Merry Ornaments!

Joie Studio's Merry Ornaments are in the Etsy shop (well, the square cards are, anyway)!

Hope you had a great Turkey day! Don't forget, Joie Studio's holiday sale (25% all items) goes on through Monday! Just enter coupon code "BLACKBDAY" at checkout! Enjoy!

Holiday Letterpress Card Offerings

So sorry I've been so slow to share our holiday offerings online! We've been going through a bathroom renovation and GEESH it's been a little insane.

Here are the first three up! A new one for 2010 is our Mele Kalikimaka card:

And, of course, they're BAAAAACK! The ever popular Nice or Naughty letterpress holiday cards are back!

Also back are the gorgeously luxe Holiday Sparkle Cards:

I have two more brand new holiday designs to share with you but I was pretty remiss in getting some seasonal help at the studio and so it's just me this season! Please bear with me, I've got a pretty sweet one coming up soon!

These three cards are up and available in the Etsy shop! More soon, I promise, and stay tuned on the blog for a very special Holiday Sale in our Etsy shop and a calendar giveaway on the blog!

2011 Letterpress Desk Calendars!

Joie Studio's 2011 letterpress desk calendar was inspired in large part by my current obsession with traditional Chinese and Japanese design motifs and my fond memories of my travels through Japan, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. I thought that the very beautiful, very luxe, very eco-friendly bamboo paper would be a perfect complement to the design. It came out beautifully. Here are the months:

These are available in my Etsy shop and they are in limited quantities. My birthday is Wednesday, so I believe I will have a sale to celebrate my birthday, Thanksgiving, and the start of the holiday season!

Enjoy!

Last Minute Gifts...Joie Studio Style!

To help out last minute holiday shoppers, I'm offering free gift wrap on our 2009 letterpress menagerie calendars! So you can grab a calendar, sans gift wrap, which looks like this in all its packaging glory:

OR you can order it gift-wrapped, in your choice of gold foil or metallic green, complete with your choice of one of our letterpress gift tags:

The calendars (gift wrap or no) are available in both the Joie Studio Letterpress Shop and the Joie Studio Etsy shop.

I'm also offering exclusively in the Joie Studio Etsy shop Menagerie notecard gift sets, which are a set of 8 notecards of the animal of your choice, boxed in a sturdy kraft gift box. Here they are in an open box:

If you're sending the box set as a gift, I can close it up for you and add a letterpress holiday tag for the finishing touch, like so!

And, if you like the letterpress holiday tags, they are available all by themselves, in a variety pack of 4. I'm unsure I will reprint these, so get them while they're around!

They're Baa-aack! Nice & Naughty Snowmen...

Joie Studio absolutely sold out of these cards last year, and so this year, we've brought them back, better than ever! We sold out of all the sets we brought to Felt Club, so I encourage you to grab them while you can. We have packaged more but I'm done printing holiday cards this season so get them while they last. They're in the Joie Studio Store and will be available on November 30th at Bazaar Bizarre!

I *heart* this print job so so much. It doesn't look that different from last year, honestly, but it's just little things about this print run that makes me realize how much I've grown as a letterpress printer. First telltale sign is registration and spoilage. Last year I had a spoilage rate of about 20-25%, which on a handfed motorized platen with 3 color registration honestly isn't that bad. This year the spoilage on these cards was about 4-5%. Second is ink distribution and coverage. Solid forms like that are honestly problems on antique platen presses, especially a smaller one with less impression strength like the Golding Pearl. I didn't have as much of a problem this year as I did last year, which I attribute to the change to honeycomb base, the new roller bearers, and better ink handling by yours truly. I honestly learned a lot printing the Love Fruits, which has the largest solid area of anything I've printed. Third, the impression on the snowmen is just awesome. Crisp lines all the way around and the best part is that the little buttons pop out thanks to the beauty of letterpress. I took a closeup picture but it's not the best picture in the world:

This design is a collaboration between Shop Toast and Joie Studio, which we hope will last a very very long time because I *heart* everything we've done so far.

Enjoy!

Long and Lean: Merry Ornaments Holiday Cards

Here is Joie Studio's 2008 signature design on a gorgeous #10 sized folded card! I did two different colorways here. This first is in mandarin orange, fire red, and sakura pink:

I also wanted to print this card with green as the primary color, and eventually decided on green, true blue, and metallic gold. Here it is!

Our Eco-Friendly Cards: Holiday Sparkle!

These gorgeous cards are based on Joie Studio's company card last year! These cards are super special because these cards are the first cards that I printed using only vegetable oil inks, making them our most eco-friendly letterpress cards to date! These letterpress cards are printed in all metallic inks -- metallic gold, metallic silver, and metallic red on 100% luxurious cotton (tree-free) cardstock. We've paired the cards with gorgeous metallic gold envelopes.

Here it is a closeup:

And here is the card in box:

A note on vegetable oil inks: I've done a lot of research on eco-friendly inks and there is a lot of controversy about the environmental impact of soy-based products. We'll just avoid the whole issue by offering vegetable oil based inks as an eco-friendly alternative to rubber based inks. We've been working with a local mom-and-pop ink company here in Los Angeles where they use vegetable oil as their oil base and custom mix (by hand!) our inks to order. That way, we reduce transportation costs, support our local economy, and utilize what we believe to be the best oil-based inks around.

Our Square Holiday Cards: Merry Ornaments!

Introducing Joie Studio's first new holiday design -- Merry Ornaments! We have this design on 4.75" square cards in two different colorways and on #10 in two other colorways which I'll post separately. For the square cards, I handset "season's greetings" in gorgeously fun P.T. Barnum antique type. I *heart* this new font I acquired. How fun is it to have a font that was made for the circus?

Anyhow, here it is in hot pink, purple, and metallic gold:

And here it is in ice blue, metallic silver, and metallic gold:

We're starting to do these fun labels (above) on our letterpress products. It's a slow conversion as everything is being labeled by hand with love, so it's new products first, old products next.

Menagerie 2009 Calendar

Here it is - Joie Studio's 2009 Calendar in all its glory! This year, it's animal themed after Joie Studio's Menagerie collection.

You can also check out all the different months up close here:



The calendars are limited edition, so get them while they last!

Fabulous Christmas Cards

I know it's a little late (or early) for Christmas cards, but I realized that I never posted these wonderful cards. A while back, I posted about these absolutely gorgeous chocolate envelopes that I letterpressed in metallic gold ink. Here is the rest of the custom Christmas card. We printed on ultra ultra thick 220lb Crane's Lettra in Ecruwhite. Then, Joie Studio also assembled the photo card, adhering 300 photographs onto these cards. Yes, that was a fun day of sniffing glue. On top of that, since these cards were so thick, we also professionally drilled holes for the ribbon. The results are gorgeous.

Festive and Fun!

I've been racking my brains for a custom holiday card for Joie Studio. I was starting to freak out because I wanted to send a custom design instead of one of my stock designs with a message inside, which is probably what I should have done. But this card is the result and I'm so so thrilled at the way it came out!

I wanted the card to be festive and fun yet have it be just a gorgeously printed card that shows exactly what letterpress is and what Joie Studio can do. So I printed it on super-duper thick, 600 GSM/220lb, 100% cotton, textured Crane's Lettra in Ecru. This is NOT stock you can shove through a printer, and it showcases the fact that letterpress can print on so many different types of art paper. The snowflakes are in metallic gold and metallic silver and the wording is in red. I have a blind deboss on the back of Joie Studio's logo. It was a lot of work, but I'm glad that my husband convinced me to do 3 colors!

And here are the envelopes that go with it! It's metallic silver printed on red envelopes and metallic gold envelopes:

I'm going to send these cards to my suppliers, my custom order clients, and my best customers. Happy Holidays from Joie Studio!

Season's Greetings!

I've got two Season's Greetings cards for sale right now in my Etsy shop!

Nice/Naughty Card: An Awesome Collaboration with Shop Toast!

So Michelle and I went to high school together. And life happened the way it happens. I moved to Southern California for college, Michelle stayed in Honolulu, and we lost touch. I left the world of new technologies and started Mystic Bottle and, subsequently, Joie Studio, while Michelle, a trained architect, took her design skills in a totally new direction and opened Shop Toast. We recently met up and decided to do a holiday collaboration. And here it is, the Nice/Naughty Holiday card designed by Shop Toast and letterpress printed by Joie Studio. There are only 200 cards available this holiday season, 100 through Joie Studio and 100 through Shop Toast. We'll both have the card in our respective shops and at craft fairs (in Los Angeles through Joie Studio, in Honolulu through Shop Toast). These cards are already available in my Etsy shop, so get them while supplies last!

We're already talking about our next collaborative project, so hopefully these cards are well-received and we'll be motivated to bring you more yummy goodness like this!

Pine Needles Holiday Card

I finished packing up these beautiful holiday letterpress cards. The cards are A2 (4.25" x 5.5") folded 100% luxurious, ultra-thick cotton cardstock with coordinating green envelopes. I used lime green with a metallic gold for a fantastically elegant effect.

Here are more pics -- can you feel the softness of the paper just by looking at it?

Cards are sold in sets of 5 for $12 (discounts on multiple sets), and they are in my Etsy shop!