Letterpress Gift Tags

Earlier this week I got to spend a day in the letterpress studio at the San Francisco Center for the Book teaching my first ever letterpress workshop--Letterpress Gift Tags.

The workshop was an awesome 3 hours of printing gift tags on tabletop platen presses. 

We began with learning to set lead type and basic press operation. Then we got right down to business with printing.

 Happy Winter was my design. The typeface kinda reminds me of a beer label...

 This one was a warm up for the students at they learned to work the press

How could we make holiday tags without naughty/nice ones?

Class ended with rounding corners, punching holes and adding string, so the tags could be attached to gifts.

Colorado Ground

Christmas was spent in Colorado with the ever so amazing in-laws (yes, they really are great). My mom and dad in-law moved from Denver to Castle Rock over the summer and traded their city skyline for a great view of the foothills and Rockies. I managed to get a nasty cold the day after we arrived (isn't that always the way when you take time off?) but snuck in a trek around the property before that happened. 

Seasonal Shortbread

The other day I made shortbread for a friend that had helped me out with a project. I've made shortbread for this friend before so I wanted to make sure it wasn't just your average shortbread this time around. Since everywhere is now selling pumpkin spice everything, I figured why not do pumpkin spice shortbread.

I followed the recipe I found to a T but, once the cookies were out of the oven, they were lacking a certain flavor kick. So I dusted them with powdered sugar, cinnamon, and allspice.

Homemade Holiday

Because Christmas is on a weekend this year, I have extra days off from work which means that I was able to put a little more homemade love into things this time around. 

Stockings:

Since we're staying in San Francisco this year, my in-laws mailed us our gifts. We each got a lot of stocking stuffers...but no stockings. For our wedding I was gifted a sewing machine but, being extremely accident prone, I have been afraid to use it. The need for stockings made me overcome my fears. I found a free pattern online, figured out how to thread the machine (thank goodness for the automatic threader) and set to work.

Charlie's stocking

my stocking

Wrapping paper:

Every year Charlie goes all out on some crazy and creative gift wrapping. I was having trouble coming up with creative ways to wrap but, since we have to much paper around the house, it seemed silly to buy wrapping paper; so I busted out the rubber stamps and some plain drawing paper and set to work making patterns and then wrapping gifts.

Charlie loves cooking so most of his gifts are for the kitchen; this stamp seemed like the perfect thing to use

Happy Christmas

I'm really not a big Christmas person but my husband and roommate love to get in the holiday spirit. Today we made a trip to get a small potted pine tree, some lights and a few ornaments to spruce up the apartment.