A few custom projects – one a birthday celebration book filled with letters to the client’s mother; another an illustrator’s portfolios and slipcases, and invitations for dear friends.

Informal botanical study three to four times a week at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Printing invitations at The Arm

I’ve been printing and designing invitations like a madwoman in between juggling one and sometimes two toddlers. Coming soon: studio space! Around the corner! Seriously!

Beach!

We just returned from a lovely wedding, followed by a luxuriously long week in Martha’s Vineyard. I had a chance to draw a bit and work on some hand lettering ideas that usually fall by the wayside (you’ll see them soon, I promise!).

My sweet dad, moving yet another press for me in Iowa! This one’s a Challenge MP-15 and I can’t wait to see it!

We have another wedding, and friends in town this weekend, then we’re spinning off to Iowa to celebrate my mom’s 60th (60!) birthday and see some of my recently acquired letterpress equipment in the flesh, as well as take some deep breaths under star-filled skies. We’ve been at a distant point on our orbit, and are looking forward to circling back in close to those people with whom it all started.

P.S. Matt’s been documenting our summer much better than I over here!
P.P.S. I’m sending out some fun letterpress snail mail when we get back from Iowa – email me your address if you’d like to receive a little mail!

The burst of warm weather earlier this week (50! In February!) was a desperately needed reminder that spring really will come again and that the feeling of warm air on your face is, indeed, the tonic and near cure-all it’s always been. Similarly satisfying as the feeling of warm air on your face after a long winter is the feeling of completing a substantial project that began as a tiny seed in your mind’s eye.

On that note, I’ve just finished a new collection of three invitation designs and am proud to finally show them off.

Entwined suite, Signature suite, Leaves suite / All photos by Christopher Walker, Gotham Pixel

Each design has a slightly different feel and each takes advantage of the tactile quality of letterpress printing, layering type, images, and color in delicate and elegant ways. There is loads of information about the designs, options, and ordering on our weddings page, and I am always delighted to talk about paper and printing at length, so please be in touch if you have questions.

And – of course – we’ve been up to lots of other things, too! I’ve been cranking out new books using vintage postage stamps and have lots more to come, and we’ve been reading The Metropolitan Museum of Art ABCs, Numbers, Shapes, and Colors till we’re blue in the face, and I just finished reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. If you need a little inspiration, it’s a great read, no matter what sort of work you do.

Spring is, indeed, on its way in the next month or two. In the meantime, I think I’ll keep my energy up by drawing, printing, building Charlotte’s vocabulary while we walk all over Brooklyn, poring over design & lettering inspiration, and soaking up just how good we’ve got it.

P.S. If you need a great wrapping-up-winter song, I highly recommend Josh Ritter’s “Snow Is Gone“. It’ll shake you right out of any funk you may be in.

February! It’s prime time for wedding planning, so just a reminder that we have a great collection of designs to choose from.

All of our invite designs incorporate Japanese silkscreened papers – and you can even customize by choosing your own chiyogami pattern from the thousands out there. Samples are available here, and please be in touch if you have questions or are ready to get started on your invitations!

Predictable or not, the beginning of the year just seems like a great time to take a deep breath, look around, see how the past year added up, and get a sense of the possibilities the new year has to offer. After an amazing 2009 that was full of all the best that life and work have to offer, it’s time to put together at least the outline of an itinerary for 2010.

I like making plans and lists, but I also believe you can’t chart out much of the future, just prepare yourself well for as many possibilities as you can. At this time last year, I had no idea I’d be sitting here with a sweet little girl napping on my lap, and I couldn’t be happier…so I’m going to hazard a guess that planning isn’t always necessary to realize the best results.

2009 was about zeroing in on the work that I felt really represented my own interests and tastes and style. I wanted to find ways to use elegant chiyogami papers in more of my work, and not just on the occasional journal cover. The result? A collection of wedding invitation designs, as well as some cards that all include an assortment of chiyogami designs I love. In the next month or so, keep your eyes peeled for personalized stationery that uses these designs, as well.

For this year’s work…without getting too longwinded, I’ve got designs on…
• A few new designs and getting some great looking things added to our site
• Really sinking my teeth in to working with the wedding collection (I’m already off and running, on that front – ’tis the season!)
• Figuring out manageable, sustainable ways to get my work done and take care of one sweet little girl!
• Dwell on what’s most elegant, beautiful, and captivating
• Get out and about with my work in person as often as possible
• Last, but not least: Grow, grow, grow!

I’ll also stay on track with regular blogging but, in the meantime, remember that you can always get a sense of what’s going on over here by checking out Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr!

And, of course, a little Wendell Berry to get the year started; from “What Are People For?”:
“We clasp the hands of those that go before us, and the hands of those who come after us. We enter the little circle of each other’s arms and the larger circle of lovers, whose hands are joined in a dance, and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.”

The last few weeks and the next few weeks are jam packed not only with holiday card printing and shipping, but with putting together an awful lot of custom photo albums and guestbooks.

A custom, personalized Coptic stitch guestbook with a letterpress printed cover page and a gorgeous red/black/white/gold crane chiyogami cover

One of my favorite things about putting together custom albums is going through the process of choosing and suggesting papers. We often use chiyogami papers for the covers, since the albums are for weddings or special occasions and the chiyogami patterns and textures are unbelievably elegant.

New chiyogami papers for a batch of custom Coptic stitch photo albums

For this batch of custom albums, there are a few papers that I use regularly (the dark green floral, the multicolored blossoms), and a couple of new, custom-ordered patterns. I love the blue plum blossom pattern, especially – I think that would be gorgeous for any sort of winter event and could be really lovely as a custom paper band for one of our new invite sets, as well. Maybe with chocolate brown and pale blue inks to match?

There are a lot of little details this time of year, and I find myself making to-do list after to-do list in order to stay on top of custom orders and my own deadlines for printing and announcing new work. I’m feeling invigoratingly challenged by the need to integrate a newborn into a working schedule and am feeling especially excited about the coming year. I’ve found that the weekends are one of the best opportunities to get work done…probably the same way my mom discovered that 4:30 a.m. was a great time to get work done when you have 3 small kids!

So many projects are in the works and I have more ideas than I have time for…and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The real hurdle these days is just doing what we can in the limited space we have. We’ll be ready to bite the bullet on expanding in the not so distant future but, for now, we’re making it work! I feel incredibly lucky to have put myself in a working position where I can not only do the work I love, but have control over my own schedule and be able to spend my days with Charlotte. Don’t worry, I don’t take it for granted for a second!

• In tandem with last week’s launch of our new collection of letterpress wedding invitation designs, there was a fantastic post about the new designs on Oh So Beautiful Paper.

• Style Me Pretty included the new 2010 letterpress calendars as part of their wonderful bridesmaid gift round up!

• Our 2010 letterpress calendars were also featured in Decor8‘s calendar round up…among some very nice company from other studios, as well!

The 2010 letterpress calendars are available for pre-order on Etsy right now, and all 10 cover designs will be ready and available for immediate purchase starting at the end of this week. I’ll make sure to announce it! (If you’re not already, feel free to start following Campbell Raw Press on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook!)

It’s yet another Charlotte-filled week around our place, as you may have guessed. Life is great!

A little of the story behind these designs: As you’ve likely gathered, I love using chiyogami (Japanese silkscreened) papers, and often use them for guest book, journal, and album covers. They are richly colored and intricately patterned papers, and I wanted to find a great way to incorporate them in to my letterpress work, in addition to my bindings. The tactile quality of a crisp letterpress impression just seems like the perfectly elegant match to the chiyogami’s thick layers of saturated color.

I’ve wanted to design a collection of invitations for some time now, and the looming deadline of a sweet li’l baby’s arrival was just the sort of motivation I needed to make it happen. I created the three designs – Fitzgerald, Collins, and Strand (a few of my favorite writers) – focusing on clean, simple typography that would print beautifully and show off the chiyogami. Each design has been paired with four different chiyogami patterns, and the ink for each color palette is hand mixed to match the respective pattern.

Collins invitation in Apricot Mums, Strand save the date in Dark Green Floral, Fitzgerald invitation detail in Blue Mums

Thanks to Matt (*huge* thanks!), our site features all of the designs, pricing and ordering information, and a huge assortment of images of all the various available pieces. Sample suites of invitation packages are also available on Etsy, making it very easy to pick up a suite of any of the designs to see in person!

Since there is no shortage of beautiful chiyogami patterns available, there are also plenty of options for customizing these to suit any palette! If you’re interested in something, or just have a question, feel free to shoot me an email.

Enjoy looking through the site – we’re awfully proud of these new designs and are excited to share them!

There’s lots of letterpress work to share with you in the next few weeks, including unveiling the new collection of wedding invitations very soon – yes, finally!

In the meantime, I have a couple of marvelous, life affirming poems to share with you. I wanted to pick just one, but these are both beautiful. Enjoy David Ignatow’s “Listening” and William Meredith’s “Accidents of Birth“.

Part of my Monday afternoon set up for taking photos of the new invitations…the sunlight made for some great shots on the roof!

It was a lovely weekend around here and, I have to say, not a work-filled one! Well, it wasn’t too work-filled for me…Matt made me sit still and project manage Saturday afternoon while he spackled and painted holes and cleaned things up around here. He’s a little too sweet to me.

I spent most of Friday afternoon and early evening printing the interior pages for the 2010 accordion fold letterpress calendars…and all of the interiors are done! That was definitely the last project of any scale pre-baby, since it turns out standing for 4 hours and feeding paper and focusing on registration (alignment) is not the best feeling in the world when you’ve got a baby in your belly that seems to be larger by the minute!

Here’s a quick peek at the interior of this coming year’s calendar…enjoy!

This week, I’ll be finishing up the first round of calendars, so you’ll get a chance to see the finished products soon, soon, soon! Plus, I am just about to get all of these new invitation designs up on the website for you to thumb through and enjoy. I’m really pleased with how they’ve turned out and just need to get a few more great pictures of everything before they’re ready for their formal debut!