giving thanks

So, it's Tuesday and a new week. We took Liam back to the doctor today; he has a full-blown ear infection now. We started him on a new {not penicillin} antibiotic and hope to see the return of our cheerful boy soon. He's actually been, as he always is, a real trooper. The good news is that he is slightly less contrary today and he ate a great breakfast. The good news is that his lungs sound crystal clear so that lingering cough is just surface stuff. It's been a rough week and a half, but there is plenty to be thankful for still. It's all a matter of perspective.

My email program has decided to take a little holiday so I have been unable to let all my customers who pre-ordered calendars know that they did, indeed, get mailed yesterday! I'm so glad to have them on their way.

As for Thanksgiving, my family begins to arrive tomorrow evening. Here's the menu:

Radicchio Salad with Anchovy Olives, Parmesan and Olive Oil Toast
Buttermilk Brined Turkey, Roasted with Bay Leaf, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
Stuffing with Celery, Sage and Chestnuts
Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Gravy
Carrots and Parsnips with Brown Butter
Cream Braised Brussell Sprouts
Caramelized Pearl Onions
Pumpkin Pie

You know I love to cook, right? I do. Somehow, in the mayhem of the past ten days, I managed to bake a batch of Buckwheat Butter Cookies with Cocoa Nibs. Hands down, the best cookies EVER. I don't follow recipes, except for baking, and I'm really looking forward to a full day of being in the kitchen making good food. A lot of good food.

end of a long week

Friends, it's been a long week and it's not over yet. This is just some of the mail I'm trying to get posted by tomorrow – lots of calendars! – only, well, I seem to have forgotten to order enough stamps on time and, most of all, Liam is really sick and now I've got whatever he has, too. We just took Liam to the doctor to check for pneumonia at the suggestion of his pulmonologist in Portland ... It's been a week of sickness, with a fever here and there, so it was time to just make sure. With SMA, respiratory illnesses are scary, although we are pretty well-armed here at home now with all sorts of medical equipment. Still, I'm glad we went – because he does not have pneumonia {which landed him in the PICU last February for almost a week} but we did start him on antibiotics. So we are hopeful that we'll see him get better over the weekend and for all of us to get back on track. After all, next week is Thanksgiving – my very favorite!

That said, I am, as Liam would tell me, 'toiling far behind' with many things. I have all the pre-orders for calendars packaged, addressed and ready to go – except for the postage. And because I'm a total nerd about how the whole package presents, I want to run out {maybe right now!} to the post office to get a pile of pretty stamps. If I do, then the packages will be on their way tomorrow. If not, continue to be patient, please, they'll go out on Monday or Tuesday...

I have so much to do still today and this weekend, but thank you so much to the overwhelmingly kind response, both in the comments section and by direct email, to my last post. Thank you.

P.S. Sunday night update ::: I did not get the calendars mailed this weekend, but they WILL go out tomorrow. It was a long week followed by a long weekend. Liam, it turns out, is allergic to penicillin which is what we started him on Friday. He's on an antibiotic that he's been on before, without reaction, so that's a good thing. I got quite sick this weekend and had to have an enforced day of rest – lying on the couch! in the middle of the day! – which has been unheard of around here for too long. I'm just going to try to focus on getting my things together for the Sunday Best Holiday Sale in Portland a week from today ... and on Thanksgiving. We have an 18 pound turkey from a local farm in our fridge! If I get time, more on the Thanksgiving menu ... soon. I do love Thanksgiving.

lesson learned, the hard way

This is not an easy thing to write about because, really, who wants to write about when it doesn't go just right? But I think there are a few reasons to write about this particular lesson learned, the hard way ... One is that I think it might help me move on and figure things out, but I also think that it's important to put it out there. Every so often, I get emails from people asking me how I do all of this: run a studio by myself, have a four year old with a disability, make dinner while staying sane, etc, etc ... the big and small of it all. I guess the truth of the matter is that, at least in this case, I don't always make the best choices. So this post is either me being awfully foolish or giving you a glimpse of the not-so-perfect side of Satsuma Press ... or maybe a bit of both. It'll likely be long-winded, too, so you might want to skip it altogether if you're short on time or interest.

In the last few days, even before the events of this day, I have been giving a lot of thought to this post by Maria of Port2Port Press. As you may or may not know, this fall Satsuma Press became the sole source of income for our family – which has been, simultaneously, a wonderful, terrifying, inspiring, nerve-wracking thing. Call it what you will – perhaps, rightly so, a complete luxury that at age 33 I'm just needing to pay all of our family's bills on my own, to find a way to make the work I love generate the income we need ...

In any case, that's where I was when, at the end of the summer, I took THE BIG JOB, one that I've referred to several times in this blog. The specifics of THE BIG JOB will need to remain somewhat obscure, I think, for everyone involved ... but it should be enough to say that I was the printer working for a designer with a client. THE BIG JOB was, indeed, a very big one for a one-person studio: 500 business cards for 11 employees, printed with three inks, double sided, with very tight registration and painted edges. It was a very hard job, technically speaking, and one that would both offer me a lot of opportunity to push my skills and put a considerable amount of much-needed money in the bank.

In retrospect, because these clichés ring so true for me right at this moment, hindsight is – indeed – 20/20. I think this was one of those jobs in which everything that could go wrong DID go wrong. It began with me needing new rollers for the SP-15 which meant that the press was down for almost three weeks. Then I made a mistake with the layout on the first pass that became apparent when I went to do the second pass. After a few days of complete frustration and a few tears, I decided to start from scratch with a new method – basically laying out the photopolymer plates in a different direction on the bed of the press. After that, with a new batch of paper, the printing went really well. Keep in mind that with a double-sided three color run, a mistake at the second run is not such a big deal, but that it gets exponentially worse as you progress. Because by the time you get to the last run, the fifth one, a mistake there means needing to start all over with that batch. That said, I was really really careful, not rushing – although this is not work that can ever really be rushed – and making sure the registration was just right on each run. I will stand behind my printing and say that it was spot-on, as much as humanly possible. The painted edges were a huge challenge, I'll admit. Ben ended up doing all of the cutting and painting for me as I pushed on to finish up the calendars. Stacks of cards were clamped together and then hand painted with a small, dense sponge. Then each card was taken apart from the stack, checked for quality and put in the keep or discard pile. I'll tell you there was an alarming amount that did not make the cut.

In the end, though, I finally sent the package off directly to the client yesterday. I got a call from the {very lovely} designer today saying the client was very unhappy with the cards. I was – and still am – horrified. I have never been in this position before; in fact, I've never had a single client or customer complain one bit. I am, as I think you know by now, a perfectionist. I reprint things more often than I should because there is something minutely wrong. I beat myself up over very small things sometimes. So this phone call today, it made my stomach hurt and my hands shake.

At the end of this very long day, this is what it comes down to – at least for me ... I have a designer who is so supportive and wonderful, but together we have a client who isn't happy. So I decided to just not get paid the balance due for my work. This is a double-edged sword for me because, yes, I have so many hours in to this project and, yes, for the record I stand behind my print work one hundred percent. But those edges, there are imperfections – and that client, he's not pleased. I think that he wanted something that I could never have delivered and so I feel that, really, this is a job I should never have taken. But, really, I don't what else there is to do but try to keep as many people happy as possible and to work and act with integrity in this difficult situation.

As I wrote earlier, I've been thinking about Maria's post a lot these few days, and even more so today. She wrote that she has to think, even if someone says that a job could make her thousands of dollars, is it one that moves her? I guess I fall somewhere in the middle of what she writes and the cold hard cash truth of my life. The thing is – I need to make money, my family needs that – for our mortgage, our insurance, our bills, our food. I think what happened today is forcing me to consider a few critical things: What jobs are realistic for me to take on? Which jobs fit the kind of craft and work I offer? When should I just say no thanks? I thought I could find – and I DID find – enough technical challenge in this particular job to engage me. I thought the client and I were beginning on the same page, with the same vision, so to speak. I am just so sorry for this situation, for everyone involved. It's a really hard lesson, in so many ways on how to stay true to the work I love and the work I know best. I feel that I need to write that I still stand behind my hand-made work, that I know I put out the best I can – sometimes much to the chagrin of those around me who wish I had more free time for other things, particularly these past few months when I've been in the studio day and night ...

I'll end on a good note and say that with the help of Ben and my sister-in-law, I was able to salvage part of my day today and am almost done with packaging the calendars! I have a sick little boy here at home with me this week – and Liam being sick is just a little bit more complex that your average kid – but I'm planning to start mailing pre-orders on Friday. And when I look at these calendars, I think to myself that THIS is the sort of work I should be doing. And so I really, really hope you love them. Maybe it's weird to write this about my own work, but I love these. I feel such a sense of accomplishment with the calendars, this year and last year.

I'm running out of steam as it's getting late, but I have also been giving a lot of thought to what it means, not just for me, to live within our means. I'll be the first to admit that I am not very good – read: terrible! – at this at all, nor are we as a nation. When I took the calendars to a fellow printer in Eugene last week, he had this posted on his studio wall: Buying something you don't need at a discount isn't a savings, it's an expense. I'll be revisiting this a lot in the coming months as I try to figure out what is really needed for me and for my family, what things are lasting and which are fleeting.

{And for the few of you who just so happened to send me such lovely emails today about my work and what you like about it ... thank you so much. I needed those messages today.}

P.S. Thank you to those who have sent me kind emails or left messages on the blog. I appreciate it so much. After a not-so-good night of sleep – stress, Liam's cold coming my way, wondering if I should have written what I did on here – I just wanted to add that I don't think this is a case of 'taking my side' or feeling that the client is a jerk. I think he's probably not. I think we probably just don't see eye to eye, that what I offer just might not have been what he wanted in the first place ... just a lot of mistakes made. So I'm off for a cup of tea ...

collaboration

Though it's been in the works for a while, the new collaboration with Lara Cameron is finally in the shop! This time around, we're offering limited edition stationery of one of Lara's new designs – acacia – in hand-mixed plum ink. And also birch, which I printed last year in orange, but in a lovely and calm grey-green ink. As before, Lara's designs are so perfect for letterpress printing – and it was a pleasure to work with her. If you like the acacia, be sure to check Lara's shop as she's also printed it in house at Ink + Spindle on fabric.

Both designs are available in sets of three. There are 100 sets of three and each set is hand-numbered on the back. The cost is $18 for a set – and I'm also having a special if you buy a set of each, it'll be $33. I think these would make beautiful holiday cards – and I really like that the colors are winter-y without being campy. {If you are in Australia, you might want to buy directly from Lara because of the exchange rate and shipping costs.}



Just a reminder: if you live in the Portland area, I will be at the Sunday Best Holiday Sale on November 30th at The Cleaners.

assembly line

All this week, I'm a one-person assembly line for calendars ... and this is what our dining room table looks like. I think I might rather assemble the calendars in the studio where there's little chance of, oh, a four year old grubbing up the pages ... except that the four year old is sick with a cold and it's best if we stay inside the house.


Today was very exciting, despite Liam's cold, because I mailed that big business card job to San Francisco. I'm so nervous and hoping UPS doesn't fail me now. It's very nerve-wracking to send such a big job out the door – my fingers are crossed til I hear that the package has arrived safe and sound tomorrow morning.

For those of you who have been waiting so patiently for your calendars to ship, it'll be soon! I hope perhaps by the end of the week. But, really, look at those stacks above! That represents my 21,880 passes of the press – only I think it's more than that because I reprinted November! In any case, there are lots of packages to get in the mail, so I may not be here on the blog for a while ... except maybe very briefly in a day or two because Lara Cameron and I have a surprise for you!


So I'll leave you with this photo I took yesterday when I was riding my bike back from the post office ... the last of the sunshine perhaps?

done!

Friends, I can hardly believe it myself! The 2009 calendars? DONE! {Well, except for the numbering, collating, assembling, packaging – to be done next week upon my return.} I am very, very tired – Ben and I just got home from Eugene where this very nice old-school printer {who has a working Linotype!} helped me out and drilled the holes in the pages. I just really needed to be able to go away tomorrow afternoon and know that the calendars were pretty much taken care of – and they are! So I'm going off light-hearted {foot-loose and fancy-free! I've always thought that was the funniest expression} tomorrow and I'm going to bed now, but I'm leaving you with a few photos. I'm sorry they're not the best – the weather and light was strange today.




P.S. If you've already ordered your calendar, they'll begin to ship at the end of next week.
If you haven't ordered yours yet and you want one, visit my shop or email me at lynn@satsumapress.com – a thousand thanks to all!

trying to catch up

Since Sunday I've had an enforced break from printing. I thought my last bit of paper was going to arrive yesterday, but it's not coming until today – and UPS delivers really late in the day. It's been very nice {and necessary} to have this break – my body has been bone tired – but I'm anxious to get all these big projects done before we head to Seattle on Thursday. I just really am in love with the idea of tidying things up, spic and span so to speak, before we go – to leave with nothing big looming over my head. To that end, I am going to work tonight and all day tomorrow with the hope that November will be neatly in its box, stacked next to all the other months, ready to drill holes and assemble next week when I return.


In the meantime, I've been giving some thought to projects for 2009. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, my projects get pushed to the side and take just so much longer to complete than I would like. After all, there's dinner to cook, a house to clean, a family to be with – all of which I WANT to have time for. The photos I am posting here today come from my new wholesale catalog, which I finally completed about a month or two ago. This was something I wanted to do for months, perhaps even a year. It wasn't that it took me so long to do – maybe a day, because I'm not all that computer savvy – but that there are always so many other things to do, both big and small.


One really enormous project that I want to try to work on in early 2009 is how to place Satsuma Press Wedding Line books in a few select shops. This is daunting for many reasons – most of all because I haven't actually made the wedding line books yet. It's a huge undertaking, printing samples of wedding invitations in various fonts and colors, assembling the books, finding the right shops to carry my line. Then there is deciding WHICH designs to focus on for the wedding line and then how to present it. It's a lot of decision making and then a lot of work. I think I'm up for it, though, once I get a small break after the holidays.


I feel, certainly more than before, a necessity to work these details out sooner rather than later now that Satsuma Press is our sole source of income. It's tough, though, to once again try to find that perfect balance of enough work and staying true to what I love about what I do. I'd like to be able to count on some more reliable and steady work through weddings, but I don't want to over-do it either. I've been working about 70-80 hours a week for the past few months and, let me tell you, it's too much. I can do it for a while, but not all the time. I want to take on more wedding work, but I love the custom jobs, too – and I love printing my own work ... so how do I best go about this? Thoughts?


P.S. There's an interview with me on the Sunday Best Holiday Sale blog. You can see it here.

a perfect day

Yesterday was my first day off in quite some time – an enforced day off because the paper I need to reprint November hadn't come yet. I had a perfect day, marred only by the fact that I think I'm getting a cold. I made two pumpkin pies, one savory galette with roasted butternut squash, caramelized onions, gruyere and sage, mushroom soup and no-knead bread. I cleaned the house, I went to the grocery store, I did lots of laundry, I read my book while I ate my lunch, we had some new friends over for dinner.

The galette was so perfect that I might make it again tonight. The mushroom soup was also very good – and we told Liam it was 'gravy soup' since in his four year old way he claims to not like mushrooms. He LOVED the gravy soup and you should have seen the look of betrayal on his face when we told him, after his bowl was empty, that it was mushroom soup.

Today I'm folding, numbering and packaging some very special limited edition cards that will be in my shop in the next day or so. They are a new collaboration with the lovely and talented Lara Cameron! Depending on when my paper arrives today, I may be taking a quick trip down to Eugene to have all the holes drilled in the calendars. I plan to (re)print November tomorrow and Wednesday – just in time to head to Seattle on Thursday for my brother's wedding. This means that next week I'll be putting together all the calendars – hurrah! And that big business card job – also being sent this week. So, you see, I've got no time for a pesky cold – I have work to finish up and a wedding to go to!!

favorite things

Yesterday I said I might make a little list of lovely things I've found on Etsy. Here they are, my wish list ... Maybe you'll see something you like, too?

Abigail Percy

Windowsill

Paloma's Nest

Yu-I Chan

Bailey Doesn't Bark

Lilfish Studios

Hello Handmade

this kind of day

It's been one of those days when:

I have too much tea to drink right away.

I pay the bills – and get in a bad mood.

I spend a little too much time on my emails and online browsing. And I manage to post twice in one day on this blog – when I can sometimes go a month without anything.

I decide that I have entirely too much in my closet that I don't wear, ever, and so I try to photograph it all and put it on E-Bay and get mad that my fancy new camera saves files too big to upload.

I rush downtown to drop off more inventory for a holiday sale here in Corvallis and then look down to notice that the leaves are still so pretty and the way that bright green moss is growing is perfect.


I look around the kitchen, but can find nothing to cook for dinner, so I go to the store and come back with: three bags of frozen lima beans, some pre-grated Asiago cheese, three pounds of unsalted butter because it was on super sale, a large can of pumpkin, 2 cans of evaporated milk to make the pumpkin into my favorite pie, and 5 tiny containers of Haagen-Daz ice cream. I still don't have anything to cook for dinner, so we're going out for Vietnamese instead.

I eat a small container of chocolate ice cream at 2:30 in the afternoon and have another cup of tea.

What kind of day has yours been?

holiday silver

I just listed a new stationery set in my shop that I'm really liking. Sometimes when the days get shorter and the nights longer, you want just a little bit of sparkle. I've been printing in silver ink lately and am so pleased with the subtle shine and shimmer it brings – nothing gaudy and outrageous, just simple and lovely.


In other studio news, I am so close to being done with the calendars, so close to being done mixing colors. I'll go ahead and admit that I COULD have been done last night, only I'm not because, well, it is just like me to decide after-the-fact that one month isn't quite right. Because it just isn't. I like the design perfectly well, only I like it better in different colors. November WAS rusty orange and teal blue, only it didn't sit quite right with me. Oh, how I tried to love it that way, though. Instead, I'll be reprinting this entire month in a deep midnight blue and smoky gray – which will be so much better and makes such a nice transition from the orange and thistle-y purple of October to the pale grey-blue and dark red of December. Trust me, it'll be better. So, this will be done over the weekend, along with several days of blindstamping ... and then it'll be time to drill the holes, collate the pages, assemble and package – and start getting these in the mail to you! I cannot wait!

And, in case you wonder, the rejected pages for November don't get thrown out. They are going to be cut down into little cards to slip into packages that get sent over the next few months.

Tomorrow: a post on the lovely ribbon I bought for the calendars. It couldn't be more perfect. And also tomorrow, maybe a round up of some really special things I've spotted on Etsy.

a very good day.

Oh, it's a very good day today. I am just so happy about the election results! So happy I could sing, but I'm a horrible singer. So, instead you get this:

We took this video of Liam singing the other night, at the same time as we took the public service message from him. The kid can perform and I have no idea where he got that from – certainly not from me. On a side note, the other day I overheard him say: This is going to be a new kind of song – half punk rock, half AC/DC, half Jim Croce. Ha – I love the sound of that, plus the funny math! (The song he's singing in the video is Speedball Tucker and the lyrics are 'all them other truckers' lest you think we have no ground rules at all around here.)

rainy day, election day

The rains have arrived in full force here. Dark, dark days spent in the studio with all the lights on, heater blasting and music keeping me going. I've been listening to a mix of Bon Iver and The Wood Brothers, plus trying out the new Ray LaMontagne and Old Crow Medicine Show albums, too.


The calendars are almost done! The photo above is February, but it sort of fits my mood for this rainy day. I'm planning to have them all printed – everything, including the blind-stamping – by a week from today. They'll begin to ship the week after, once they are collated, assembled and packaged up for you.

It has to be said that today is, as you know, is election day. I'll be up late in the studio printing and watching the election coverage, hoping for change. There are many ways to put it and it may be odd to just put it right out there, through my kid, but it is time for change and it has been for some time. I actually started to post this video yesterday and then took it down, thinking maybe it wasn't quite right. Well, enough of that. The video is funny and, yes, I am all for Obama.

{Plus, it is so much fun to take videos of Liam!}

So whatever you may think, whoever you may be voting for, please just vote!