Dying Flowers

Shortly before the winter holidays and the end of the year officially hit, I was wrapping up a few projects in the studio and happened upon some flowers left over from a holiday event. They had been left uncared for over a weekend and were clearly destined for the compost bin but there was still something about them that caught my eye. I had my camera with me and couldn't resist spending nearly an hour photographing them. 

I love the Dutch tradition of vanitas and, despite the lack of bugs and complete rot, these past-their-prime flowers reminded me of that tradition. I would be lying if I said I had thought of the overtly poetic end-of-the-year-death-evergreen-new-life concept as I photographed; that didn't happen until I was typing up this post. Vanitas, symbolism, nice photos, interpret them however you like, I am simply sharing this quick end of 2014 photo project with you.

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.

Holiday Party

This here is a real live postage stamp dispenser!

No holiday season is complete without a holiday party. New Years is yet to come, but this season's party of choice for me was the Correspondence Co-op Holiday she-bang. Some of my favorite people were there and, to make things even better, there was also, food, postcard stamping, and a raffle!

My gift to the crew was typewriter wine. I'm not a wine drinker myself but how could I resist...this wine was made for the Co-op.

These photos do not do justice to the table that was positively overflowing with delicious treats!

Of course there were gifts as well, like a 'make your own stamp' and lickable artists stamps. Is is just me or does everyone think of the wall paper scene in Willy Wonka when they hear the word lickable?

We were making postcards to petition Obama to save USPS.

That awesome stamp dispenser was one of the raffle prizes. Alas, I didn't win anything despite the giant train of tickets I bought. It was still a grand night, though.

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