Not spooky at all

Happy Halloween from Owl and the Forest Fairy Princess, and from Sweet Olive Press!

(Owl is testing the forcible entry approach to trick-or-treating. At 17 months he gets a pass; next year not so much.)

 

 

Away we go

One thing I’ve noticed since moving from Australia to the United States is that over here the downhill dash to the end of the year starts much, much earlier.

If you’re so inclined, you can start fretting about Halloween costumes in late September and be in full panic by mid-October. The last week of October is all lollies and trick-or-treat and then hey presto, we’re into November and there’s Thanksgiving to plan (and plan and plan). As soon as the turkey’s done, Christmas is absolutely hurtling towards you.  Lovely! (I mean that!)

And so: while once I would have thought it was strange to be choosing Christmas cards in October, these days I say it makes perfect sense.

So here they are….

Hand-mixed inks for a gorgeous dark silver and a rich red… magnesium plates for a strikingly deep impression… luxuriously thick card made from 100 percent reclaimed cotton… and a message for all mankind.

Available with red envelopes in boxed sets of six and boxed sets of 30, they’re in the Sweet Olive Press online store now.  (Plan ahead! Blink and it’s Christmas!)

Advice

Printing wisdom from my four-year-old:

“We don’t lick the letterpress,” she says, “because it would taste yuck.”

Getaway

I had planned a weekend at the press… but since it was all “do-anytime” work, we decided to go to Florida instead.

It was lovely.

Life can be fun!

I’m so excited to show you the very first limited edition art prints from Sweet Olive Press!

“Life Can Be Fun” is a four-colour print (read: four separate trips through the press!) inspired by Australian women’s magazines of the 1950s, and is the first in a series of works on this theme. I’ve been working on this piece for months, and I’m thrilled to be able to unveil it at last!

This is a limited edition of 110 prints, signed and numbered. The four colours were printed one by one, using magnesium plates and hand-mixed inks on my 107-year-old Chandler & Price Old Style letterpress – an enormous antique iron machine of great charm and mysterious history. This centuries-old printing process presses the images and letters into thick paper, for an impression you can see and feel.


I created this original artwork to reflect the captivating mix of style, earnestness, and buoyant promise of the time.

(Aside: there really was a 1955 ad that proclaimed “Life can be fun!”.)

Limited-edition “Life Can Be Fun” art prints can be purchased at the Sweet Olive Press online store!

Letterpress Prize Winner

We have a winner in our first Sweet Olive Press letterpress giveaway!

To ensure a completely random draw, all Sweet Olive Press newsletter subscribers who signed up before the Friday midnight deadline were entered into a Random List Generator which shuffled the names and assigned numbers to each one. Next, those numbers were entered into an online Random Number Generator, which revealed our winner……..drumroll…… :

16. Ivy Lemberg
{Random numbers generated Oct 18 2009 at 13:58:54 }

Congratulations Ivy! Two sets of the gorgeous Pink Peony Letterpress Notes are headed your way!

A great big thank you to everyone who signed up for the email newsletter – our first issue is almost set to fly out, full of news and big, beautiful pictures of letterpress loveliness. Stay tuned!

(If you’d like to sign up for news from Sweet Olive Press, you can do so here!)

News and prizes!

At last, I’ve forced myself to sit still long enough to get an email newsletter system sorted out!  Now you can sign up for monthly(ish – depending how ambitious I get) email news with updates on Sweet Olive Press, brand-new letterpress stationery designs and special offers just for subscribers.

Also just for subscribers – the chance to win! If you sign up before this Friday, October 16, you’ll be automatically entered to win two sets of these lovely Pink Peony Letterpress Notes (in the picture above).

The winner will be randomly selected from all new email news sign-ups, and will be announced here on October 19.

{ Just in case the sign-up links above don’t work for you, you can simply click or type this url into your browser: http://bit.ly/sweetsignup }

See you soon!

Make Me A Poster…

I can’t believe I nearly missed American Letterpress: The Art of Hatch Show Print.  That would’ve been a tragedy!

Although the exhibition opened in New Orleans in August, I only found out about it last Wednesday, and it closed last Saturday. I juuuust scraped through on Friday – kids in tow – knowing I’d narrowly escaped massive disappointment.

I didn’t want to be the obnoxious girl using a flash in the gallery, so these images are a bit blurry. (Can we just call it atmosphere…?)

It was incredible, fascinating, inspiring. I looked at every print at least twice, while Berry ran around identifying hearts and the letter A and the number 4.

I came away full of happiness and admiration and wishing, for a crazy minute, that I had been born into a printing family that stretched back more than a century.

But I guess there’s more than one way for printing to get in your blood.

Under wraps

You might think, since I’ve been a bit slow to post here recently, that I’ve been slacking. Au contraire!

I’ve been printing like crazy – often at midnight, 1am, 2am – and being so productive I have to pinch myself. But all the results are things I can’t show you yet.

The most Top Secret project is my first letterpress art print for Sweet Olive Press. It has been complicated in every way, and time-consuming, and incredibly exciting. Seriously, I’m finding it hard to refrain from posting progress pictures here, I’m that excited. But I’m keeping it all in check because I know the piece needs to be seen with all four colours printed, the whole image complete.

When it’s finished, you’ll hear all about it here. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, a tiny creative accomplishment that does have a picture to go with it… my lovely friend Kate in Paris sent me an amazing recipe for dark chocolate chip gingernut biscuits (cookies, Americans!). They were so great I had to send most of them to other homes so the biscuits wouldn’t later call me, in a fetching manner, from the kitchen…

Letterpress baby announcement: coral

A new letterpress baby announcement!  Hand-mixed coral ink and a polka-dot ribbon design worked beautifully with the adorable photo of baby Bella and her proud big brother.

The ribbon band and the text were printed separately, using two magnesium plates, so that a good impression could be achieved for both elements.