A Watercolor Revival

March 3, 2015February 25, 2015 ~ Bess Paper Goods & Gifts ~ Leave a comment

When I first made the decision to move to Bermuda, I made a list of goals for my time here to stave off a small (ok, giant) panic attack that went a little something like this: I’m going to quit my job. What if I don’t get steady freelance work? I’m not going to have a steady paycheck! What if I get bored? What am I going to do all day? What if I get all clingy and totally ruin the relationship because I’m so bored?!… etc. etc.

So, to pause that downward spiral, I started making a list (it’s still the best way I’ve learned to get a grip: somehow tasks look more manageable when they’re written down with a little check-able box in front of them) :
• Redesign the 622 press logo (check!
• Grow 622 press social media (check!)
• Start blogging again (check!)
• Reshoot all merchandise (check!)
• Grow wholesale market (first round of catalogs are out—fingers crossed!)• Submit my work for blogs and editorial features (working on it!)

And lots of other business-oriented goals like that plus lifestyle goals that I hadn’t been able to do with my very full-time job and my part-time letterpress work…
• Learn a new language/brush up on French (does downloading Dualingo ~~and never opening it~~ count?)
• Volunteer (check and check! I should write about that some time…)
• Work out (hitting the gym 2-3 times a week lately, plus tennis lessons!)
• (And the point of this post…) Draw every day

As it turns out, I shouldn’t have been so worried. For the first three months here, I was so busy with both freelance design work and getting my new life in order—guiding my crate through customs, getting my license, buying a bike, etc., that I actually felt like there weren’t enough hours in the day more often than not.

Now that the holidays are over and I’m smack in the middle of my longest on-island stretch yet (three more months until we have any travel planned!), I’m starting to tackle more of my Bermuda to-do list. To-do is perhaps a bit too hard of a word, as all of these activities are things I enjoy, but have simply fallen out of practice with. Throughout my childhood and into college, I kept dozens of sketchbooks and made art—crafts, paintings, calligraphy, pastel drawings—nearly every day. But even though I’ve been in a creative profession since, there was usually just one day a month—if I was lucky—when inspiration flowed and I got to create something that felt closer to art.

It all started with watercolor—for 622 press actually. I experimented with letterpress printing over watercolor, then started with production in earnest not too long after. First, abstract washes of color in the background of these invites and then employing paint as the main source of color in these prints.

Then, one Friday when I gave myself the day off from “real” work, I started painting in earnest. First succulents, which I ended up finishing with colored pencil in the smaller details. Then poppies made with pastels, and wet with a paintbrush for a smoother effect.

Then, coincidentally enough, a dear friend asked if I could create some art for her new house—she even had some inspiration: feathers, abstracted a bit. So I painted feathers for her.

And then, since I feel bad when I monopolize the dining room table for too long, I cleaned up my paints and transitioned to my sketchbook. My trusty set of Prismacolor colored pencils made the trek to Bermuda with me, but I’ve been sticking with plain old pencil as well. The textures of nature have always spoken to me (my photography professor had to force me to shoot anything else in college), so that’s what I’ve started with: poppies, seed pods, more succulents.

It’s not quite a drawing a day, but it is flexing my creative muscles and waking up a part of my brain that has been dormant for a long time. I feel like my skills in seeing and translating form still need some work, but I’ll keep posting work here—hopefully that will help encourage me to keep at it!

Prints & Recreation

February 13, 2015February 12, 2015 ~ Bess Paper Goods & Gifts ~ Leave a comment

Happy Galentine’s Day, dear readers! (Please tell me you totally got the Leslie Knope reference here.) Aaaaanyway all this romantic hullabaloo has me thinking about a Valentine making kit I had when I was young. It was filled with scraps of (fake) Victorian ephemera, little photos, pieces of lace and doilies and plastic rhinestones with adhesive on the back (way to be authentic, kit-makers).

This little seed has had me pondering ephemera and the ephemeral… after all, that is what I spend my life making these days. Ephemera traditionally refers to printed paper material—things that don’t last. Ephemeral essentially means temporary, but in an age of instant messages, facebook photo albums and email, almost everything stays digital—it’s the printed material that we hold on to and treasure. We only print the truly special photographs, or the important documents we cannot afford to lose in a cluttered inbox. Hand written notes get tucked away into secret hiding spaces to be pulled out when we need to feel a connection perfectly typed words can’t provide.

This is really just a long-winded way of saying now that the ephemera I make might be treasured years into the future, I totally overthink what I’m designing. Is it timeless? Will it feel classic or dated a decade from now? Does that matter? After all, we make Valentines with aesthetics that went extinct more than a century ago, we collect antique dishware and glorify the ‘60s and ‘70s, even though we wouldn’t be caught dead in Technicolor bell bottoms.

And maybe that’s part of the point—to capture a bit of the time period and remind us of what we thought was cool, even thought it’s not any more. (And who knows, if you wait long enough, it probably will be again! See: shoulder pads, neon, bow ties, mustaches…)

And so (here’s the part where I stop rambling and get to the point), with my new collection launching next week, I tried to design for how I’m feeling now, in early 2015, and not worry so much whether I’ll like these designs three years from now. And it feels like it worked. There’s a feeling of exuberance that my stationery hasn’t had up till this point. Letting go has released a sort of joy, which translates to the page, and is a good reminder for life. So while I’m still saving for retirement, I’m also trying to keep my mind in the present and live like life is ephemeral, because it is.

GIVEAWAY!!!!

February 11, 2015 ~ Bess Paper Goods & Gifts ~ Leave a comment

Sorry for yelling in the post title, but I’ve got some pretty exciting stuff cooking over here in the studio. First and foremost, the Spring 2015 collection is very nearly finished, so check back for some thoughts on that and the big reveal next week!

In the mean time, I’m super excited to be hosting a big fat pre-V-day giveaway! If you want to get a bunch of free letterpress goodies, head over to 622 press’ Facebook page. Find one of the giveaway posts (it’s at the top of the page right now!) and tag a fellow letterpress lover in the comments. You must comment to be entered—simply liking the post won’t do the trick. Enjoy, and good luck!

“I’m trying to grow stuff again”

February 5, 2015January 26, 2015 ~ Bess Paper Goods & Gifts ~ Leave a comment

That was the warning I gave my roommate/boyfriend last week after digging around in possibly-cockroach-filled potting soil out on our porch. You may remember at the beginning of my adventures in agriculture, I had a whole living room and porch full of lush green plants. The living room plants have fared pretty well, statistically speaking, the outdoor plants, maybe not so much.

So let’s start with the good news: Remember the avocado plants I grew from a pit? After months of growing in water (because I didn’t have a container for them yet), the healthiest one is thriving in a small pot. Despite the Jack-and-the-beanstalk perspective of this photo, it’s actually only about a foot tall.

The tillsandia and my other no-name house plant are both thriving, despite forgetting to water them for weeks on end pretty consistently. Thank you 90% humidity!

My beautiful little succulent grew to monstrous proportions—so much so that it was top heavy and tipped over its ceramic pot—and then I accidentally dropped our blinds on it while it was sitting in the window, minding its own business. Shit. I was hoping its broken leaves might grow back, but instead, they sprouted roots! So I did a little research on propagating succulents (and by that I mean I looked on Pinterest, obviously), and apparently that’s how you do it! I planted the new babies from the blind-dropping incident, picked off the rest of the leaves and did away with the damaged overgrown mama plant altogether. Stay tuned.

…And then there’s the porch inventory:

Cilantro: Dead

Chives: Dead

Thyme: Dead

Parsley: Thinking about making a comeback, but mostly dead

Basil: A little yellow, a little thin, but holding on!

Mint: Who knows! It wasn’t doing well at all, so I transferred it to a different pot where it thrived for a bit but now looks all spindly. I think the real problem is that I don’t use enough mint to trim it enough to encourage it to get bushy. I’m going to start paying attention to it though… Gotta get it healthy enough for mojitos in the spring!

Carrots: Sprouted, eaten by an animal just before the hurricanes. Also I’d like to clarify these plants are not in the ground, they’re on a second story porch. Who is taking bites out of them? Are there Bermuda winged rabbits no one has told me about?

Lettuce: Met the same fate as the carrots

Strawberries: This was perhaps the fruit I was most excited about. Homegrown strawberries! At Christmas! Obviously the little berries got eaten before they were even red and I didn’t get to taste the fruits of that labor at all! The plants are still holding on though, maybe they’ll try again?

Tomatoes: Ok, actually maybe this was what I was most excited about. I hate hothouse tomatoes. None of the plants I grew from a seed made it to adulthood, but the plant I purchased struggled through weather and critters to produce one beautiful little tomato for me while its leaves shriveled and died. And it was the most wonderful, most beautiful, most delicious little tomato I’ve ever eaten!

So the outdoor track record is not so great… and my neighbor’s thriving container garden does nothing but emphasize what a bad caretaker I am. I’m trying again… maybe I’ll get two tomatoes this time!

The Story of a Blanket

January 28, 2015January 27, 2015 ~ Bess Paper Goods & Gifts ~ 1 Comment

Do you beleive objects have memories? I sort of beleive they do—at least in the sense of the memories they can trigger in you.

I’ve just finished a blanket that I started approximately one hundred years ago—ok, two—while my mom was in the hospital. This is the blanket that kept my hands busy while I kept vigil and listened to her ragged breathing in the ICU. That is my clearest memory of working on it—sitting in a dark hospital room illuminated just enough by some HGTV program, volume turned down so I could hear her take another breath.

And yet, four or five weeks later, we packed up the hospital room—pieces of blanket included—and took my mom home. My sisters and I cooked Easter dinner and decorated with a welcome home sign and were more thankful than I can describe that our still-fragile mother was back in the home she had raised us in.

The blanket got packed away for the summer—who wants to crochet when it’s 80 degrees out, amiright?—but then as the weather turned colder and my relationship with a man I thought I would marry fell apart, out she came again. First, I would bring my project to his house so I wasn’t bored when we stopped talking to each other. Then, as he needed more time to himself, I made progress at home, watching the circles pile up next to my couch.

All of that seems eons away as I finished the last few circles this fall and winter—although it still fits the theme, as I didn’t start working on it again until it started getting dark early and Andrew worked late and I felt a bit lonely.

So I suppose this blanket is imbued with sadness, but it also seems to have cultured strength and resilience in me. I may never have ended up taking so many chances without those tragic events that my blanket witnessed—and I certainly wouldn’t have ended up here.

She’s proudly on display now, making Bermuda feel a little more like home, and you know the memories that will come to me every time I walk by.