book review :: good fall reads

I have two really great books to share with you today. Firstly, we have this wonderful little book of letterpress. As this age old craft has come full circle in the past few years, this collection of greatly talented studios show just how innovative this traditional printing technique has become. This book proudly sits on my coffee table for all to see and it will stay there for a long time.







next we have Lotta Jansdotter's Handmade Living. This book radiates simple living ideas for real people. Lotta pulls us into her personal scandinavian style and shows us that you can do a lot with a small space. You can learn a lot from this one, i know I have. It's truly a treasure trove of simple beauty.

pre-swap news

hi again, I wanted to share with you a special announcement before swap sign ups begin next week. We will NOT be using swap bot this year. We have decided that we'd like to get back to our old school swap roots and do everything by hand again. It may take more work but it's well worth it in the end. Our two biggest concerns from most swappers are answered below.

1. There were too many flakers on swap bot, how can we solve this?
~unfortunately we can not control flakers either way, we rely on good faith and it's just unfortunate that some people never follow through. The good news is that we can better control the flakers now because the groups will be set by me.

2. Can we have the same send and receive partners?
~a big fat YES to that question. We are going back to our original format and will also try our best to level off the amount of international swapping in each group. This makes for a more meaningful and personal swap.

So stay tuned on November 1st for sign up details.

covered :: FBA studio

I've been seeing these beautiful designs passed around the web and I finally caught them from FBA studio in Portugal.

Reality check

It's moments like this that make me feel less guilty about leaving my studio alone for a year and a half to be a full time mommy. It's true, there are those times where I feel like I've let my creative intuition go in the fact that I'm not creating as much or I'm not blogging as much but I don't regret the things I've sacrificed in my creative life to have those moments with my daughter, to play peekaboo and act like a kid again...it's really the best inspiration you can have.
It's really important for me to dive right in to motherhood and give zoe everything she needs to enrich her life and become an excellent person. It's definitely been a trying year but I realized that this was my time to slow down and live my life for someone else for a change, and more importantly I learned that It's okay to set things aside for a bit and learn something new, experience different aspects of yourself you never knew you had. love it, live it.

whimsy letterpress :: 1 canoe 2

I love the hand illustrated work of 1 canoe 2. This quaint little shop takes letterpress to the next level with DIY letterpress paper house kits, whimsy calendars, and more.

carved by hand

really great and intricate hand carved stamps by minna from her shop, eat pray create. She also does custom carvings.

little lovelies from yellow canoe

lovely variations on wood. yellow canoe.

Pre-swap news

Hello to all those giddy ornament swappers out there! Just a little note today to let you know that YES, the swap is back for it's 5th year! Fb will be launching swap sign-ups on NOVEMBER 1st and will be open only until NOVEMBER 8th (it's a one week window) We will be using the swap bot website again this year so go on over and set up an account with them if you haven't already or make sure your account still exists from last year if you haven't been there since then. stay tuned for full sign up details on NOVEMBER 1st.

stacks of beige

Sew it yourself  hemp/organic cotton blend tiles from karen barbe.

COVERED :: redesign of Carl Jung series

For the longest time, I've been trying to find a way to emirs my title as a book cover designer into FB, It's been difficult because a lot of what inspires me on FB isn't directly influenced by what I do behind the scenes...I could call it the "other life".... I am a book cover designer by trade but my personal style dives into places that the publishing world knows little about so I always find that there is a separation between the two and i'd like to attempt to bring them together.
I'd like to start a weekly series that pays homage to beautiful book cover designs. "COVERED" will dive into the publishing design world and give you a taste of some really great design processes that are over looked very often for whats inside rather then whats on the cover. Hopefully as this series progresses I can also share with you little tidbits of my experiences as a cover designer and what it is we actually design.
for starters here is a quick look at an intelligent redesign by Kathleen Lynch for Princeton University Press. The Redesign is of their Carl Jung backlist as a series, starting with 5 titles. The artwork is a series of paintings reproduced in The Archetypes & The Collective Unconscious.

beautiful tidbits from Nest Pretty Things

I'm sure you've seen these delicate delights from Nest Pretty Things on the web, I just couldn't resist posting them on FB. Living beautifully in Vermont, Tamar translates her living environment in to these lovely jewelry pieces. What great inspiration she gets from her surroundings.