I think my goal was mid-October, and definitely I had many more holiday designs in mind, but! I did it – as of today we have a wee Etsy store and are selling two cards and DC coasters online.

The newest holiday card is above. Since it looks like two designs will be my limit this year, I’m really glad the two go well together. Lightening the snowflake/dot design on this was key – at first I used almost the same shade of blue for the type and flakes, and it was not good. But with the softer color, (Wes’s suggestion) the contrast in print styles makes sense, and it’s more reminiscent of snowflakes.

If you have feedback on the Etsy store, I’d love to hear it.

A simple postcard I made as a change of address card for a colleague, with photopolymer and lead on a smooth brown paper. Because we weren’t going to use an envelope, I was afraid Crane’s Lettra, which I’ve used for most projects, would get smudgy in the mail, so I decided on this paper. A smoother paper also seemed to work better on a photopolymer graphic this large – I’ve found it’s not easy to get the Kelsey to print photopolymer evenly on a large image, and rough paper makes it harder.

Here’s Lauren & Russ’s baby announcement, described earlier in Monkey Evolution. It was sent out long ago but I’m just getting around to posting it. Love the ampersand in Bernhard Modern.

I’ve got a backlog of new work to post, but have to start with these. Quite some time ago the striking similarity between the the shape of DC and the shape of a paper coaster dawned on me, to the tune of The Magnetic Field’s song Washington, DC. I think there are a lot of different versions of these to come, but I’m pretty happy with this first iteration.

Plus, it’s the first time I’ve gotten to use what we call Ziggy font – it’s a rare case of lead type in our collection that’s unmarked – I don’t know what the real name is, but it turned out just as cheesy great as I’d hoped.

This is actually the first project where I’ve centered type instead of left-aligning. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be to space out on each side and get it locked up.

It looks neon on the press, but it’s actually a really great green – I lightened it and took a lot of blue out of the original tone.

In my latest project, a birth announcement for good friends, the design of the main graphic has evolved in a really nice, organic way.

Lauren and I started talking about the tone they wanted to strike, and we liked the idea of being a little funny. They’re funny and sarcastic people – not the type to do a really flowery birth announcement , but then again you can’t really be too funny, or sarcastic at all, in a birth announcement. It really is all about joy in the end.

This is their first child, and I knew they were debating how to hyphenate the last name: Klein-Onkeles or Onkeles-Klein. At some point I came up with the jingle, “First of her kind, she’s an Onkeles-Klein”. I’m sure they have other reasons for the name order than this card, but it stuck. (After all, nothing rhymes with Onkeles.)

Lauren also liked the idea of monkeys as a graphic element. She said in Spanish it’s common to remark about a baby, “que monito!” which literally means “what a little monkey” but is truly a term of endearment – what a little cutie.

The first monkey image that came to my mind was the monkeys from the game Barrel of Monkeys – I think because those are a really graphic shape that I knew would translate in a flat image. (Though in retrospect…not cute.) I liked the idea of repeating graphic pattern that breaks with one monkey in the midst of the pattern, being “first of its kind.”

I made mockups of this concept which were mildly successful, but then the parents-to-be found an image of a child’s stationary, with really cute monkeys, from Dear Olive. They’re adorable, and much more suitable inspiration for a baby announcement. And the image of a monkey on a vine makes for a nice overall graphic that can anchor the card and balance a photo, which we knew all along we wanted to include.

So I set to work on my own version of a cute monkey on a cute vine. I modeled shapes from two unrelated images from istockphoto – a cross-with-vine image and a more cartoony monkey with no tail and big arms and legs. In the end, I’m really happy with my little monito and super excited for the card to take shape.

And we own a printing press, so…it seems like we should use it to print our press name. But it’s so unappealing to run a third or fourth print run just to put our name on an envelope or back of a card.

I’d be curious to know what other small presses do, but is it totally lame to use a stamp? I hope not, because I just bought a custom-made Knotty Pine Press stamp! And yes, I totally upgraded to the exclusive optional handle. As if that was even a choice.

I’m really proud of this holiday card – actually both the holiday cards Wes and I made this year, because we relied solely on our lead type and ornaments.

All those stars are itty bitty individual pieces of lead type, aligned and packed together tight. I’m not at all opposed to photopolymer and will use it regularly for graphics, but it was a great learning experience to work only in lead.