I grew up in Nebraska and Iowa, but every other year or so (although it seems like every year in my memory), we would drive to northern New Jersey at Christmastime to visit Grandmother Maggie and Grandfather Bud. I’ve written about Christmas at their house before; it was always magical, without fail. My grandmother embodied the Christmas spirit right down to the tips of her toes.

Iowa to New Jersey is about 1,000 miles, almost all of them on Interstate 80. When we (finally) reached the Delaware Water Gap, we would all cheer, knowing we only had about an hour left in the car. Our whole family – Mom, Dad, Charlie, Willa, and me – would pile in our 1988 Dodge Colt station wagon and make the trek, crushed into the backseat with comforters, books, and the way back stacked with presents.

This new card is a drawing of my memory of those drives, coursing along I-80 as we closed in on the end of the rainbow at the end of the drive. We’d pull into the driveway, past the Joy flag on the left, the Minettis’ house on the right, and into the end of my grandparents’ driveway and their waiting open arms.

P.S. If you’d like to listen to a beautiful song, here’s Karla Bonoff singing “Home”

P.P.S. As with all of our new projects, we’re giving back a little with this card. 5% of every sale goes to support Iraq Veterans Against the War, in memory of our friend Josh Casteel.

A detail of our new 2013 calendar. This detail is of calendar No. 10/60.

From the beginning

In school, I only ever studied art because I loved it. Photography, printmaking, ceramics, bookbinding, and drawing were electives; things I loved to do, not things I was required to learn. High school was your standard blur of self-doubt and academic ambition, and when I was at Grinnell I tried to take myself seriously in an academic way and majored in History and English–two things I use indirectly every single day of my life.

But the moments of greatest clarity and comfort were the times I found myself in various studios and darkrooms, usually by myself, over-dedicated to making images and objects of varying quality. The smell of ink in a printmaking studio, the feel of paper under my hand as I tore pages for books, and the moment in the darkroom when the image begins to appear in the developer tray–those turned out to be the markers on the road heading toward where I am now.

Anna Atkins cyanotype of sea algae

Images & artifacts

In October of 1843, the British botanist Anna Atkins published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, considered to be the first book ever illustrated with photographic images. The algae specimens recorded in Atkins’s book are splendid, sprawling cyanotype samples in the white-on-brilliant-blue characteristic of that process.

Cyanotype is an early photographic technique made by coating paper with an ultraviolet-sensitive iron salt solution. When exposed to the sun, whatever covers the paper leaves a filled white outline, and the remaining negative space turns a brilliant, deep, oceanic blue.

I pored over my mom’s copy of Ocean Flowers, a catalog for an exhibit that ran at the Drawing Center in 2004. The exhibit featured 19th century botanical illustrations in a variety of media at the meeting point between drawing and photography, with Atkins’s cyanotypes as the centerpiece. I was sucked into their deep blue and I was hooked. The images were captivating, and the text as compelling; a discussion of natural history preservation techniques and approach. To me, the most fascinating idea was the following thought:

“Conserved specimens do not tell the whole story about living nature.”

In short: We can’t tell the whole story of anything from a preserved specimen because the specimen is removed from its natural, living habitat. The remnant we study is a cold sample; the structure is there, but none of the life. The hard truth hits: we can’t take the living past with us, just the tangible artifacts of it.

New techniques & new directions

As a 7 or 8 year-old, I remember making my own cyanotypes (sun prints) with paper from a kit we probably got at the Science Station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We would lay rocks and flowers on the papers, set them out in the sun, and rinse them in water to develop the image. With this new, grown-up look at Atkins’s sun prints in a historical context, I wondered whether the technique I first knew as a child might be something I could use in my own work. Would this style of imagery be just the thing to pair with the ideas that filled my head? An idea germinated.

Early evening over the Mississippi

Every year, I think about making a calendar for the coming year. It’s not that I feel some urgent need to mark specific days and times, but I want to acknowledge the beauty and significance of each moment of our brief lives. That’s heavy, I know, but honest.

This summer, Matt’s mom was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. If you want something to put a fine point on the fragility of life, that’s a pretty good way to go about it. Memories, joys, regrets, curiosity, frustration, sadness, love, family, worry, confusion, uncertainty, and urgency replaced any and all thoughts otherwise and we were instantly headed down a brand new patch of road we never saw coming.

We’ve already made several visits back to Iowa in the months since and have our next visit on the books for Christmas. We don’t really know what to do, or if there’s much we can do, but we are navigating this road as best we can, learning how we can be helpful, and focusing on what’s most important.

Pressed & dried Queen Anne’s Lace

When we visited this July, I gathered a bucketful of Queen Anne’s Lace from Matt’s mom’s backyard in rural Iowa, overlooking the Mississippi River. The view is nothing short of sweeping, and taking this bucketful of invasive weeds made no dent in the vast sea of lacy white that swathed every edge of the yard and bordering woods. I hauled the flowers back to my folks’ in Marion, and pressed several stems between glass.

“We live by no mind, that is only reason,
For there are in us strengths older than thought–
Memory of moon-earthed seeds, the treason
Of spring in our hearts, old family-named corn lands–
Eternal in us as ancestral-wrought
Curve of our thigh and the gripped shape of hands.”
- from “Earth in our Blood”, Paul Engle

Printing, printing, and more printing

We returned to Iowa in September, and I had a plan in hand. I ordered letterpress plates for a calendar I hand lettered, as well as paper, cyanotype chemicals, and the necessary tools in advance. We arrived in Marion and I began to coat the large sheets of letterpress paper with the iron salt solution. I coated 150 or 175 14″ x 26″ sheets with the yellow liquid, dragging a glass dowel across the paper lengthwise, then crosswise to spread the solution as evenly as possible. I wasn’t aiming for smooth precision, just a coating that would allow me to create a number of varied images.

Coating paper with iron salt solution

Exposing coated paper in the sun with Queen Anne’s Lace compositions

Once the papers were coated and dried, I set up shop behind my mom & dad’s gallery (where they also live). I sandwiched 3 large pieces of heavy glass on top of the compositions I assembled as I went: stems of dried Queen Anne’s Lace on the iron salt-treated papers. Three at a time, I exposed the images to the Iowa sun for 5 to 15 minutes. What is that, about 12 1/2 hours, all together? When the time was up, I moved the sheets to a water bath to stop the exposure, and moved on to the next composition. Over the course of about 5 days, I ended up with 140 or so finished prints.

I stacked the prints and weighted them a bit to push out most of the moisture and, with many still-damp sheets in tow, my dad and Charlotte and I packed up the Subaru and headed to Dubuque to use a large letterpress (a Vandercook 219, to be precise) at Slow Print, the letterpress home of Peter Fraterdeus in Dubuque’s buzzing millwork district.

Developing cyanotypes outside in a water bath

Tearing edges

At Peter’s shop, I set up the press with the photopolymer plates for the calendar I drew back in Brooklyn. After a few runs with inks that–though gorgeous–were totally illegible on the cyan background, I mixed a dark gray that worked beautifully on top of the images that I’d exposed for less time to the sun and were a paler blue. I ran each sheet through the press, checking the impression, registration, and the look as I went.

Of course, I didn’t stop at the plain cyanotype; that would be too easy. I’ve also hand torn the margins of all the images to leave a softly deckled edge, and bound each into an accordion fold book with linen covers that is punched for easy wall hanging display. All said and done, I ended up with a host of beautiful images, including 60 final calendar prints that are now available for sale.

Gluing up Books of Days covers

Limited edition Books of Days / this is No. 1/60

As for the remaining beautiful-but-didn’t-make-the-cut cyanotypes? I’ve used them as the gorgeous decorative papers they are and created a limited edition series of Books of Days perpetual calendars. I made a limited edition of 60 of these beautiful volumes. The 2013 calendars and the Books of Days are available on our site in batches of 10, beginning today.

Bringing it all together & giving back

That’s not the end of the story, of course. We like to give back a little with everything we do, and this year’s calendars and Books of Days are no exception. $15 from the sale of every calendar and $5 from the sale of every Book of Days will be donated to the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, an organization that works to find a cure, as well as stop the disease before it even strikes, with early prediction and prevention.

2013 Calendar No. 1/60

2013 Calendar No. 3/60

2013 Calendar No. 4/60

2013 Calendar No. 6/60

2013 Calendar No. 10/60

Every one of this year’s calendars and Books of Days are a labor of love; a project I envisioned many months ago and am proud to have completed as I saw it in my mind’s eye. I’m even prouder that this project enables us to give a little something back to a cause much bigger than ourselves. 2012 has been a tough but rewarding year and we find ourselves on a great side of things as we head into everything 2013 has to offer.

Jan. 4th, 1895
Dear Edna,
The tissues of the life to be / We weave with colors, all our own, / And in the field of destiny, / We reap as we have sown.
Ever your friend,
Effie Naylor

Edna Foster Campbell, my paternal grandfather’s mother, kept this small leather volume as a young girl, with cushioned black leather covers embossed with gold lettering. The book is a little fragile these days, with yellow pages showing their age. On each page, though, there remains a clear sentiment, in careful pencil or ink cursive.

I drew and drew and drew and drew this summer, developing botanical images to match with each autograph.

I’ve studied enough history to know that the artifacts of our lives tell our stories after we are gone. They are a tangible connection to a time we can’t revisit or never knew ourselves. We hold them in our hands, though, and we feel a little of the hands that held them before. I often wonder how a digital age transfers to a collection of physical artifacts, but I know that there is just a different process now. All this new change seems to make even more precious what we can hold in our own two hands.

Brand new autograph cards! Available as singles or boxed sets of all 6 designs in our shop

I’ve taken six autographs from Great Grandma Campbell’s book, hand lettered them, and paired them each with one of my own botanical drawings. The resulting cards are my own small attempt to give a little more life to the love and friendship they celebrated nearly 120 years ago. I love to think that these cards will become the artifacts of others’ lives now, as well.

All of our new projects support organizations and work about which we feel strongly. 5% of the sales of Autograph Cards will go to Safe Horizon, a NYC-based organization that assists victims of domestic violence and child abuse.

A gorgeous inky mess

Lest you think all is quiet on the home front…I’ve been silent recently because wedding season is in full swing and, besides Charlotte, the thing I’ve spent the most quality time with lately is the press.

There will be lots of beautiful invitations and albums to show off just as soon as I find the time to take pictures of them all. In the meantime, I’m grabbing as many shots of things around the studio and pieces in progress as I can. Enjoy the sneak peek behind the scenes…it’s pretty lovely chaos.

Lately, the moon has been in a triangle with Venus and Jupiter, all 3 brighter than anything else in the early night sky, with Orion close on their heels as they all fly west (more correctly, as we spin east). I mark my nights by the angle of Orion relative to the tops of buildings, even though I see only a narrow swath of stars at any given moment.

In combination with the calendar arrival of spring and the buzz of our own family’s hive, all of this observable celestial movement inspires thoughts of cyclical change and growth, our roots extending and shoots inching our heads above ground to feel the newly warm air. It is no coincidence that the flowers identify, too – in fact, they led the charge. Snowdrops bloomed. Daffodils and magnolia are already wilting and leaves are unfurling, while bleeding hearts, tulips, grape hyacinth, and cherry blossoms begin to open.

As you may have gathered, we have a few things going on around here, and we actually put one project together last year that is just plain perfect for spring and Mother’s Day, but we were a little late to the party. This year, I’m thrilled to be one step ahead of things (at least on this front!) and show off a series of cards I put together with my mom.

My mom, Priscilla Steele, is a phenomenal drawer (draughtswoman? sometime illustrator? fine artist, to be sure) and she drew these tiny delicate blooms last winter in anticipation of me letterpress printing them. I did the lettering for each of four flowers: Bleeding Hearts, Dutchman’s Britches, Meadow Rue, and Sweet William. Truth be told, collaboration with my mom is about as good as it gets. We may be 29 years apart, but we are often like the same being, just at different points on the same orbit. It was a pleasure to put together this small collection of botanicals that showcase the very earliest flowers, the spring ephemerals, the first markers that spring is on its way.

Sets of 8 cards (2 of each bloom) are available in our shop and would make a delightful Mother’s Day gift. To make it even sweeter, I’m more than happy to wrap and ship them anywhere in the world with a note, too!

It’s one thing to be busy and go on and on about it (see: almost all previous posts). It’s quite another thing to actually show off what it is that has kept me so busy. There are a number of custom wedding albums, binding of family letters, wedding invitations, etc. in the works around here, but I thought, rather than tackle the whole stack at once, I’d bring them to you one at a time since they’re all pretty involved and elegant.

Elizabeth Carey Smith, she of The Letter Office, is a dynamite designer who came to me for a custom wedding album for some good friends of hers. We met up on one of the sweatiest days of last summer in Bryant Park, and bonded over design, materials, and our adorable, similarly happy and vibrant little girls. E dropped off the photos for the album mid-holiday season, and last week we got together for the hand off of the finished album. (It doesn’t generally take me for-e-ver to make a book, but this was a casualty of one seriously crazy holiday season…so here we are, mid-March.)

Hard workin’ hands, custom album & slipcase, interior

Elizabeth wanted something clean and elegant, but fun and with some bright colors that played a role in the wedding. I set to work making a casebound (traditional hardcover) album covered with a linen/cotton blend cloth. The cloth is that brilliant combination of stylish and durable, and a letterpress printed panel with the couple’s name and wedding date is inset into the front cover. Elizabeth designed the emblem, which also appears on the first page of the album. Inside the front covers, we used bright-as-bright-can-be fuchsia endpapers; a Nepalese Lokta that is fibrous and thick and just lovely. On the slipcase, covered in the same linen/cotton, we chose a wide, leaf-green grosgrain ribbon to complement the pink interior. The whole thing is understated and bold, celebratory, and timeless.

Letterpress cover panel, Endpaper & slipcase ribbon, Cover page, Slipcase, Album & slipcase

This album was such fun to put together, and it’s always a total treat when you meet–and get to work with!–a kindred spirit on a project. And! This album is just one little piece of what I’ve been up to…with plenty more to come! In the meantime, go check out the rest of Elizabeth‘s work. She’s a powerhouse.

P.S. Chandra Greer interviewed me for Felt & Wire’s blog in February, and I talked a little bit about just why I love making books like this album.

P.P.S. Are you interested in a custom album of your very own? Please send me a note and we’ll make it happen!

October is my favorite month. Yellow leaves are falling outside now and even here in Brooklyn, where the colors are beautiful but somewhat less than spectacular, the change of the seasons is palpable. Sunlight comes into our apartment late in the morning now and as soon as the day’s begun, it seems we have spun back around to darkness.

Matt & I had our first date on October 10 fourteen years ago. We were married ten Octobers later. And two Octobers after that Charlotte was born. October is home; it is the familiar, well-worn path, even with the momentous changes it brings. Squarely situated between summer’s swelter and winter’s bite, in October balance almost seems possible.

People chide Midwesterners for all their talk of weather, but there’s something beautiful about acknowledging the position of the earth on its axis and your place on that globe as it tips toward and away from the sun. Noticing the weather – and talking about it – may be the thing that always identifies me as a Midwesterner.

Working away in our new studio space, mixing ink, and checking registration

As of a week ago, I have studio space – complete with a large Vandercook No 4T press – about 2 blocks away from our apartment. I’ve been getting up very early to print and so I’m out in the neighborhood before much of anyone is up. Tired high school students descend onto the sidewalks in the lamplit dark, shuffling to buses. On Saturday morning the air had cooled significantly. The sun was just peeking up into the streets and made the yellow leaves that lined Prospect Place absolutely golden. I breathed deeply, and looked up at the leaves and the bright blue sky. When I reached the studio I mixed up my ink, turned on the press, put on workin’ music, put my head down, and printed. It seems October’s brought its promise of balance once again.

On that note, the newest collection of books in my Post-Marked series is available today. It’s entitled “Familiar Territory” and it’s all about the places I feel at home.

I know this press is meant to be ours because when I went out to meet it for the first time, it had its own Charlotte-in-residence. I saw a brilliant little brown spider and egg sacs galore on her web. Hundreds of tiny spiders were crawling out in to the world in bright sunlight. It was meant to be.

Charlotte #2
This press belonged to the inimitable Kim Merker and made its way to us via Tim Fay, one of the most dedicated printers I have the pleasure of knowing, who publishes The Wapsipinicon Almanac. It’s by luck of timing that the press became ours and we certainly intend to keep it working in the tradition of its previous operator, doing the very best work we can…and lots of it.

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!

Making good use of limited space: My press & shelving setup, on a particularly clean day about a year ago

All of my bookbinding work is done on a 3′ x 5′ table in the corner of our living room with basic tools and minimal equipment. My toolbox of thread, needles, knives, awls, bone folders, pencils, and beeswax sits next to stacks of book covers in various stages of completion, boxes stuffed with printed cards that need to be scored and/or packaged, a large box of invitation samples, not to mention the glue, tape, jars of pens, stacks of books whose endpapers are drying, and finished books that need to be photographed.

And that doesn’t even include what’s under the table…or the toddler who stands on the toolbox next to my table and helps me rearrange those piles 47 times a day.

A pretty average day on my work table

Needless to say, I’m working within some pretty tight confines with a business that continues to grow quite steadily day by day. It’s close, happy quarters, but we’re bursting at the seams. Something’s gotta give.

This past week, we had an opportunity to rent the empty main floor storefront in the building we’ve lived in for about 5 years. In addition to being the most convenient studio location ever, the space has a backyard and about 900 square feet of finished indoor space. For a family of 3 living in a sub-400 square foot apartment, the only appropriate response is to drool.

So, we got to work. We measured, we ran numbers, I inquired about the availability of various equipment, and learned about dimensions, logistics, weight, and safety. There was lots of interest from fellow printers in setting up a small co-op letterpress studio, which seemed like just the right path for our burgeoning little business – a great way to get me the setup I needed to work more efficiently, and also ensure that I wouldn’t work in isolation.

After a great deal of research (and getting lots of help from all kinds of wonderful fellow printers), it became clear that the best way to set up a shared studio was with cylinder presses which are relatively easy to use and understand and are safe, though scarce these days. When that fact surfaced, it was time to make some even more precise measurements and see whether it was feasible.

To make a long story short: even the smallest cylinder press would not fit through the front door of the potential space. Sure, the front plate glass window could be removed if we needed to get things in, but we’re talking about a building we don’t own ourselves and on which we would not have a long term lease. It would be careless to spend so much money, time, and energy to move huge pieces of equipment.

It was disappointing to learn that this wasn’t the space for us but I have to tell you that it was also a relief. When the right opportunity comes along, I have to believe we’ll know it and be ready for it and we’ll make something amazing happen. In some ways, I wish that time were now, but I think we have a little more to learn and grow before that’s a reality.

Tools, tools, tools

For now, it’s back to the living room grind, back to my basic and busy setup, living the dream day to day with Charlotte at my side and pushing the bounds of what we can do with what we have. It doesn’t feel glamorous, but it’s an awfully happy little set up. If you can ignore the daily bout of utter chaos around 3:30 or 4 when there are toys, books, paper, and scraps strewn around the entire apartment, it’s really pretty calm and wonderful. We’ll be ready for real chaos in the not so distant future, and that’s when we’ll make the next leap.

All of this potential for instant change right now reminded me once again that we *do*, in fact, have a great thing going. We’ve grown what we have quite organically, and that’s just what we want. Sure, big breaks are great, but legacies are built with careful, steady, hard work and a commitment to the things we believe in.

Thanks for supporting that sort of organic growth and our personal approach to work. This dream of a sustainable, profitable, creative, small family business is taking shape because of all the people who support us and work together in small ways to lay a foundation. Soon enough, it’ll be a living, breathing, visible building of its own and we’ll be ready for it.

Please stick with us. There’s so much more to come!