty little space, and the photos on the site don't do it justice. While they're officially open now, the grand opening is September 29, and Emily says to "make sure to stop by for a cupcake and a free gift with every purchase from our lovely consignor Melissa of Honey Bee Herbals."

Second is a double-whammy: my first wholesale order, and my first international shop. You heard me right! Arthur's Circus is a new shop opening next week in Melbourne, Australia. Natalie saw my Bingo Books on etsy, and emailed me straight away about having a few for her vintage-inspired shop. Read what she has to say on the shop's blog, and be sure to look at what she got in the mail this week! Thank goodness I'm nowhere near Melbourne, otherwise I'd need these and these right now.

And now for some nice words:


May Day Studio got a little bit o'love over the summer on Apartment Therapy: Chicago's regular Scavenger feature. Click here for the full post.

After delivering new books to new shops in Burlington, I found these lovely and flattering blog posts from Sara at Made Boutique and Amanda at Studio STK. If ever you find yourself in Burlington, I highly recommend checking out both places!

catching up part two

Here they are, the real reasons I've been offline for the last few weeks:

one: a custom portfolio for Boston designer Deborah Wieder.

Deborah wanted to give her client, a local synagogue, a book both tangible and meaningful to hold her design work. The logo is raspberry and ochre, so Deborah found a lovely deep pink bookcloth, and I used several colors of linen thread--white, tan, ochre, and maroon--as accent. The binding is a kind of modified Japanese 4-hole binding, with a separate spine-pleat and hinged covers. The four threads gather together at the top station, and are simply knotted to make eight strands, as a reference to the tzitzit on traditional Jewish prayer shawls.

two: a custom wedding album for an old friend

Courtney wanted to give her newlywed-friends a handmade gift, and so approached me about creating a one-of-a-kind album or scrapbook for them. I'm sure I overloaded her with ideas, but she was definitely excited about the process, so played along. She found the cover paper--an indigo, carrot leaf-print lokta--and we settled on the buttonhole stitch for binding and Stonehenge for the pages. The result is a huge book: 12" tall x 12-1/4" wide x 1-1/2" thick. And it weighs almost three pounds! The buttonhole stitch is unique in that there's a hole in the spine, where the folds of the signatures show through. I like it because the thread binding the book together draws the eye from top and bottom to the exposed folds. It's a book that will cry out to be taken off the shelf!

catching up on old times

It's been a killer couple of weeks, and I don't have much energy today, but I did want to catch up (as it were) on a few letterpress events from the summer.

one: the Printing Arts Fair at the Museum of Printing in North Andover, Mass. (I dare you to say that three times fast!)
That's Shelley (of Albertine Press), Mr. Benjamin Franklin, and I in front of my table. Mr. Franklin actually has a handpress, and in addition to being an 18th century historian, gives walking tours around the Boston area. (His real name is Gary, and he was amazing to talk with.) You can click on the picture to see more from the day, or click here to see Shelley's slightly more timely recap.

two: summertime workshops at Letterpress Things

On the left are Janet and Emily, testing out the Pilot. They spent the day working on thank-you notecards. Emily was a real trooper, working in a shop designed for folks a little bit taller and a little bit stronger. It was great to see a younger person get so excited about printing...and pick up techniques and terminology with such ease.

On the right are Tim and Erin, a carpenter and printmaker, respectively. We had a mostly quiet day, and they set a whole lot of type and printed pages pages for our little chapbooks. It was a nice to take it easy and focus on the process of printing...they left me with a lot of food for thought about the workshop. Click on the photos to see more, and click here to read about upcoming workshops.

three: the Letterpress Guild of New England's annual WayzgooseThis event was just last Saturday (my, how times flies!) at Firefly Press in Allston, MA. That's John Kristensen (Firefly's proprietor) demo-ing the Vandercook SP-20. Click on the picture to see more of the event. All told, it turned out to be a lovely day of talking, printing, and meeting new people!

history lessons

It's seems that it's my fate to be in the studio on the most beautiful days of the year. Today is no exception. Though I was here mostly by choice--being trapped in the mystery of this type.

The story: I was cleaning out type cabinets at Letterpress Things a few months ago, and, as a treat, John B. let me keep anything I found. It was all pretty dirty, but I saw 3 cases of Caslon Openface, and this lovely blackletter. I put the type in a box, and just started sorting it last night. Usually I sort it into lines in the little box (above left), with chipboard separaters. And because it was such a small font, I wanted to check that I had all the characters, so I then sorted it onto a sheet of paper (above right). All there, thank goodness, even though there's not a lot. Step 2: find it in MacGrew's. The result: Tudor Black, 12pt. And it's just lovely.
Step 3: Set a little bit of it, and proof it. I decided on Dante's Inferno (Canto V), it seemed the most appropriate thing on my bookshelf. Hooray for my spankin' clean Nolan No.1!Isn't it pretty? I just love that "O."

Step 4: Which typefoundry? After a little cleaning of the pinmark, I check Briar Press' pinmark directory, and discover that it looks an awful lot like this one, from Farmer, Little, & Co., a foundry that operated in NYC from 1862 to 1892, when it was absorbed into ATF. That means that my type might be well over 100 years old! I'm so excited. Does that make me a big dork?

P.S. Workshops are filling up fast! Sign up soon, or you might have to wait until Spring...

the smell of fall

(Pic of Janet and Emily, workshop 6/9/07)

I can practically smell the pencils being sharpened. Really. And though the trees are still green in Vermont, they're already turning in Massachusetts.

And Massachusetts it was, last weekend, for the grand re-opening of Letterpress Things after an extended summer vacation. And just because it's on the 4th floor of an old mill building, Mother Nature decided to give us one last hurrah: 90+ degrees and (wicked) humid. Thanks to the folks who trekked out in the heat, and for humoring me by conducting serious conversations standing only 2 feet from the big fan. Hello out there to Lucy, Janet, and Karissa, who are super excited about jumping into letterpress.

So here it is, the big reveal: I've just posted the fall/winter '07 schedule of letterpress workshops. In a nutshell:

Experience the Letterpress Thing will run 9/22, 10/6, and 12/1.
Broadsides for Beginners (*new workshop*) will run 10/27 and 12/15.
Holiday Card Extravaganza (*special event*) will run 11/17 only.

Read more at my site, and look at pictures from past workshops here.

saturday treats

A "day off" Saturday is rare for me--usually I'm teaching, or driving to teach, or spending many hours hunched over the press. Today, I'm happy to say, I gave myself the morning off, ostensibly to spend a few hours outside...before coming back to the studio to finish a custom book (I promise to post pics later!).

So, back to Saturday morning goodness...mmmm latte at Langdon Street Cafe (thanks, Wes!), then off to the glorious farmer's market (today's finds: green beans, fresh onions, and baby beet greens) for some much needed socializing. If you live in a small town like I do, it's possible to run into every single person you know at the farmer's market. And so I saw a whole lotta folks, talked about the weather (uniformly yucky today), the new Thursday Next novel, and the strange habits of grasshoppers and Japanese eggplant.

And as I was leaving, I ran into yet another friend, who reminded me that the ReStore was having it's 17th birthday today. The ReStore is a fabulous treasure trove of all that stuff you really don't need, but are sure that someone else will. I make a weekly trip, because you just never know what you're going to find! It's where, for example, my amazing stash of Bingo Cards came from, and where I get all my fabric for that new line of books. Here's what I found today:
Vintage knitting magazine-size pamphlets. For those of you who've seen my artist books, you'll know that I can't pass up a vintage lady. And while I can knit, sweaters are still a bit beyond my skill level. They're a bit scruffy around the edges, but I'm sure I'll find a use for them. Any suggestions?








Bits of fabric. It's not that I don't have plenty of fabric to work with already, but I couldn't pass up the 70s orange & brown flowers, or the giraffes (!), or that "I still think it's 1982" patchwork. There's basically enough for one book from each. Perfect! And the price was totally right: 42 cents for the lot. You heard me right!

I hope you're enjoying your Saturdays, out there in la-la land. I'm off to work!

paper + water = days of fun

Collaborations are awesome.
Here's Shelley at the Albertine Press studio, pretty early on day one of the Paper Marbling Crash Course/Delightful Boston Weekend. (I'm normally not a fan of random capitalization, but I'm so excited to talk about the weekend that it's either that or italics--ugh!) Shelley had marbled paper at summer camp years ago, and when she mentioned to me that she'd like to do it again, I jumped. Or rather drove four hours in a torrential thunderstorm to take part in the festivities.

Shelley had almost everything set up--paints mixed, sizing made, paper cut--so I got there and got straight to work!

Here's a brief how-to for those who've never marbled before:
1. brush one side of your paper with an alum/water mix. let dry.
2. mix the sizing (distilled water and carrageenan), let sit for awhile.
3. mix acrylic paints with a small bit of distilled water, and ox gall if needs be.
4. drop the paint onto the water, using droppers, toothpicks, little broom-like whisks, or anything you can think of.
5. lay the paper very carefully on the surface of the tray.
6. lift the paper, hang dry, then press flat.
7. clean the paint off the sizing, and repeat.

Of course, I'm leaving lots of things out. But it was so much less complicated than I thought.

Oh, and don't forget--
8. invite your friends!

Jesse of Firefly Press braved the rain to play with paint. And Kathleen (the designer at Taza Chocolate, Shelley's studio-neighbor) stuck her head in the door to say hi and stayed to make paper.

I have to say that making paper was totally amazing way to spend a weekend, but talking and getting to know Shelley and Jesse and Kathleen was really great, too.
Shelley was definitely the pro of the weekend--she can pull an amazing Spanish Marble on purpose, whereas I can only do one because my hands are shaky.

You might think that we ate, slept, and breathed paper for 48 hours, but we did take a break to see Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in Smell-O-Vision (and bubble-vision, too: imagine a crowd of movie-goers sitting in a parking lot blowing bubbles in the dark!) with Shelley's husband Jacob (you can't really tell that he's a physicist, he's so funny!) and bits--ahem, Nibs--of Taza Chocolates.

Sunday morning I had breakfast on Newbury Street with my friend Katie, who manages the Simon Pearce on Newbury. Yummy yummy belgian waffles, lots of catching up on gossip, and much talk about art vs. production, and the ways of the retail world, before heading back to Cambridge and paper marbling.

A brilliant weekend, I must say. If you'd like to read more, check out Shelley's blog, and definitely look at the rest of the pictures on my flickr page.

Ta-ta for now!

treasuries abound

What a nice thing to wake up to--an etsy convo from fellow seller smugcat, saying that she's included me in her latest treasury! Such a treat!Click here to view the Calling Bird Noteset on etsy!

ah, the glories of old metal

In finishing the last of that HUGE letterpress job--for Carbon Farmers of America--I realized that my press was acting a little funny. Not surprising for old metal, but since Minnie (my Pilot) is my baby, I'm worried. So I'm talking to John Barrett on the phone right now, and here is the trouble zone:The first image is at rest, the second is rocking the handle forward. Darn loose screws!!

Update! Thanks to my fantastic neighbors Rick & Ben, I was able to unscrew the "key" that was loose, clean out the gunk, and tighten it up. I'm not sure that it's a permanent solution, but the handle is much tighter now--only a little movement back and forth. I also cleaned out the "set screw" and tightened it while I had the tools. Looks like it's time to go the hardware store for my own set of hex wrenches!

new books & a new look

Sometimes working for yourself can be a chore. And sometimes it's great! Today was a terribly rainy day, so I ran to the Savoy to pick up a few videos--Grey Gardens and Midnight Cowboy--and ran into Eric and talked about his Sci-Fi July movie series, and then back home to hunker down at the worktable. The results are these pretty little case-bound books, made with fabric from my voluminous stash. They're a good size (5x6-1/2") and have 144 pages.

What do you think? Leave me a comment--tell me that you love them, or hate them, that I'm totally off the mark, or whatever you like, and I might just send you a little something as a treat!

Also, I did a quick web design with google pages, and now May Day Studio has a home! Come on over! There's coffee and vegan cookies if you're nice!

i'm a bad, bad blogger

It's true. I've been ignoring you. It's for a good cause, but I know that's no excuse.

Today has been a beautiful day, and I spent almost the whole day inside printing those fantabulous envelopes. (Almost, because I did have to run to the store for kitty litter.) So there they are. Hopefully soon I'll get my bum in gear and upload the photos of my last two letterpress workshops, as well as from the Printer's Fair at the Museum. Gosh, everything feels like sooo long ago.

Take care, you hear? I'll be back soon.