Studio Party!!!!! Friday!!! Yo!

Please join us for a Studio Party to celebrate our new space! Come see where all the letterpress hijinks for Paper Parasol Press and Shimmer Studio will be happening!

3729 N. Ravenswood Avenue, Studio 135A in Chicago.
Friday, October 2nd, 2009 from 7pm to 10pm.

Our special thanks to Delicate Creature for the event design.

And don't forget the Ravenswood Artwalk is this weekend too! Lots of studios open all along Ravenswood (including ours). Come on out! October 3rd and 4th from 11am – 6pm.

Letterpress Openhouse — Saturday, July 11th!!!

Starshaped Press is hosting a letterpress open house!

Saturday, July 11, 2009
11:00am - 5:00pm
starshaped press
4636 N. Ravenswood #103
(on the west side of Ravenswood)
Chicago, IL

Come check out (and purchase) letterpress work from a handful of Chicago's talented ladies!

Printers include....
Starshaped Press
a. favorite design
Rar Rar Press
Shimmer Studio
Cindy Tomczyk (Paper Parasol)

with sweet treats by Sugarkist

and Starshaped Press will have the studio open for folks to see how printing works

another little custom project

These signs were so much fun to design and print! I love the way they turned out. Designed by and letterpress printed by yours truly for Vive La Femme which is located at 2048 north damen * bucktown. A fantastic and awesome store!

Announcement Postcard

I turned one of the Shimmer Studio designs into an announcement postcard! This postcard features the jasmine flowers design on the front and the client's information on the back. The card was letterpress printed with two colors on the front and one color on the back — the ink colors are turquoise and teal. It is a standard postcard size and can be sent at the USPS postcard rate.

To celebrate the custom project Shimmer Studio is going to offer a summer postcard sale! Choose any Shimmer Studio design for the front of the postcard and I'll customize the front and the back. Contact me for special pricing. I'm going to offer the sale price through September.

Thanks for taking a peek at the new project! Contact: info@shimmer-studio.com

hot off the press

Here's a little peek at three brand new letterpress cards for 2009. All the cards are fold overs and include envelopes.

The above card is gold ink printed on turquoise cardstock.

This is the newest card design and I call it "My Melancholy Butterfly" because she is thinking "Le Sigh." Teal ink on turquoise cardstock.

This last card is named "Cherry Glow" and features pink and gold ink. It really pops!

color studies

Another method to my madness is how I do color studies. I like to do my color studies by flipping through magazines and pulling out the colors I like and then I glue them in a hodge podge mess and throw them in a sketch book. It looks like controlled chaos but I like doing them this way because I can open a few pages and look at a lot of my personal color picks and see how they interact together at a glance. I do need to focus on doing some more specific color boards right now, specifically a fall color board filled with oranges and reds. I tend toward the cool side so I am going to conciously focus on warm tones. The second color study spread is the one I used for the current Shimmer Studio line of stationery.

Welcome home!

My Heidelberg Windmill arrived on the scene this AM and that is it outside the Ravenswood building. It seemed to stop spritzing just long enough to move this in without having to worry about the rain. Yay! Below are some photos of how the studio is coming along. I still have some more things to get over there and some major organizing to do. The C+P is Cindy's press — don't they look great together. Her press is beautiful. I can't wait for both of them to be up and running.