stationary

I'm a little behind with blogging. I've been working like mad on a set design - I need to hand in drawings on Monday - and so blogging (and knitting!) have fallen by the wayside. Interestingly, I don't miss either. I know that knitting fills a need to have my hands busy and mind active in a more creative way, and designing does that too. Designing does not calm me down, however. I think I need to find time for yoga or something to really settle my mind.

Last weekend I went down to visit my parents in Philadelphia. My mother and I spent most of the day on Saturday seeing my cousin's family in Maryland, and on the way back we stopped and saw my mother's art show. It was in its last days and was indeed "sublime," as described by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

We also went to a printer. Many moons ago, my mother began talking about stationary, and how it would be nice for me to have something with my name or initials on it. We are now taking steps to make that happen, working with an independent print maker, Liz. (She also printed our wedding invitations.)Liz has a really wonderful collection of vintage letterpress plates and fonts. We selected a botanical image for the front of the card and then looked at fonts for my initials. What she has is fairly hit or miss; there is some great stuff but sometimes it's only in one size, and often that size is very large.

Figuring out the colors was difficult. My mother and I had chosen light green cards from Paper Presentation. We settled almost immediately on a beige ink for the botanical image, but it took us hours to come up with just the right color for my initials. Unlike Photoshop, you can't just change the color with a click of a button. Each time we wanted to try something else, Liz had to mix it and then print it on our sample. And of course once the sample got full of little colored initials it was hard to see, so she had to print more samples. It was very cool, if time consuming, and I do wish that I had taken print making in college.