4th of July Wedding Invitation

Wedding season is in full effect!  I was contact by Laura to design an invitation for a wedding that would be during 4th of July weekend.  The challenge was, how do you incorporate the Indepedence Day holiday "feel" without making it look like an invitation to a backyard barbeque?

I had just the thing.

There is a letterpress technique called "blind" letterpress that I'd benn dying to try out, this was the perfect opportunity.

We came up with a graphic that emobied the holiday (fireworks) and then letterpressed it into the paper without ink, hence the "blind" part, get it?

We used 220# 100% cotton paper (for those of you who aren't paper geeks like me, that means THICK) and the impression just popped of the page.

It was simple, understated and just lovely:

Close up:

It's always fun to create something "new" and once again, the bride was just such a joy to work with.

Thanks Laura for letting me help you design your invitations!

New Designers at Crane & CO.

I just posted a comment this morning over on the blog Exquisite Stationery (*love*) about the designs at Crane & Co Stationers. You may not think you know who Crane & Co. is, but believe me, ya do.  They have retail locations in higher-end malls across the country, they are the nations oldest stationer and if you don't think you've ever seen Crane paper before, just look in your wallet, Crane has supplied the paper for US currency (for those of you who actually USE such a thing) to the US Treasury since 1879.

Now, I love Crane for their tradition and their elegance, but besides buying their unprinted 100% cotton paper to print  invitations on, I've never actually purchased "stationary" from them, that will soon change!

I just jumped over to Cranes blog and saw this post! They just announced they've brought on THREE new studio artists! 

From the Crane blog, here are their brandy new designers, click on their names to be directed to their work posted on Cranes blog...not sure how keen they'd be to me using their pics, so you'll just have to click for yourself:

Peggy Wong

Julia Farill

Christine Ferrante

Happy Clicking!

Martha, Oprah and Yulia??

Anyone remember my post about the book Papercraft and illustrator Yulia Brodskaya? Cliffnotes version: cool book about artists using paper as a medium, one of them being Yulia who uses a hokey old paper quilling technique to take her flat ink on paper typographic illustrations and pops it right into the 3-D world. Like-a-dis...

Anyone ever heard of some snooty old broad named Martha Stewart?  Anyone happen to read her April issue?

Anyone happen to notice these feature headings?

This one too:

And then there's that other slacker who's slide to number TWO of the Forbes list of The Most Influential Women in Media, Oprah.  Anyone else put their back out carrying this tank of a magazine home from the grocery store?

And although she may have 22 OTHER fairly interesting women write SINGLE articles for the issue, it was Yulia who was highlighted throughout...

and finally:

It's like a chick mag, craft junkie, paper snob, design lovers mecca!