For L

These flower images have a different purpose from my other flowers pictures. 

L's birthday was earlier this month and her parents sent her a lovely little flower arrangement. Not wanting to keep it at work, she brought it home where it would potentially face the wrath of my two crazy cats. Hiding in our little sink area wasn't much of an existence for the arrangement either so in an attempt to prolong their lifespan, I decided to photograph the flowers. These images are a bit of a belated birthday present for L.

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.

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

Grown Gifts

Last Sunday was my 26th birthday and I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with my friend Susan. She cooked a delicious lunch for me and we spent 4 hours talking about anything and everything. Besides purchased gifts (a seal and wax and a wand!) she sent me home with some gifts grown in her yard.

I had been admiring the centerpiece flower on the table while we were eating and then I got to take it home in a cute little former balsamic vinegar jar. A week later this little guy is still going strong. 

These handpicked apples are truly delicious. I didn't think there would be that much of a difference between the store bought apples, but I'll take these little ones any day. They are flavorful, juicy and not at all mealy--just the way an apple should be.

*All photos in this post were made with a Fujifilm Instax Mini 7S camera.