Just a little midweek update…
A few new journals - covered in Paris maps and vegetable seed packets - making their way to Etsy
And I’ll have several fun new printing projects to share with you soon. Plus, I’ll have some dates soon for bookbinding workshops here in Brooklyn!
For now, we’re just checking things off the almighty to-do list as it’s getting down to crunch time on the days till full time binding & printing…we’re at 16 days, and August 1st is only getting closer!
I know you all probably have the impression that we sit around here with our feet up, sipping fancy summer drinks and grilling on the roof…but I swear we do some work, too!
This last week has been a particularly busy one, putting together a lot of letterpress quotes for printing projects, working on some new designs, getting some books finished up and out the door, and trying to get all my ducks in a row, as the big transition from working-all-the-time-at-two-full-time-jobs shifts to working-all-the-time-at-one-full-time job! August 1 is only 3 weeks away!
In anticipation of the upcoming change, I’m making attempts to get supplies, schedules, plans, and projects-in-the-works as organized as possible, given that space and time are what they are at the moment. There are a lot of pieces spread around, and they do seem to be coming together, slowly but surely.
I’m also getting new journals and albums up on Etsy as regularly as I can (and there are plenty more to come!), and a few fun new guest books are in the works, too. In the meantime, off to relax just a little (and hopefully recover from a nagging little summer cold!), before another busy week is upon us!
I think this week’s to-do list actually has about 87 very specific things on it already and, while I managed to check off 5 or 6 things tonight, we’ve got a ways to go, so I’ll make this short & sweet!
New journal and album covers - lots of dental journals and maps!
And a little look around our roof over the weekend - just for fun!
Despite the seemingly constant drizzle, we’ve managed to have a pretty wonderful time of things over this long weekend…a little grilling (which I think made Matt ready to move to the suburbs, just for a yard), some very healthy rooftop plants that are a sure sign it’s nearly mid-July, and fireworks all around!
We’re two extremely lucky people.
The cosmos and zinnias that I started from seeds are also coming right along. I’ve been thinning them out regularly and they’re enjoying the rain. So far, this year’s urban gardening experiment is a little more successful than last summer’s.
I also spent the holiday, rather unexpectedly, putting together card packaging. The day started off a little messy, but was very productive (and yes, I do actually manage to get a lot of work done, despite the sheer amount of supplies I’m surrounded by!)…
…and I think I came up with some nice results!
And now I really need to get back to enjoying the day and a half or so that’s still left in this weekend! More soon…including new journals and albums (yes, again!). Have a safe and relaxing holiday weekend, in the meantime! And…because I almost always need to share a little poetry, here are a few beautiful lines to read and recall the perspective, rhythms, stories, history, and our little lives that intersect with one another over and over and are always more complex than we first assume.
Lately, I don’t even find myself making excuses for all the mornings and evenings of folding and trimming and sewing. I just love it a little too much and that’s just how it’s gonna be.
Today was a welcome day off which, right in line with my track record, ended up being one of the hardest working days I’ve had recently! Between invitation designs, sorting out pricing, responding to emails that have been piling up, and finishing up a few albums and journals on the ol’ to-do list, it’s somehow 3:48 in the afternoon…the last time I checked, I think it was about 8:20 this morning. I guess that’s what a little coffee & and a lot of plans will do for you!
I wanted to share a fun little bridal shower invitation that I printed earlier this week. The colors are wonderfully fun and summery and very, very watermelon. Enjoy!
Now I’m off to pick up some more paper, get myself a little more organized, and then have a great holiday weekend with the best live-in web designer in the world!
It’s been a busy weekend of finishing up a couple of albums and some invitation pieces. We made it outside for brief errands, but mostly tried to stay in the A/C, since it was about 90 degrees and somewhere close to 100% humidity for most of the weekend. There were a few amazing thunderstorms and, all in all, it was pretty conducive to a whole lot of productivity on my part!
Journal and album covers ready to go!
So, there will be lots of new albums and journals soon…more pictures as things are done! In the meantime, I’m off to enjoy the remaining few precious minutes of my Sunday evening before this nicely shortened holiday week begins!
Another of Donald Justice’s beautiful American Sketches:
Crossing Kansas by Train
By Donald Justice
The telephone poles
Have been holding their
Arms out
A long time now
To birds
That will not
Settle there
But pass with
Strange cawings
Westward to
Where dark trees
Gather about a
Water hole this
Is Kansas the
Mountains start here
Just behind
The closed eyes
Of a farmer’s
Sons asleep
In their work clothes
Just in case everyone wasn’t already aware, I do actually spend close to every waking second thinking about paper and books. Some would say this is a little extreme, and it probably is, but I tend to enjoy it. At 7:00 p.m. today, after a full day of printing, binding, designing, and invitation planning, it all came to a head.
(Just a heads up, if you’re a fan of Fawlty Towers, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about here. If not, please go watch as many episodes as you can immediately! This is the gem of a segment that came to mind…start watching about 7 minutes, 55 seconds in…)
John Cleese’s mishap-prone Basil Fawlty and his judgmental but abiding wife, Prunella Scales’s equally hilarious Sybil Fawlty, are hosting a gourmet night in the dining room of their English hotel. They’ve shooed away “the riffraff” as Basil calls them, and have ended up with 2 couples game to take the plunge. Of course, comedy ensues and, after losing their alcoholic chef to his vice early on in the evening, Basil arranges two ducks from the nearby French restaurant instead, thereby scrapping the previously advertised menu for the evening in favor of Duck with Orange, Duck with Cherries, and Duck Surprise (duck without orange or cherries, of course). When the clientele questions the limited nature of the menu and asks, “So there’s only duck?”, Basil replies, “Yes, but done of course the three extremely different ways.”
I’ll admit that I thought of this exchange in the show because I’ve been considering packaging options for my cards to make them as marketable and eye-catching as possible, and pretty much keep coming up with ever-so-slight variations on essentially the same theme…cards done three extremely different ways: in a cellophane envelope with the card facing out on top, card not showing on top, with ribbon, without ribbon, or - the ultimate combo - card facing out on top WITH ribbon!
I don’t think it’s even up for debate to say that my family has always enjoyed Fawlty Towers because it seems so uncannily similar to many of the situations and reactions my own parents have had with their own business over the years. The family lives above the gallery? In the middle of downtown Marion, Iowa, where people do not do that? It’s bound to happen!
Possibly the most illuminating example is when my dad was performing Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends or A Final Evening with the Illuminati as part of the Liars Theatre season in the summer of oh, say, 1993. He had partially shaved pieces out of his hair to play the paranoid Reverend Eddie and, needless to say, the folks at Farmers State Bank were a bit concerned about him and the teller we always went to, Priscilla, pulled my mom aside one day while she was making a deposit to ask, “Is Craig ok?”.
So it’s not exactly that we had a questionably competent Spaniard like Manuel cleaning the place, or an overly astute and able manager like Polly, but I’m positive more Marionites walked in on the inner workings of family business on a daily basis than probably should have, but I’m sure it was almost as entertaining as a good, solid episode of Fawlty Towers.
We ended up with a welcome day to ourselves on Friday, since we had both taken the day off, thinking we’d head to Iowa for a wedding. Between the incredible flooding and damage being dealt with in Cedar Rapids and the ungodly expensive plane tickets, we nixed those plans. Instead, we headed up to the Dia:Beacon first thing Friday morning.
The museum itself is beautiful, and right along the Hudson. One of the perks of doing anything with Matt is that you have your own personal photographer for the day.
The museum is gorgeous. It used to be a box printing factory and the building is a pretty staggering 240,000 square feet. Their permanent collection includes work by Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol; many of the key large scale features of any good American-art-since-1945 class.
There is also an outstanding exhibit of Louise Bourgeois work upstairs in a sort of attic-like space with the original exposed brick walls. Her cast bronze pieces that resemble hornets’ nests are suspended from the beams, and one of her now somewhat classic spiders is carefully nested into a back room, leaving us wondering how exactly they managed to fit it in there. (The image I linked to here is a different spider than what’s there right now, but the same space.)
It takes the right approach to installation art to make a statement I actually appreciate. Oftentimes the conceptual element far outweighs the execution, leaving you with a nasty I’m-not-quite-sure-that’s-art feeling. The Tacita Dean exhibit in the basement of the Dia:Beacon is not one of those installation pieces. It is breathtaking. The Dia has given her almost the entire floor: as you come to the bottom of the steps, you enter a huge, cavernous room with ceilings on the order of 20 feet high and concrete columns throughout…and there are absolutely no lights on. As you wander through the space (and you have to wander because your eyes can barely adjust), there are 6 projectors showing video of Merce Cunningham doing a piece called Stillness projected onto 6 small panels (about 6′ x 6′ each). The video is just Cunningham shifting into different simple seated positions every 45 seconds or so, raising his hand to his chin or crossing his legs. Otherwise, he’s completely still. It’s a powerful piece, I think because it has such an instant physical effect on anyone in the room. You have to slow down. You have to move carefully.
After we made our way through the basement, to the outdoor side garden with a bizarre sound installation (imagine the most annoying birds you can think of from some sort of tropical jungle, yet you’re in Beacon, NY and the Hudson is just on the other side of those trees), we stopped into the bookshop to wait out a brief shower. While the shop hosted the usual selection of art books and a great selection of texts on modern sculpture, there was also an impressive assortment of small fine press chapbooks. I saw a lot of books that were definitely on the order of what I want to be doing over the course of the next several years: small, handmade, limited edition (anywhere from 100 to 350 in an edition, in this case) and beautifully designed collections of poetry, imagery, and essays.
We spent the afternoon walking through downtown Beacon and had a wonderful lunch, some amazing sorbet, and enjoyed being able to walk down the street and actually have room to let our arms swing at our sides. We needed a break.
We popped back into Grand Central after half-napping on the Metro North train all the way back, and decided to stop at Franklin Park when we got back to the neighborhood…a little too nice!
And, while I’m still terrible at calming down and just enjoying the moment, it’s been a fantastic weekend. I’m getting myself ramped up for the newfound time I’ll have to devote to books & printing, come August, and still kind of amazed, terrified, invigorated, and exhilarated that all of this is actually happening!
From Blossoms
By Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
continued here