Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Things That Are Long-Poster
Everyone likes a good mini-series, right? Remember our "Things That Are Round"? This is "Things That Are Long", and we may do even more! We sold out of the last poster in 48 hours, although we still have some of the coasters. We're still hoping to reprint this sometime soon.
Carrie did so many drawings of "Things That Are Long" That we felt like we had to use them all! (Some go used in the calendar, but we couldn't fit all of them.)
So we made an 11x14 poster. And it's beautiful! It's up for sale in the shop now, and we only printed 120, so I recommend you snatch it up if you can. We only made 40 of our last poster, and it sold out in 48 hours.
Monday, September 13, 2010
2011 Calendars--it's official!
2011 Letterpress Calendars! Get 'em while you can!
Cause there are only 200 of each, and it's only September, but they're selling quick!
Last year printing our calendar took us from Labor Day weekend all the way into November. It's pretty much the only project we did all autumn long. This year the drawings took us longer, but we printed it in just a couple of weekends. What will we do with our spare time?
This is my farm scape. I really love the way it turned out. I like it so much because I think it looks like someone else drew it! And I LOVE the colors. So happy!
This is Carrie's Flower Garden. I love the colors here, too! And the flower illustrations are brilliant. Doing the lining up was a bit of a challenge, but we did it! We've finally gotten to the point where we can think ahead and see problems. Like this time before we did anything else, we printed a few test prints with the dark lines so that we'd be able to line the whole thing up better.
This is my boats drawing, it's the misfit because it's horizontal.
And finally, Carrie's "Things That Are Long" which we also have made into a poster. (I'll post about that later). On a side note, I think we're getting so much better with our photography. With the help of Carrie's mom and dad, we shot these all at their farm. Carrie happened to be wearing the most perfect dress/boots, and the sunlight was beautiful. Nothing like the country in the fall!
Last week, we were featured on Design*Sponge (This is the holy grail of good publicity right to our target market) And we've been crazy-busy shipping, which is a great thing!
Have a great week everyone!
Sunday, September 05, 2010
2011 Calendar sneak peek
Even though it's just the first of September, Carrie and I have been working feverishly on our 2011 Calendars. See, you have to be ahead of the game with the calendars in order to get the publicity you want. Really, if we had wanted to try to get in some magazines, we probably should have designed and printed them in May (and then gone to the National Stationery Show to hawk them).
As it is, we feel extremely productive and ahead of the game this year. Last year's calendar was a labor of love and frustration. We began printing it on Labor Day weekend, and continued printing it until almost November to get just 300 copies done. This was long before Roy and Charlie (our 2,000lb. hot hunks of iron). Now that we have modern (circa 1950) technology on our side, our 4 designs for 2011 only (haha) took about 4 days to print.
Here are the step-outs from the flowers calendar. We are learning from past mistakes when trying to line things up, but these were a challenge!
So this year we couldn't come up with any designs that we thought would be great in a 12 month calendar, and we decided to draw 4 full-page poster style calendars instead. The paper measures 11x14, and this is really the limit for how large we can print on our presses. It's a great size, though, as it's still small enough to hang with just a clip, and it's a readily available frame size.
This is my boats calendar. Jason helped out when I could think of no more boats to draw.
I'm especially pleased with my farm design. That pantone color book we bought was well worth the money. As we say, "It's gonna revolutionize our business".
Due to human error on my part and rushing to get the plates turned into the platemaker, Carrie has one more calendar that is 80% finished.
We're gonna finish it today and then do an official photo shoot. After all that, we hope to put them up in the shop.
All of this not a moment too soon. I have orders from my doctor to take it easy, and standing on concrete to print for hours is not exactly what she had in mind. So I'm taking a big camp chair with a foot rest and Carrie will be doing the heavy lifting. And Jason is going to get training. The doctor says I can be there while the printing is going on, just not actually doing it. This is so sad for me, but it's best for the baby, so I will have to deal with it! Luckily, we have most of what we need for the holiday season all wrapped up.