A warm golden manor house among silvery snowflakes, to wish your nearest and dearest a merry little Christmas… letterpress printed on thick folded cards made from 100% reclaimed cotton.

I got so busy with printing and turkeys and family (not all at once!) that I forgot to post these! You can find them in the Sweet Olive Press online store and on Etsy.

I’ve been printing so much this week, I’m in letterpress heaven!  Exhibit A:  a golden candle-lit Christmas tree and a holiday-red “noël”, just off the press and available in the Sweet Olive Press online store in boxed sets, and soon on Etsy.

More coming! Much more…

I knew trains used to be cooler than they are today. Look at this fabulous shot of a linotype in operation on a railway press car in 1913!

Um, molten lead on a bumpy railway? The pot did have a cover, but I wouldn’t be putting my hand up for the job…

{Photo by Brown Photo Co., St. Paul, Minnesota, from the George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress}

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.)

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!)

Printing wisdom from my four-year-old:

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

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.

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.

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!)

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!