I’ll keep it simple: we had a lovely weekend.
Saturday, we hit the NY Botanical Garden in the Bronx, which is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a park-like setting and the wooded areas are beautiful, as is the rose garden, and the assortment of lilies, lady’s slippers, and poppies, in particular.
After the Botanical Garden, we made our way down to Williamsburg to swing through the Renegade Craft Fair, which was excellent. In particular, I thought there was a lot of great fabric work, as well as a wonderful assortment of paper and printing-related pieces…which I always have my eyes peeled for!
We had a chance to meet several people in person who I’ve kept up with on blogs, but who either live outside of the area, or whom I’ve just never run into.
Mary Robbins of Moth Designs in Portland, Maine does a very fun assortment of screenprinted onesies, tshirts, and lots more with Arabic phrases on them. Mary’s husband is Moroccan and I think we originally connected because of my (past-life’s) work with Morocco, and I’ve kept up with her work and her blog for a year or two now.
I also had the pleasure of meeting Kelly McMahon from MayDay Studio in Montpelier, Vermont. Kelly is also a bookbinder and printer, like myself, and she makes great journals and albums, as well as cards, broadsides, and some new beautiful decorative papers!
We also landed on Andy Pratt’s booth, shared with Davin from Woodside Press. Matt got me a package of Andy’s cards featuring Brooklyn rooftops a few months ago and I really love the style of his work and drawings - they’re just a ton of fun.
Davin and the guys at Woodside have just produced a gorgeous chapbook of a poem of Walt Whitman’s, entitled “Pictures”. The book was created in tandem with a Whitman celebration at the Brooklyn Museum’s Library, and is available on Etsy and well worth the incredibly reasonable $35 price tag. As someone who has designs of her own on finally getting some fine press books printed and bound, this was a great, inspiring piece to see.
With a great weekend under our belts, the week is already off to a quick start, and there will be lots of new journals and a few new albums up on Etsy throughout the week, so please continue to stop back and check out all of these fun new things!
Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider”.
maggie it was such a pleasure meeting you at renegade! thank you for stopping by-it was a great weekend made all the more sweet by so many wonderful appearances. hoping to see you again at future shows!