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!

"Lotus Glow" limited edition print

I have a new limited edition print titled "Lotus Glow" available in the etsy shoppe. It is a four color letterpress print and there are 75 in this edition. This was the first print with more than two colors that I have ever done. I am really excited about how it turned out and to the great responses I have received.

And all the "Mandala" limited edition prints are up in the etsy shoppe as well. They are available as singles or as sets of three or six prints.

big BIG news!

So the big mama printer hanging on a country road in Indiana is Shimmer Studio's new big mama printer! Yo! Ed Regan of Regan Printing Machinery Movers took the above photo outside of his warehouse in Indiana (And yes the press is being stored inside—it only had a short stay outdoors on a nice sunny spring day—we did have one of those. So nobody panic). The press technically only had to be moved about 15 miles but because of conflicting schedules it needed to be removed from it's original print shop in Cicero and stored in Indiana until it can be delivered to my new studio on Ravenswood in Chicago. See—big news! The press is a 10x15 Heidelberg Windmill and it is in need of some TLC.

This month Shimmer Studio will be moving into a new studio space we are sharing with Paper Parasol Press. Yay! So here's to letterpress and paper goodness all around. Cheers!

What comes first? The studio space or the letterpress? These were the questions I have been pondering for well over a year. The answer? I don't think it matters. Paper Parasol Press had their press before the space and as soon as we joined forces to find space I got mine. Although there were set-backs on space and press, in the end I think it will all work out super duper coolio! Needless to say I am very excited as you can tell by the unnecessary abundance of exclamation points and extra special descriptors.

Shimmer Studio will be starting a great new chapter this summer. While it will take us some time to get up to speed on our new press and to get our studio set-up again we look forward to taking your orders! Wholesale and custom orders will continue to be printed at the time of order so please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery. All Etsy and online sales will continue to be shipped out within 2 business days of order. If you have any questions please email me: sales{at}shimmer-studio.com

Shimmer Studio Brocade

A new folded letterpress card is available on etsy! This letterpress card features the Shimmer Studio Brocade pattern printed in silver ink on turquoise card stock. The card is blank on the inside and includes a metallic silver envelope! You can purchase a set of six here.

Tina Fey is my new hero!

The new poster is in the shimmer studio etsy shop now! The unofficial title of the poster is "Tina Fey is my new hero." I had a couple requests for the design to be made into stationery so if you agree let me know! I would like to start printing more art prints and next week I should be listing some matted mandala prints. I better go and get stuff done!

news: DIY Trunkshow: Saturday: Chicago: Please come!

Hello, Hello! WOW, winter certainly has blown into Chicago and trees and holiday decor are going up around town. And even better Shimmer Studio will be at one of the first holiday handmade shopping extravaganzas — The DIY Trunkshow (woo hoo!). I'm really excited and I have been trimming cards feverishly all week. I will also be debuting my first letterpress poster design (it's a little poster but it's a lot of letterpress). There will also be some new pocket mirrors, buttons and, of course, HOLIDAY CARDS! The DIY Trunkshow is this Saturday, November 22nd from 10am until 5pm at the Pulaski Park Auditorium (1419 W. Blackhawk, Chicago, IL 60622). Shimmer Studio is Booth #11 in Gym 2. Please check out the DIY Trunkshow website and take a peek at all the great vendors!

Splat Flats 4th Annual Open House

Splat Flats 4th Annual Open House! Saturday, October 11th!! 4pm until 10pm! Lots of studios and artists. My studio is on the East Side and it is 35E (third floor)! I will have some munchies, wine and stationery. Maybe a little letterpress demo if I can pull it together. Stop by if you have a chance.

Computer Design Bootcamp

My computer design bootcamp class will be next weekend at Evanston Print & Paper. Below is the description of the class. If you would like to sign up call 847-475-7674.

Want to know how best to translate your designs into letterpress friendly files? This two-day workshop will help you take your design ideas and prepare them for photo-polymer processing. Don’t have a design idea, but want to learn what works? We will have a class project for you to hone your skills. We will work with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to learn what works best in letterpress and what to avoid. This is a hands-on class, so it’s best to have Illustrator and Photoshop, and even better to have them on a laptop you can bring to class.

Saturday & Sunday, October 11th & 12th, 11:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Hint: you can download free 30-day trials of both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator at adobe.com but wait until just before class to download so you can really optimize the trial time. If you have any questions feel free to contact me.

three: Printing Ink

Oops I am getting a little behind in my list here! So something that may seem kind of strange that makes me happy is the smell of printing ink. The other thing that makes me happy about ink is mixing up colors but it is the smell that gets me. My favorite part of being a graphic designer is always going on press checks and I love the way press shops smell. I did not realize I needed to start spending some time doing the actual printing. I would not want to run a gigantic fully motorized Heidelberg but I will keep on Letterpressing (it's time to make that a verb isn't it?)! I'm printing holiday cards tomorrow!

photopolymer plates can be recycled!

Photopolymer plates are awesome! I love these crazy yellow sheets of plastic that you process in a plate maker machine with your negatives. For letterpress printers it means we can digitally design projects and then make plates or have plates made for us to print from. I have kept every single polymer plate I have ever made because I did not know what to do with them after I was through. Incidentally you can keep your plates a pretty long time and print a good number of prints with one plate.

Most of the ones I no longer need are ones that (a) I messed up (which means I messed up the film and previously the digital files which does happen when I try to do things at 2am and (b) the plates can get dry and cracky. Plates should stay nice and flexible and even though I have stored my plates in complete darkness they have dried out enough that I can not print from them any longer and I can even snap them into pieces which is very very bad. The other thing about polymer is after I've processed my plates I cut a lot of waste away that in the past I did not know what to do with.

So where I am going with this tangent? Boxcar Press will recycle letterpress photopolymer plates, either exposed or unexposed! So I can send my hard cruchy plates and my polymer waste pieces to Boxcar for recycling—I feel better now. Well I am a little upset about my dry crunchy plates. So why did some of my plates get dried out? I think my apartment is not humid enough for them. I solved this by moving all my new plates that I made this year into my bathroom—seriously! Goodbye xtra hair products and hello plates! So far that really seems to have solved my dry plate problem. Funny but true. I've read basements work really well too. The keys to preserving those plates is dark plus some humidity. Of course all this being said everyone's places are different so experiment for yourself where to best keep your photopolymer. If you are just starting out with photopolymer keep a close eye on it to see how it is holding up. Here's the link to the recycling program at Boxcar!

hot off the press

Well, maybe not hot of the press but it was just last week!

Beckman's Handcrafted Show :: Booth 7-4065

Shimmer Studio will have a booth at Beckman's Handcrafted Show July 19th – July 22nd. Our booth number is 7-4065 on the seventh floor of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Beckman's Handcrafted Show is part of the Chicago Gift Show: Living and Giving.

We are very excited to be a part of this show on our home turf.

Printing*Printing*Printing

I have been consistently printing since I returned from New York and I will be at it again next week (and probably the week after)! I love the process of printing so I am not complaining! For now I rely on renting letterpress time at some fantastic local Chicago spots but I hope to purchase my own press soon! Below are some photos of the Vandercook Universal I at the Center for Book and Paper Arts. I hope I can find myself a Vandy one day!

Letterpress videos on YouTube

I've never really been a huge watcher of YouTube, except for the occasional muppet snippets and music videos. As a matter of fact my all time favorite YouTube video is, "Me Lost Me Cookie at the Disco!" (it really is a must see). So on one of my many random googlings of the word "letterpress" guess what I found? Letterpress videos on YouTube. I'm so ecstatic! I haven't gone through and watched a lot of them yet but here is a link to a good start for all you other letterpress nerds out there: http://www.youtube.com/user/DonBlackLetterpress.

FYI, I use a Vandercook press to print most of my stationery but I do have a Sigwalt table-top platen press which I use for little things here and there.

YouTube is pretty spiffy!