If you’ve ever had questions about metallic paper for wedding invitations or other creative projects, chances are John Kelly has the answers. He is President of one of the more prestigious paper companies in the USA, CTI Paper, a Wisconsin based company behind the Aspire Petallics line of exquisite, metallic, pearlescent papers. You’ll hear from John in his own words as he answers our questions about:

• How real mica minerals are used on the paper surface
• Tips for inkjet, laser, offset, and digital printing on Aspire Petallics
• Inspiration behind the new line of Aspire Petallics Linen paper
• Responsible paper manufacturing & environmental concerns

This is an audio interview. So you can listen to the conversation, read the transcript, or enjoy both!

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time: LCI Paper Podcast #49 – John Kelly of CTI Paper, Makers of Aspire Petallics Paper

Here is a transcript of the interview:

What is your role at CTI and how long have you been with the company?

Well good morning Josh and thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. I’m President of CTI Paper USA and I’ve been with the organization about 16 years.

Has your role changed over that time?

Somewhat; I came in to the company with a primary focus on developing the sales and distribution end of the business and growing our company, along with taking on the marketing responsibilities. That eventually evolved into a broader role overseeing the whole organization.

Great, well we have some new items to talk about today so we’ll definitely talk about the company’s growth.

First of all, let’s just talk about metallic paper. If someone doesn’t know what that is… I get calls about different paper types and they ask me, “Oh, I see you have metallic paper. What is that?”

Well John, how would you describe it?

Well that’s a great question and there are a couple different ways to answer it.

There’s a way of applying metallics to papers by using inks, and a lot of times the inks are made with actual metal—aluminum flakes or some other metallic component—that gives this metallic appearance or look. That’s one way to create a metallic paper.

The other way to create it is similar to how we create our Aspire Petallics which is basically using mica which is a mineral, and you incorporate that into the coating being applied to the surface of the paper. That creates a metallic or in some cases they call it a pearlescent look.

So you can achieve metallics in a couple different ways in the paper industry.

The mica product is interesting. Some different applications in other industries that people might be familiar with would be if you see women’s eye shadow and you see sort of a glitter dust in the eye shadow, that may in fact be mica. Or if you look at automotive paints and you see a glittering effect or a sparkle, that may in fact be mica embedded into the paint. So those are just a couple of examples of how mica can be used in other industries but also answering your question of how it can be used to create a metallic paper.

We’ll describe the mica look on our web site when we’re talking about Aspire Petallics paper. It’s not just a look, it’s the real thing.

It is the real thing and it’s quite an interesting material and it’s got a lot of industrial applications. Frankly, I think paper is a relatively new industrial application for this mineral, but it’s really a wonderful component to use in the paper manufacturing process to create this look. It’s a very unique and I think very dynamic and sharp looking product.

Like in any industrial product, it doesn’t simply come in one size or color. You can actually get it in a variety of different colors and different particle sizes to create different effects within the papers. As an example, you can actually get silver mica. You can get gold mica. You can get a white or a pearlescent mica. Depending on the specific color, we use a different combination of mica particulate to create that color. But it’s also done in combination with the color of the base sheet so the combination of the two is really what creates the ultimate color of the product or the paper.

When did Aspire Petallics launch and what was the inspiration for creating a metallic sheet in this wide range of colors?

We actually launched it about 8 years ago. It could be 7 years ago. Frankly, the inspiration was we saw an emerging market opportunity to develop and create a line of papers that capitalized on this emerging trend for sparkle and interesting surfaces of paper that gave it a different dynamic and look. So we ended up putting a fair amount of R&D effort behind the project and developed the Aspire Petallics line to sort of serve this emerging market need. In addition, it seemed to also fit the emerging need in the wedding, crafting, scrapbooking world to enhance the invitations, the announcements in that category.

How did you know when to stop? Did your researchers and teams have to rein themselves in and say, “Woah! This is too much sparkle! This is too much pizzazz!

Well that’s a good question as well. The original Aspire Petallics was, I would say, a softer or slightly more muted metallic looking product. We wanted it to be metallic but not over the top, whereby it had a more broad market appeal both in the SoHo, wedding invitation, crafting market but equally as important, the commercial offset print market.

You really bumped things up and added a bit more pizzazz than originally.

We ended up making it, I would say, a more moderate metallic looking paper rather than totally subdued or an over the top, very heavy duty metallic looking paper. If you go too heavy in the metallic look, you then limit the applications of what you can do with the product.

What are some of the more fun or memorable projects that you’ve seen using Aspire Petallics?

We’ve had a lot of fun over the years working with many, many different and interesting companies for the product. I would say some of the more notable ones at least for me as an example, I took my family to Disney World about a year ago and one of the applications with our Autumn Hay is the Disney photo frames. So if you get your picture taken with Mickey Mouse in Disney World and you use one of their photographers and you go collect or have them send you one of the pictures, it will be framed in Aspire Petallics Autumn Hay cover, 98 lb. I thought that was quite interesting, just from the standpoint of tying it in to a family vacation. There was a real-world application for the product.

In addition, we’ve had some interesting successes in the casino market where we’ve been able to work with the graphic designer within several large casino chains where they develop the high roller package for their real key customers and their welcome packages and their invitations to come join them or their announcements on any sort of specials that they want to put out to their high rollers has all been done on a variety of Aspire Petallics items including Silver Ore, Gold Ore in particular. As you can imagine, the casinos are interested in a more glitzy and glamorous look and so Silver Ore and Gold Ore seem to be our popular colors for the casino markets.

Another interesting application that we’ve seen with the product is in the automotive industry. We’ve had some pretty good success in the automotive catalogs and so certain vehicles, one in particular was a GM job for Cadillac and the automotive brochure covers were all done with Aspire Petallics Beargrass cover. So that was a rather interesting, very high end, high profile collateral piece for General Motors so we’re very proud of that one.

These are great examples and it sounds like when companies want something very special, in many cases they’ll choose Aspire Petallics. I hear this over and over from customers; people that are getting married will call and say, “I want something different. I want something really special.”

And they’ll gravitate to the metallic papers so it really trickles right down to the average consumer. When they want something special, you can’t get much better than a really nice metallic sheet.

Absolutely; it is a little bit unusual. It’s a little bit different, and it does make the printed piece that much more special and it does enhance the piece fairly dramatically from what we can tell from the consumers.

Speaking of printing, are there any home printing tips that you’ve found that maybe you could pass along to our creative customers who might be thinking of buying Aspire Petallics specialty paper and printing at home or perhaps taking the paper to a local printer?

Sure, absolutely. As of today we have made a very strong effort to transition all of our products to be inkjet compatible. That’s been a concerted effort over the past year or so that we’ve made. I would say today, about 90% of all items including the original Aspire Petallics colors and the new colors that we introduced are inkjet compatible. When printing these products with inkjet, if you’re going to do real heavy coverage, you’re going to want to leave a little extra time for drying because it’s a type of paper that requires the ink to absorb down into it and it just needs a little extra time to dry.

If you’re using any sort of laser or toner based print equipment, typically that dries almost instantly on this paper. You won’t really need any additional drying time. In the toner based end of the print world, there’s a heat fuser that really locks that ink and toner down onto the paper without much additional need for drying time.

If you’re taking it to a commercial printer who is going to use offset print technology, the main consideration is to use inks that dry purely through oxidation and that means that the inks need to be top drying rather than inks that absorb or dive down into the sheet and that’s the difference there.

In addition, we have developed for those customers who may be printing at a commercial digital print shop who might have an HP Indigo or a NexPress or a Konica Minolta Bizhub, we’ve got digital products in Aspire Petallic that fit all of those technologies today.

So it doesn’t really matter what your output method is or your print method, whether it’s inkjet or laser printing, offset printing, HP Indigo printing, we’ve really got a solution today to solve all of that.

Great tips and a cool announcement that I’d like to come back to in just a minute. But the original Petallics line, are they digital press ready, or only the new digitally designated colors?

Actually, there’s a couple ways to answer that.

For the HP Indigo and the NexPress, we have I think about a dozen items, 4 or 5 different colors both available in text and cover that are certified by the RIT Institute and they’re available in 18 x 12 or 12 x 18 size. It’s a very specific, separate coating. You have to apply to render the sheet suitable for those presses.

In the case of toner based technology like Ricoh, Canon, Konica Minolta, Bizhub, the standard Aspire Petallics product works perfectly fine in those toner based technologies.

I’m really excited about something you said a few minutes ago. As of now, 90% of the Aspire Petallics papers are inkjet compatible.

Correct. We have been rotating and transitioning our inventory to move all new production to an inkjet compatible surface and we’re basically through almost the entire inventory. There are a few exceptions to that. I think Juniper Berry text is not done yet and I think Spring Larch cover is not done. And not all of the linen items are done.

We have been promoting the improved inkjet compatibility for Black Ore, Snow Willow, Spearmint, and Wine Cup. So it’s good to know in the future we’ll really be able to expand on those colors.

Absolutely.

LCI is now carrying Aspire Petallics Linen in Autumn Hay, Beargrass, and Silver Ore. When did the linen line launch and what was the inspiration behind it?

Well that’s an interesting point and question. We had been in a meeting, I would say 3 to 4 years ago, and we started talking about how we could extend the product range and one of the things we noticed is that there were very few embossed or textured metallic paper products in the market and we started thinking about how we could potentially add a texture to Aspire. But we also didn’t want it to be a texture or an emboss that was so deep or heavy that it might interfere with offset or toner based printing. So it needed to be subtle and a very mild surface texture and so we developed this very beautiful, very elegant linen pattern that just gives it a hint of a texture and an emboss and really creates a very elegant sheet.

Yes. It is. It does.

For the average consumer, would you recommend laser printing or offset?

Absolutely, absolutely. And we will be transitioning that item as well to the inkjet surface, I would imagine within the next 6 to 12 months.

Can you give me some history on CTI paper?

Sure, absolutely. CTI Paper actually was the brainchild of my partner who is Brian Cowie. He was a commodities trader down in the Chicago Mercantile. He owned his own seat and trading company down in Chicago and he wanted to start a new organization and he somehow got the thought that he wanted to get into import and export business. Long story short, he ended up making some contacts into the paper industry and he built a relationship with a paper mill out of Europe. He began to distribute some of their products while he was still working at the Chicago Mercantile sort of part time. And then eventually, he gave up his trading business full time and moved into the paper industry full time. It was a fledgling startup company. Then eventually, he and his wife Colleen moved the organization to Wisconsin and shortly thereafter I joined them and we put together a little bit bigger, broader business model of how we thought we could grow the company and focus on specialty, unique, value added products to serve the consumers and the customers looking for these unique products that were not commodity.

So is the company based in Wisconsin now and is that where you are?

Yes, we’re in Wisconsin. Actually our headquarters is located in a town called Sun Prairie, Wisconsin which is a suburb of Madison which is the capital. Our distribution and converting facility is actually about an hour and a half northeast of here in Neenah, Wisconsin which is just south of Appleton.

Is there an easy answer or a general answer that you could give to the customers who might be wondering about Aspire Petallics’ environmental characteristics?

Sure, absolutely. You know, in today’s world, environmental and green initiatives are of growing importance to the consumers and for us as a company we take the responsibility of having environmentally sound business practices very seriously. It’s part of our culture and it’s part of our DNA and wherever it’s feasible we want to have the most environmentally friendly products possible and bring these to the consumers.

In the case of Aspire Petallics, over the past year or so, we have been able to transition the entire grade line to FSC certified. FSC is an organization, Forest Stewardship Council, that promotes sustainable forestry practices so we’re basically ensuring that the trees that create the pulp that produce the paper are coming from sustainable and environmentally positive forestry practices and that’s really important to us.

In addition, for a select number of items—we’re hoping that in the future we can grow it—but for a select number of items we’re now able to offer as well 30% post consumer waste and we see certain consumers where that’s very important to them as well.

We’re also providing the Aspire Petallics line as a carbon neutral line and that really means that what we’re doing is we are offsetting the carbon footprint that is required to manufacture the product with either wind, biomass, geothermal, or some other greener or environmentally friendly fuel alternative so we’re doing that through an offset credit program. Again, that’s very important to us, to be able to provide as environmentally responsible product to the market as possible.

All of the papers are elemental chlorine free, lignin free, acid free, and of course they can be recycled, is that right?

Would you be comfortable describing it as archival?

Okay. Can you tell me about the launch of Black Ore? It seems to be popular for us. How popular has it been for you?

John, is there anything that you wanted our customers to know about Petallics?

Sure! I think the one thing that your customers may find of interest, and we do get this question quite often is, Where did the word “Petallics” come from? It’s a combination word of petals and metals. If you look at the color names within Aspire Petallics, it’s really all North American indigenous metals or petals or indigenous plants is another way to put it. So as an example, Black Ore is an indigenous mineral to North America, Silver Ore, Copper Ore, etc. And then if you go to the petal side of things, Beargrass, Wine Cup, Greeneyes, these are all indigenous plants or flowers to North America. So that’s where the inspiration for the color names actually comes from.

Excellent. Anything else?

I think that’s it!

Okay. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for spending so much with me.

Well very good and I appreciate your time and your patience in hooking up here but I’m glad we got it together.

Thanks to John Kelly CTI Paper President for taking the time to answer our questions. Ready to shop for Aspire Petallics?

What if you wanted a beautiful, elegant, beach-theme invitation but didn’t have the money to spend on a pocket fold invitation style ensemble? This was a bride’s request to Dominican-born, New Jersey-based invitation designer Yvette Sencion of SDezigns. To answer the call, Yvette created a layered and tied invitation ensemble from Stardream metallic and vellum papers that the bride absolutely loved. We saw photos of the ensemble on Yvette’s Facebook page, and we’re not ashamed to admit, we fell in love with the design too. We spoke to Yvette about what went into the design. She even agreed to tell us how she made it, so if any of our DIY customers are looking for fresh inspiration, now is your chance to learn!

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #48 – Yvette Sencion of SDezigns’ Layered, Tied Beach Wedding Invitation

All photos are courtesy of Yvette Sencion.

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Yvette, a couple of days ago on Twitter, you posted a link to your Facebook album with photos of your Beach Wedding Invitation and I have to tell you, I was immediately hooked. I thought they were one of the more beautiful invitations that I’ve seen.

Wow! Thank you!

What inspired you to design this beautiful, layered, beach-themed wedding invitation?

Well, let me tell you a bit about the process of the initial design of all of my invitations. I meet with my potential clients or my brides or we communicate over the phone or online and I ask them a series of questions on color scheme, what type of paper they like, what styles they’re into, and of course, their budget. After our conversation, I get a sense of what they’re looking for. So I go back to my studio and I create something inspired on the specs and something special for that specific client. If you go to my online store, you’ll see that not a lot of them are very similar. My invitations are mostly unique for the bride, unless they love something that I already created and then that’s fine. But this one was inspired on that specific bride. If they really, really love it and they want it just like that, then obviously I will give them what they want. But I always suggest something that makes it more them or something that makes it stand out so it’s not a copycat of the other bride’s invitation. And it’s also a challenge for me and I like that. I like creating new things all the time.

I guess I’d be curious about that conversation that you had where you ended up coming up with this design for the client.

She said, “I’m having a beach wedding and I want it to follow this color scheme and something nice and simple but elegant.”

This bride was on a budget and she couldn’t afford a pocket fold which is the most common invitation order that I make. She only needed one insert card which is the RSVP. She didn’t need anything else, just the invitation front, very simple, and the insert card. So with this in mind, she left it up to me. She said, “You go ahead. Create something that doesn’t go past this amount of money and something that’s going to be beautiful using beautiful papers.”

It came out perfect for her.

I’m curious to see how you described it to her. When all the components came together—the backing card, the response card, the invitation card, the vellum layer, the beautiful tie… So we know what a pocket fold invitation is. How did you position this one?

That’s the thing! That’s why it’s called “unique” wedding invitation because there is really not a specific style for this. This is something out of the blue and actually this is the only one that I’ve done like this. It was only for her that I created this design. I think one other bride purchased the same design but it was created for that. I’ve never created anything else with another photo, nothing. It has just been for her. So it doesn’t have a style per say. I just told her it wasn’t a pocket fold and I just showed her. When I showed her, then she fell in love with it. It’s hard to describe it!

Let’s get into it if we can. There are quite a few, we’ll use that keyword “unique” design elements I’d like to touch on. What type of vellum layer did you use?

When I purchased the vellum it was purchased for laser. It was a regular vellum paper to go in a laser printer. I wanted to design something to go on top of it, but then at the end I decided not to do anything, just to leave it blank so that everything else would come through. So it was vellum for laser printers.

Now let’s talk about the beautiful photograph on the invitation itself. I was wondering, is that a stock photo? How did you print it? What kind of card did you use? What kind of printer? Did you process it so that it would look good in the background under your text? All those are questions I have for you.

Okay, I’ll tell you a little bit more about that. This was definitely a stock photo. I use istockphoto.com and I get all my photos from there. So obviously I make sure that the text is going to fit right, that it’s not going to be overwhelming. The photo was processed. It was faded a little bit. I added a cream base on top of it, just so that it’s not so blue so that I can then write the text so that it’s legible. This was printed on—it wasn’t card stock actually—this is metallic paper, text paper. It’s not a heavy card stock. When you turn the page, it’s “flowey,” so it’s soft.

I don’t think I have ever heard of photo printing on a metallic sheet, even if it’s text weight.

Oh yeah! Yes! When you put it into the light, you can see the shimmer on it. It looks beautiful. The pictures can’t really tell you exactly how it looks because you don’t see that shimmer on it.

Right. No you don’t. I think it’s hard to get that metallic shimmer in photographs. What color metallic sheet is it?

I think it’s called Quartz.

Oh Stardream.

Yes, it’s a Stardream metallic paper.

If people wanted to use a photo like you’ve done for this invitation, what should they look for in a photo?

The main and most important advice I can give on this is to make sure that the photo is high resolution. For this type of thing or any type of printing, you need a 300 dpi resolution photo. If they copy it from the web, it’s going to be a 72 dpi resolution which is only made for the monitor so you can see it on the monitor. It looks beautiful, but when you print it, it gets pixilated. I always recommend buying the photo because then you’re going to get the high resolution photo or you take the photo. Make sure it’s 300 dpi. That’s the main thing.

So you chose to basically license the photo and then I guess you would just pass along that cost to your customer and they get the best quality image possible for their invitations.

Exactly, exactly. Yes. I don’t usually charge them for the photos that I purchase because I might use it on something else. That’s basically a company expense.

Okay. It looks like the same photo was adapted for the response card. Is that right?

Yes it was.

And that response card looks to be secured to maybe a light blue backing card with slits in it. Is that something you specifically made to hold photographs?

Yes. This is actually a card stock. This one is the heavy one so that it doesn’t look so flimsy when you take it out of the envelope. This is the heavy one. So you have the vellum which is the thin one, the paper [invitation] which is a thin one as well, and then you have the backing which is a heavier metallic card stock. The slits were cut one-by-one by me to make sure that the RSVP fits in there.

What kind of tool do you use to cut slits like that?

One of those little X-acto knives. So I had to take a ruler and cut each corner. There has to be a better tool for it but that’s what I used.

Right. So you had to use a ruler to mark exactly where to cut first.

Exactly.

And then where to end up, right?

Exactly.

Where to start your cut… Where to end your cut…

Yes.

A lot of care, a lot of work goes into something like this. Would that be one reason why you would recommend that folks come to you for invitations?

Definitely. Not everyone knows the type of work that goes behind this. You see an invitation and you say, “Ok yeah. It’s a paper on top of another one, whatever.”

But it’s not. There’s a lot of care that goes into it. There’s a lot of work. Even just the design process takes a while to make sure that you come up with something that’s going to look right, that’s going to be eye candy. It has to be a professional, I think, to do this type of thing. And especially with those little details—slits and cutting and pasting and all of this—it takes a lot of time, definitely.

Speaking of time, we pushed back this interview a few hours. Tell the listeners what time you were up ‘til this morning.

Yes, when I have a new design to come up with, 12 o’clock at night is when my creative juices flow. Everybody who knows me on Facebook, they know that from 12 – 4…4 something, I’m going to be awake because that’s the time that I can create. So last night I was up until 4:45 making sure that this design was out. Because once I start, I can’t stop and leave it for the next day. I just go ahead and finish even if it’s the next day. So yes, I go to sleep very, very late when I have new designs.

Now back to the backing card where you cut slits for the response card, may I ask what color metallic sheet that is?

I don’t recall the name because that is not one that is offered with the company that I work with so I had to find the exact shade that I wanted and I’m not sure of the name of it so I will have to get back to you on that.

[Yvette followed up saying, “It's called Aquamarine and it's a Stardream metallic.”]

Now the raffia tie…

Actually it is twine. That’s thin twine and they can find that anywhere in a hardware store or online, actually. Most of my materials, I purchase online. But it’s not raffia, it’s twine.

And I just love how you used it to secure everything together. It makes it like a little booklet.

Exactly.

And I think it brings an element of nature into it which is nice because the beach is such a naturally beautiful place but sometimes we imagine the beach as over-commercialized and I like how you brought nature back into this.

Exactly. I didn’t want to use a satin ribbon which is mostly what I use because it just wouldn’t look right for the beach. So that’s why I only used twine.

What kind of hole punch for the twine?

I have a collection of punches that I purchase when I find something unique. This one is from Fiskars. I don’t know the name of it but it has a few slits so that you can put the ribbon through. It was perfect for this. I actually used it only a couple of times but you can use a little bit thicker ribbon as well if you want. You put all of the papers together, you punch it once, and then you put the ribbon or the twine or the raffia through there.

Do you like to order your paper and your card stock pre-cut or do you do the cutting in your studio?

I do both. If I’m doing a plain card, then I just order them pre-cut but if not, I cut them here. I have a machine. It’s a die cut machine that cuts the precise size that I want.

It does a nice job? You’re happy with the cuts that it produces?

Very, very happy. It’s an AccuCut.

I was going to ask you, “Is your beach wedding invitation one of your better sellers?” But you’ve already made it clear that invitations are custom made for the individual.

Yes. I don’t have a specific one that categorizes a best seller. I do have another card. It’s not an invitation but it’s a “Will you be my bridesmaid?” card that is the best seller. That’s usually how my brides find me, when they’re in the first stage. They want to ask their bridal party to be part of their wedding and they find this. It’s a dress card. It’s a card that’s cut as a little dress and it’s really, really nice. If you go to my Etsy invitations shop, you can see it there. That’s the card that I can tell you is a best seller, but when it comes to invitations, I try to be unique for everyone.

On your unique beach wedding invitation that’s the big feature today on this podcast, I don’t mean to put you in a corner here, but what could someone expect to pay, say for a set of 100? Is it something that you’d be comfortable quoting or no?

Oh yeah! That’s not a problem. I always do my pricing per invitation. It doesn’t matter if you order 1 or 1,000, they’re always going to be the same price. The price doesn’t get lower or higher with the quantities. This one in particular is $5 the set right now and it includes the envelopes as well.

Let me ask you about the feedback you got from this client for the beach wedding invitation. What was that like? That interaction when you presented them the finished ensemble…

I have been very, very lucky to receive great compliments on all of my invitations so for me to specifically remember one client, it’s hard. But usually the words that I receive are “Oh my gosh, this is beautiful!” “This is gorgeous!” “This is so unique!” “This is exactly what I am looking for!”

So it’s usually around those lines. She loved her invitations. She gave me a big hug, so that I will never forget. But usually it’s along those lines and I’ve been very, very lucky.

So it sounds like you’ve done a lot of work. Why don’t you tell me about SDezigns and that’s spelled S-D-E-Z-I-G-N-S. How long have you been in business? Where are you based?

I am in New Jersey. Right now I have two offices. The main location is in Toms River. That’s where my main studio is and where all the magic happens (laughter) and the second location is where I meet my northern New Jersey clients. It’s in Kenilworth, New Jersey at The Wedding Place.

My business actually started in 2004 but it started only as a web and graphic design company. We were concentrating on small businesses and universities with brochures and logos and business cards, things like that. But after designing and planning my own wedding in 2006, I fell in love with the wedding scene and the industry so I decided that I wanted to get into doing weddings so SDezigns Weddings was born. I started planning and coordinating weddings but I saw a need of more customized and personalized stationery. I had the regular books that you pick out invitations, but you can only change the fonts or the color and that’s it. You can’t add a design element or make it more custom and more personal. So I said, “Okay, I’m a designer. There has to be a better way and I’m going to do that. I’m going to start custom invitations.”

So in 2006 I started to design for weddings. Then I also started designing for parties, for other types of celebrations, for birthdays and Quinceañeras, sweet sixteens, Bat Mitzvah’s, all the types of celebrations as well.

Now, SDezigns is the umbrella for SDezigns Weddings and SDezigns Celebrations. Since last year, I’m dedicating myself full time to the company because before, it was part time. I used to have a “day job.” Now I don’t. Now it’s full time SDezigns.

Well obviously, business has picked up!

Definitely, yes, definitely. I’ve been very blessed.

It’s great to hear. I think sometimes people are filled with admiration and sometimes a little envious over people who have quit their day jobs to do what they love.

(laughter). Yeah! My advice is always, “You can do it.”

It’s always hard and it’s always scary to take the plunge but if you think you can, just do it. Just do it. I’m much happier now doing what I love, definitely.

Now if people want to follow your work, what’s the best way? Do you want to talk about your Twitter and Facebook and your web site?

Well, right now we’re working on updating our web site and our blog because we have 3 web sites. We want to separate the Celebrations with the graphic and with the Weddings. So we’re working on the web site now. The web site for the Weddings is up but it’s not really updated so I don’t recommend anyone to go there. (laughter)

Okay, not yet.

So if they want to see up to date stuff, Facebook is magical for me. It’s easy for me to just update, “This is what I’m doing. I just did this. This client wanted this.”

It’s more interactive as well. So Facebook is a good way to find what I’ve been up to and what I’ve been doing. Also, the Etsy shop, you can go there and browse through all the designs that we’ve done and it’s a good way to start an order if that’s what they’re looking for to do. So Facebook and Etsy.

And easy to find just typing in SDezigns with a “z” in there?

Yes, you will find me there.

What about Twitter. What’s your handle?

Twitter is the same, SDezigns. Twitter gets mostly updated with all the stuff that I’ve been doing on the wedding side. It goes from Facebook to Twitter. (laughter) That’s how you found me.

Yes.

–

Thanks to Yvette for taking the time to talk to us after a long night of creativity. We hope her beach wedding invitation design has inspired you. Tell us what you think of her design by commenting right here! Do you want to be hit with more creative ideas like this on a regular basis? Then don’t even think of missing a future episode of the LCI Paper podcast. Subscribe in iTunes!

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #47 – Gina in Ohio Talks Canon Vs. HP Printers

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Thank you very much for taking the time to talk about your printing experience. So I know a bit. I know the frustration that you went through trying to print on 2 different HP printers and I want to let folks know what invitation you’re trying to print. It’s the Hearts in Sand Beach Wedding Invitation and it folds to a 6 ¼ x 6 ¼ square. It’s a folding card.

Right. This is for my nephew who is getting married on the beach and this is for an after party when they get back because not that many people will be down in Sanibel Island. I found these perfect invitations for a beach wedding.

Can you give people a little bit of background on what you went through?

Sure

Was it Friday night that you started?

I started at dinner time Friday. I was eager to get going because I had received the invitations on Thursday and they were so neat.

I’ve done a lot of this stuff so I’m really not a novice at it. I thought I knew how to change the typical size paper when I print to a custom size. I had a newer HP printer [Photosmart D5400 model] than I used to have a long time ago and that gave no options to do a custom size. I started researching. I worked all Friday night. I worked all Saturday. I was researching on the internet. I was going into Administrative Functions, Printer Server Functions, all kinds of things that I’m really not an expert at.

I had never heard of those options. So you got some advice and you went deep. But it didn’t work out, did it?

No, it did not and finally, I saw some blogs on the internet that made me think I might need a wide format printer.

When you bought your new wide format printer to print these cards, you did go with the HP brand again.

Yes I did. Yes I did. And it was an expensive printer [Officejet 7500 model].

As you mentioned, I think you explained it very well, you could not find the option to input a custom document size.

Not at all.

And you even went so far as to go to HP’s web site and download their latest driver, right?

Yes I did. I did. I installed from a CD and then I went and installed a more recent update to that driver release and it still did not work.

So I went out, for these very reasonably priced invitations, and bought an expensive wide format printer. The guy at the store, he assured me that this was good for any kind of custom stuff I wanted to do, even newspaper sized things. So I brought it home. It was huge. It was heavy. I took a long time to uninstall my other printer and install this. It did have a lot of unusual sizes already in the [print driver] program, but it did not have a function to create my own size. I got home about 5 or 6 Saturday afternoon. I worked Saturday evening. I worked half the day on Sunday and finally I gave up and I thought, “I’m going to call LCI first thing Monday morning and see what Josh has to say” because I had seen a couple of your videos, actually about the same size card.

So I talked with you and we talked about printers and I asked you to be honest with me and tell me what kind of printer you recommended and you were honest. You said you have learned over and over again in your discussions with your colleagues there at the company as well as with customers that HP is not very user friendly with this kind of stuff.

I told you and I tell other customers that we can usually get through it. We can usually dig deep inside that HP printer driver and find the place where you input a custom height and width for your card, but you and I could not find it.

It was nowhere. It wasn’t in the Print Setup. It was nowhere. And you suggested an Epson or a Canon or maybe a Lexmark, but I’m not fond of them. I thought, “Gosh, I have to do all this?”

But after I talked with you I was kind of energized again. So I went to Staples and I got a $79 wonderful Canon [Pixma MX410] printer. And you also suggested that I get the back downward feed which I did and I’ve never had that before. I’m telling you, I got home, I installed this printer, I kicked out my invitations and envelopes—I printed all the envelopes—in an hour! No problems. No problems whatsoever. It was a breeze and I cannot believe the trouble that I had with the HP printers. So now I’m not an HP girl anymore.

Tell the listeners exactly what you did to set that custom size with the Canon printer.

It was very easy. I went to Print. Let me get there for just a second. Okay, in Print, which is where I was going all this last weekend, I went to Properties. And in Properties—I’ve seen different formats for this kind of information—but you’ll see the Paper Printer Size. The default is always at the 8 ½ x 11 letter size, but you go down this list and it has Custom. Sometimes I’ve seen Custom, sometimes I’ve seen Other but this particular one says Custom. I go into Custom and it asks you whether you want inches of millimeters. I kept it on inch. I put in 6 ¼ x 12 ½ because that’s the size of the unfolded card, hit Ok, and that was all I needed to do!

The other nice surprise was that it keeps that there for me. I don’t have to do it every time. I went in just now and found that same size. It’s there forever now.

Okay.

I just want to say to anybody who listens to this, first of all, I’ve bought supplies from LCI in the past, several times over the last 10 or 12 years I guess, from translucent paper to different stuff. I love the stuff that you sell. I think it’s at a reasonable price but today I am a really happy camper because of the technical service. You could not fix what was wrong with my printer. Nobody could have. But you did lead me in the right direction and got me to where I could do this in an hour! And I’m really grateful for that Josh, I really am.

Now that that custom size is so accessible to you in the Canon printer driver, don’t you think you can tackle any kind of card size in the future that might come up?

Any kind, any kind. And that’s the other thing because I love to do this and I did not want to be limited to the little panel card that’s 8 ½ x 5 ½ that you get at the stores. I wanted to be able to go to LCI and pick anything I wanted. And I’m not just saying that. I really mean that because I love to do this. I wanted to go there and pick anything I wanted and not be thinking about, “Am I going to be able to print this or not or is this going to be another 2 days out of my life?”

So I’m very, very happy. I thank you so much. Great customer service, and if anybody ever needs any paper supplies or card supplies, I know where to tell them to go!

–

Thanks to Gina for sharing her printing experience with all of our readers and podcast listeners. It’s gratifying to hear positive printing feedback, especially after some difficulty. Do you have a printing experience that you’d like to share, even if it wasn’t all smooth sailing? We’d like to hear about it. Post a comment and tell us!

You may also be interested in two of our printer reviews:

Canon Pixma iX7000 Large Format Ink Jet Printer Review

Epson Stylus Photo R1900 Ink Jet Printer Review

Founded by Renae Christine, Let’s Talk Stationery is a web forum with nearly 400 active members, all of them stationery industry professionals. In this episode, #45 of the LCI Paper Podcast, you’ll hear our our telephone conversation as Renae opens up about the origins of the forum, the reasons it needed to become a paid forum, the family-like atmosphere members enjoy, and the big meetup at the 2011 National Stationery Show in New York. If you’ve ever been interested in Let’s Talk Stationery but haven’t yet decided to join, this is a great opportunity to learn more and hear directly from its founder.

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #45 – Interview with Renae Christine of Let’s Talk Stationery

All photos are courtesy of Renae Christine.

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Are you the owner/founder of Let’s Talk Stationery?

Yes, I created the forum in October of 2008.

What life roads brought you to create the forum? I just assume that you’ve worked in the stationery business but maybe I’m wrong.

The creation of Let’s Talk Stationery was kind of a freak accident, actually. I have my own stationery company and it does well enough. I wasn’t really looking to start another business venture. I just happened to discover some fabulous friends in a Yahoo group and they were complaining about the way the Yahoo group site was structured. It seemed scattered and it was hard to keep track of all the posts. So I threw up Let’s Talk Stationery in about a day so we could keep the information organized.

At first, the forum was free and we all continued to share information, but eventually, we had a lot of people coming to the forum and just taking our information and becoming competitors. So everyone on the forum agreed to initiate a fee and a vetting process so that only those serious in the stationery industry would sign up on the forum. That has worked amazingly well. It pays for the cost of the server and we have only the best of the best. They aren’t afraid to share their industry secrets because their secrets are well protected.

That is an issue in a creative field like stationery and designing, isn’t it?

It is. We’ve had people come on and read people’s signatures and go to their sites and steal some of their work, copy some of their designs, so we’ve had to alter the forum enough so that stuff like that doesn’t happen. We have a code of conduct now to make sure that nobody steals each other’s work.

About how many active members are in the forum?

To date we have 971 registered users with 384 of them being active, participating members and that is all by word of mouth. Those are all members who have been vetted and proven to have stationery companies of their own. Now we have over 31,000 posts and over 3,700 threads going. It’s pretty buzzing.

That’s incredible, I mean far more than I would have guessed.

Yeah, it’s a huge wealth of information, 3 years worth.

The web site is currently a forum. Do you have plans to expand the site beyond that and maybe start new sections?

We have expanded a bit already. We have the Let’s Talk Stationery directory with a list of our favorite vendors and people can add to that as they like. We also have the discount program that helps everyone’s operating costs stay low. We also just installed a smart phone app so that Let’s Talk Stationery can be read on any smart phone or iPhone or iPad as well. And then also, just a week and a half ago we had a Let’s Talk Stationery brunch at the National Stationery Show and everyone loved it so much. We’re like family there. After that, it just wasn’t enough for everybody so we’re now implementing a program for a stationery workshop cruise for Let’s Talk Stationery at the end of 2012. We just all can’t seem to get enough of each other.

Cool. So you and a lot of members were at the National Stationery Show. What is your history with the show? How many have you been to and could you tell me some of your impressions of this year’s show?

Sure. This actually was my first year to the show. I’ve been having babies for several years.

Congratulations!

Thank you. The Let’s Talk Stationery members actually met last year without me. I sent along little gifts for them and they kept all of us at home posted about the show. This was my first year so they all were so welcoming for me.

All of the members are best friends and they wanted to be able to find each other at the National Stationery Show. There were also some members who couldn’t go and they wanted to keep track of what Let’s Talk Stationery members were doing at the show this year. So we created a Twitter list that included all of the Let’s Talk Stationery members who were going and everyone who followed the list during the show could see, “Oh, Renae is at the CatPrint booth right now” or “Oh, LeAnne is on her way to the Let’s Talk Stationery brunch and she needs directions.”

So it was fantastic. And those who couldn’t go felt like they were there because they could follow what their best friends were doing. So in that way, everybody says the show is so much better with Let’s Talk Stationery because you’re going with your best friends. You’re not going by yourself or just with a single colleague or a significant other, you’re going with a whole group of people. We actually stormed a few of the booths that were Let’s Talk Stationery members exhibiting and everyone was looking around, “What is that? What is that?”

We all had matching scarves and everything. It was really a lot of fun doing that. I’ve only been to one, but I would never do it without Let’s Talk Stationery because it was just too much fun with all of them, doing the brunches and workshops and everything all together as best friends.

So at the show, the identifying physical markers were the scarves?

Yes, we all had these really fluffy, white matching scarves that looked absolutely ridiculous but we all wore them together so we all looked ridiculous together.

Anything that really stood out to you at the show that you’d kind of like to throw some promotion toward?

I love textures and there was this metal company, MetalPress Designs. You could do custom designs in this beautiful metal and put them on invitations. It just looked gorgeous. I just loved the sheen of the metal. It’s one step up from foil.

Any other textures were great too. I loved all of the textures.

The fashion show with the paper dresses was incredible. I couldn’t believe that those dresses were made out of paper. They were just mannequins and they had these gorgeous paper dresses on and they were all different styles. It was like a red carpet event. I think they were even on a red carpet. All of the dresses were made out of paper and stationery products. Nothing else was used, so they looked amazing. Just with paper and stationery, it wasn’t your usual…

Dress

Yeah, it wasn’t your usual dress.

In terms of promoting or supplementing the forum, how do you use your Let’s Talk Stationery Facebook page? I’d ask the same question about your @stationerytalk Twitter account.

Sure. We call Let’s Talk Stationery “our little Camelot” and Facebook is really an extension of that. It keeps everyone interacting with each other with pictures and posts, but more importantly, when someone has big news to post on Let’s Talk Stationery, it’s protected but we usually post a link to it on Facebook for more of those inactive members who aren’t on the forum every single day. A lot of members are on every hour of every day, but for those who might not be, we’ll post a link to it on Facebook. It just brings them back to LetsTalkStationery.com. It’s important to keep everyone in the loop. It’s important to keep everyone coming back to the home base.

We’re posting it secure. People have announced their babies. They’re announced they’re getting married. They’ve even announced friends’ terminal illnesses-type information on there, because we really do feel like family. We don’t post that information on Facebook but we’ll post a link to it so that the members can know that stuff is going on in the Let’s Talk Stationery family.

You’ve now described the members as best friends and family. People must feel very comfortable there to share the personal things that they do. It sounds like a real community.

Thank you. We pride ourselves with that and we’re very warm and welcoming to new members, as long as they have the same type of feel and tone to their posts.

Have there been times where you’ve had to “layeth the smacketh down” and kind of keep people in line or remind them of the tone?

Oh yeah, there are times when we have to mediate a little bit but it usually just takes one post or one small private message to say, “Listen, remember the rules of the forum” and “We don’t pick on each other here.”

There’s been a couple times for that happening, but it doesn’t happen all that often. Usually they vent about difficult customers, crazy Etsy quotes, people trying to get something for nothing; usually they’re complaining about that instead of each other.

So as you know, I’m completely new to the site and I understand that LCI Paper and Let’s Talk Stationery have recently established a relationship. Do you have any advice on how to we can use the forum to serve your members?

Sure. We are thrilled to have LCI Paper as a new vendor on the forum. More than anything, our members love activity. They love seeing vendors participate. The vendors thread is a thread where all of the vendors have access and the members have access to the vendors there as well. The members can go in there and post questions and vendors can answer. Or vendors can also post really whatever they like. They can post the tips about the stationery industry or even marketing or anything, really. Members love that and they read the vendors thread quite a bit. They fall in love with vendors who are active and regular on the forum and respond to their questions in the vendors thread. Even if a vendor posts something like, “It’s a beautiful day here in sunny California. What’s the weather like where you are?” Members love that. What they don’t love is the technical, political answers that some vendors like to give. Members are on this forum so that they don’t have to hear the legal jargon anymore. Tell it how it is, tell it with heart, and tailor it to the forum’s tone which anyone can pick up by reading the introduction thread or vendors thread freely as a guest. Everybody can read those threads. No one has to be a member. That’s what they love the very most is just activity. They love for you to pay attention to them and the forum.

Thank you again. Is there anything that you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered?

If there are folks in the stationery industry that want to be a member of Let’s Talk Stationery, that’s completely fine. We don’t have an advertising policy so if anyone finds us, it’s usually by word of mouth or referral and they feel lucky to have found us because of that no advertising policy.

If you have found us, please remember that you also have to be a good fit for us and our family and we will warmly welcome you as long as you adhere to the rules of the forum and you’re not there to just steal people’s information.

And if people do have a serious interest in joining, what’s the best way to proceed?

They can go to LetsTalkStationery.com and just go to the registration page?

Alright, and everything’s there and laid out? It’s clear enough?

Yes, it’s just a simple form that they sign and fill out.

–

Thanks to Renae Christine for taking time to give us all a better understanding of the Let’s Talk Stationery forum. Any questions or comments about what you’ve heard? Post a comment! Thanks for listening! Don’t want to miss that episode or any other? Subscribe to the LCI Paper Podcast in iTunes.

On this, our 44th episode of the LCI Paper Podcast, we had the pleasure of speaking to Tamara Smith of Designs to Impress. She’s a Florida-based invitation designer that attended the 2011 National Stationery Show in New York. After the show, we put out a call via Twitter to see if any of our followers that attended the show would like to report on it for our blog. Tamara answered the call which you’re about to hear in her own voice. She talks about her general impressions of the show and gets into some juicy specifics. Are you a designer, a vendor, or just a fan of great paper stationery? If you are, we’re sure you’ll enjoy the interview.

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #44 – Interview with Tamara Smith of Designs to Impress

All photos are courtesy of Tamara Smith.

Here is a transcript of the interview:

When did you start attending the Stationery Show in New York and what was your initial motivation to start attending? Was it because of your design business?

Yes, I started attending the show in 2008. Initially, I attended for the inspiration. I was fairly new in business at the time and just wanted ideas—color inspiration, typography, embellishments, vendors, you name it. The show was very heavy on that so it was wonderful. I walked away feeling like I achieved my goal. But in subsequent years, I find that I’m there less for the inspiration and more for the relationships—the relationships that I’ve already established with vendors that I work with currently, obviously looking for new venders, looking for better ways to do things, ways to be more efficient.

So what was your impression of this year’s show? Talk to me about your general impression. I know you have some specifics that you’d like to talk about.

Yeah

Tell me about how the show has changed over the years. Give it all to me.

Okay. The show is significantly smaller in my opinion. I couldn’t tell you exactly how many exhibitors there were in 2008 or 2009, but just visually you can look at the show and tell that it’s a lot smaller, that we don’t have nearly as many businesses coming out to exhibit any more. That’s one significant difference, that there just aren’t as many companies.

From another perspective, the show doesn’t offer as much in the way of new products. In past years, it used to be that every vendor had something new. I remember the year that Envelopments, and I believe Marsupial also, came out with the JIGster. It was the thing. Everyone wanted to go see how it worked. They were offering unique pricing on it for the show. But you just don’t see a lot of that at the show this year.

What I did find was that many businesses were trying to find innovative ways to give you something new, even if it wasn’t necessarily in the way of a tangible product. For example, Envelopments offered a lot in the way of new ideas for working with their existing products, creative ways to create new and fresh stationery. And one of their ways that they did that was by having the people behind the company kind of come out to the forefront—people like Tom, Ramon, Patty—and they talked a lot with the vendors about business development, new electronic resources that the company would be offering, and they even had some of the creative artists who typically stay behind the scenes, they had them come out and showcase their products, showcase their work which was really beneficial.

We had chatted a little bit yesterday. There were a couple negatives that you found as well, right?

Yes. I guess a lot of the companies that chose to come out and exhibit are of the mindset that people are not really in a buying mode because of the economic climate, so maybe it colored their interactions with people, but I found that a lot of vendors weren’t necessarily eager to greet people who came to their booth, and I noticed that not just at one booth but at several different places, that people just weren’t as engaging. They weren’t as willing to interact. One such booth that I went to, it was particularly disheartening because their products were being featured at the Trendys and I was really, really interested in this one particular product that they carry that was featured there. I went to their booth to go find it and the booth was being worked by—it had to be about anywhere from 5 to 10 employees at this particular station—and no one knew the product. No one had a single idea about what I was talking about. So finally, they get a hold of a catalog. We thumb through it. I point out the product that I’m looking to physically touch. I want to see a physical copy. No one can find it. And finally they come to the conclusion that, “We don’t have a sample of that here.”

I’m like, “Really? It’s up at the front. It’s up at the Trendys.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have it in here.”

And I just felt that it was unacceptable. Your product that you showcase, you should have it available for vendors, distributors, whatever, to take a look at, to be able to feature, show the components of the product, and they just didn’t have that and were quite unapologetic about it. Just, “No, we don’t have that.”

It kind of colored my interaction with them. I really wasn’t interested in seeing any other products after that. I wasn’t interested in discussing anything further. It’s really sad because the product itself is so good. It was this little, miniature notebook, maybe about a 5 x 6, spiral bound. It had pockets inside. It had lined and unlined paper inside, perfect for a designer to have with them on the go, whether it’s a meeting with a client to jot down notes or if creative inspiration comes to you somewhere. I had to go just based on what I saw in their catalog which was totally a turn-off.

You mentioned the Trendys. For someone who has never been to the show, what are the Trendys?

The Trendys are the stationery show’s awards in a variety of categories—Best New Product, Best Wedding Product. There are tons and tons and tones of categories. All of the products that are nominated are featured in a special section before you even enter the stationery show itself. They’re all featured there on display. The winners are announced, I think at the end of day 1, and then the winning product is showcased in their newspaper/magazine.

What was the name of that product that you were looking for, the notebook?

It was by a company called Design Designs and I want to say that they call it the Pocket Purse. No, the Purse Notebook is what I think it was called.

Do you think you’re going to buy one?

No, I’m really not interested in buying it anymore. (laughter) If someone sends it to me as a gift, that would be great, but no, I’m really not interested in purchasing a product from a company that’s not interested in my business.

Gotcha. Kind of a lighter subject, my co-workers Kristen and Mandy have been wondering about what people do after the shows close each day. Were there any special after parties that you were aware of?

Yes, several. Many of the vendors take people out to dinner to kind of continue the conversations. Because the show is rather fast-paced, you can’t really sit and have an extended conversation with some of the vendors that you work with just because they’re greeting new people who are attending the show for the first time. They’re showcasing their products. They’re just working their booth. So a lot of them take people out to dinner to have a chance to continue the conversation in a more intimate setting.

I know that some of the vendors also have small parties.

The stationery show itself, they have a dinner. It’s a little on the pricey side so I don’t know exactly how many people attended. I didn’t choose to attend this year, but they do offer that at the end of day 1.

You’re based in South Florida, right?

Yes.

So getting to the show is a commitment on your part that you choose to do every year, right?

Yes.

I mean you pay for your flights, your hotel I assume.

Yes. I’m actually from New York, so it’s a little less of a monetary commitment for me. All I have to do is get there. But even so, it’s a time commitment in terms of being away from your business in the height of wedding season. Obviously you have to get there so there are flight costs and things of that nature, but it’s totally, totally worth it. It really is. The only year that I didn’t was the year that I gave birth and I was physically unable to attend which was last year. And literally, I was following the trending on Twitter. I was looking at the vendors’ pages, looking to see what they were offering, and just totally felt remiss that I couldn’t be there. (laughter)

Of course people can follow you on Twitter and your handle is @Designs2Impress with the digit 2 in there. I saw that you had shouted out a couple people that you had met up with at the show. Talk to me about some of the people that you were happy to make the acquaintance at the show.

Oh absolutely. It was kind of the question of the day. You met a new vendor. You saw their offerings, and the next question, “Are you on Twitter?”

Because these days, for me anyway, I know that a strong social media presence in any company that I’m choosing to work with is crucial. And companies that only have a marginal presence; they just find themselves losing ground to companies that are posting relevant, frequent updates. So I was really, really happy to see that companies like Laura Marr are now on Twitter. Kristy Rice from Momental Designs, I had an opportunity to meet her. I had an opportunity to meet Jackie who’s the Editor-in-Chief of Munaluchi Bridal magazine. She had just started following me several days before so it was really, really nice to put a face with the name. Tracey of WeddingInvite, love! Darcy Miller of Martha Stewart Weddings, just real industry notables that you got a chance to interact with face to face, people that you interact with, virtually, all the time.

And now you go back and you can continue interacting with them daily [on Twitter].

Absolutely

Speaking of social media, you also have a Facebook fan page that people can “like.” It’s Designs to Impress, Inc. and you’ve got some photos from the show.

Yes, I have tons of photos from the show taken at the various booths. I have photos of products that I saw that I thought my clients would be interested in or that I found inspiration in. There are photos of some of the seminars that we attended. Yeah, it’s well documented. (laughter)

And then on your web site, I like the comparison you made about invitations being like a well-made movie trailer in that your invitation “provides your guest with a preview of the events to come.” Can you tell me more about that philosophy?

Yes. In this day and age when people are invited to so many events, social life events, I feel that it’s important for your guests, when they receive an invitation to your event, to feel honored and privileged to be invited and to attend. Whatever the occasion may be, whether it’s a wedding or a baby shower, christening, birthday party, no matter what the occasion, your guests should feel honored and it’s really what drives my business. What will guests feel when they open the envelope and pull out a Designs to Impress product? My mantra is, why just invite your guests when you can impress them? I think that guests who will find themselves impressed, they’re more likely to attend your event which is obviously the goal, and they’re more likely to feel that you put a level of thought into having them as a guest which is what we all want.

Very well said. Thank you very much Tamara for sharing your thoughts about the show so soon after you arrived [home] and have had to settle back in. I really appreciate this update about the show.

Thank you for talking with me. I appreciate being able to share my thoughts.

Episode 43 of the LCI Paper podcast features an interview with New York City-based mother and blogger Joanna Dreifus and her report from the National Stationery Show in New York which bills itself as “the world’s most comprehensive collection of stationery and related lifestyle products.” First we’ll learn how Joanna’s popular blog, MyMomShops.com provided her the opportunity to attend and cover her first National Stationery show back in 2007. Then we’ll ask her about her favorite products at this year’s show which took place earlier this month over three days, May 15 through 18. There’s some great stuff here. She doesn’t hold back, and she even has some criticism about the show.

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #43 – Interview with Joanna Driefus of MyMomShops.com

All photos are courtesy of Joanna Driefus.

Here is a transcript of the interview:

How did your web site, MyMomShops.com come about?

Well I became something of an expert online shopper when I was on bed rest for both of my pregnancies. I’m a pretty well-organized type A person who’s good at gathering information and I found that not only was I good at finding the necessities I needed to order online, but I think to become very good at finding really interesting things to purchase for myself, for my kids, a lot of gift items, baby gifts, birthday gifts… And it got to the point where a lot of my friends were telling me, “Oh I always come to you because you seem to have the best ideas if I have a particular shopping question like where you do find a personalized baby gift for under twenty dollars with free shipping that doesn’t look cheap?”

So I seem to have good answers for that and I decided that I wanted to start a web site that would share some of these online finds for things that were mostly items that would work well as gifts, and this goes across several categories like clothing, accessories, home décor products, toys, and a big one for me is stationery. So I decided to start the blog and the first week, maybe I had about four readers, me and my mom and two of our friends, and four years later it’s turned into something much bigger.

Okay, so it’s been about four years it’s been up.

Yes. Almost four and a half years.

Was it completely a non-commercial idea?

Oh absolutely.

Or did you hope to make money?

No, I started it really on a whim. One of the reasons I started it also was because my second child who at the time was four months old was a night owl. He didn’t sleep at all so a lot of my online retail therapy was taking place also around three in the morning. So I was spending a lot of time online again and finding these things. And again, I really just started it primarily as a virtual version of putting pen to paper of these ideas that I had for these great gifts and things like that. I had no idea that it would turn into something else.

And also I think the blog world was very different back then. This whole phenomenon of mommy bloggers and working with brands and doing product reviews and things like that didn’t really take off until later that year. This was in 2007 so I think I preceded it by a few months, but it’s definitely changed in nature over time.

And now is it somewhat of a commercial venture? I wasn’t sure. I saw that you have some ads so hopefully that’s helping a little bit.

Yeah, it helps a little bit. It’s definitely not a job that will earn you a real income. A lot of people ask me when they’re starting a blog like this, “Can you make a living off of this?” And my answer is “Definitely not. It has to be something that you really enjoy doing.”

But one reason I think that my blog has stayed popular, and I have readers who started with me back in February of 2007 and are still reading every day and tell me it’s the first thing they check in the morning, and it’s because I really have always stayed true to the voice of the blog. It helps that I’m the one person writing it. Some other blogs, sometimes as they get bigger, they get a team of writers, they farm things out. This is really a blog where I write everything. I post almost every day. I’ve done I think close to three thousand posts at this point over the four years so it’s really been a labor of love and I don’t twist it to fit… If a certain brand wants to work with me and it fits into what I’m interested in, I’ll do it, but mostly I do keep it focused on the areas that interest me most which also has changed a little bit as my children have gotten older. But I’d say certain areas that have stayed constant have been home décor, things that the moms can enjoy for themselves, and definitely stationery has been a big one as well.

How does your site tie in with your visits to the New York Stationery show?

I attended my first National Stationery Show about four months into my blog. It was May of 2007. A friend mentioned, “Oh, well if you write a blog you can get a press pass and go to the show.” And I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to be a kid in a candy store there. That sounds like paper Mecca.”

I was so excited. I went and I covered the show for the blog and at that time, again there weren’t that many bloggers going to trade shows and certainly not at the Stationery Show, maybe at some other shows. I just had a great response to the coverage I did and I met so many designers who were emerging then. It’s been so much fun to see some of the people who started out very small at NSS in 2007 and now they’re moving further north on the floor of the Javits Center and becoming much bigger retailers and it’s just been really exciting to see them grow. So I’ve been to the show every year since then.

Alright. How did this year’s show compare to others?

I think the general feeling was that this year seemed a little bit more upbeat again.

Good.

I think it was May of 2009, following a real dip in the economy in 2008, that there was a gloomier vibe to the show. There weren’t as many buyers, there was less excitement in the air, and there were a lot of kind of snarky greeting cards about the recession and being poor, and it was kind of a downer. I think it’s definitely starting to perk up again. And also, I think the show has just improved in terms of quality. This year it seemed a little bit more paired down, a little bit smaller, and I think the cream has risen to the top and some of the designers who maybe didn’t stand out as much that you might have just walked by before, those seem to be falling by the wayside. So the certain strengths within the show definitely seem to be getting just stronger and stronger.

Good. You mentioned the snarky cards. I really enjoyed your couple blog posts that you did during the show. Can you tell me about what you focused on in those two posts?

Oh yeah, one was about the funny cards and last year I called the post Snark & Sarcasm because it seemed like it was even stronger last year. A lot of cards, you’d have to be really gutsy to actually send them to someone. I call these more of like collector’s cards because they’re funny but your mother would not be proud of you if you actually mailed one of these to someone. But they are very funny. But those are sort of the nastier, more sarcastic ones. There are some that are just plain funny, I mean that T.HANKS card with Tom Hanks on it, everyone was admiring that card. Some people come up with really clever puns or visuals everyone seems to get and everyone seems to enjoy. And again, it’s one of those cards where if you have one of them, you’re probably going to want to keep it for yourself anyway, for your own collection rather than mail it to someone.

All you need is a camera really, and maybe a notebook and a bag to collect some things?

Yes and extra batteries and a fully charged phone. One of the big complaints this year, I complained as well, is that it’s very hard to find somewhere to charge your phone. Now this is something else that has changed. In 2007, I didn’t even have a smart phone yet so I was there with just a plain old clunker of a cell phone and my Canon DSLR camera which takes wonderful pictures. Now people are juggling more and more equipment. Now you have your phone. You have your point and shoot camera, your other camera… You’re carrying your business cards. Sometimes I think I should wear one of those fanny belts like you wear when you’re traveling around Europe or something because it gets a little bit cumbersome.

Your other blog post about your favorite finds…

Oh yeah.

Any off the top of your head that you remember?

Yeah, there were a couple of debuts this year that really jumped out at me. One is called Printerette Press and this is a letterpress studio from St. Paul, Minnesota. The woman who makes these designs use to work for Target and her booth was adorable. It looks great. Sometimes you can tell as soon as you see the booth display that there might be a really special product in here. And she just makes excellent quality and really bright, fun letterpress cards, greeting cards, and box sets. I always joke with people that at the show, if the paper really smells good and feels good, I’m going to like it. She uses a very thick card stock. You see a lot of people sniffing the cards when they like what they see. It’s the only place where it’s not weird to be seen sniffing paper. So I really liked her designs.

Then another one is called Double Bravo and this is another letterpress shop. This designer has traveled all over the world and she makes keepsake cards for new babies and for weddings that reference the year of the wedding or the year of the child’s birth and some really fun, offbeat pieces of trivia about those places. Those were two standouts.

Oh, one more was Gooseberry Press and these were little letterpress postcards for prints with hand-drawn maps of major cities, I think eight different cities across the United States. And that’s another trend that I’ve noticed, a lot of hometown pride and maps and cartography and people are always looking for their city. These make really fun pieces, not just for correspondence, but even if you were to frame them and put them in your home somewhere, they make really cute prints or wall art.

For those who haven’t seen your article at StationeryTrendsMag.com, can you touch on some of the tips that you give show organizers to accommodate bloggers like yourself?

Yeah, well I think for the exhibitors, they’re becoming more used to the idea of having a blogger walk into their booth and what might happen so this article was more for the sizable group of people that still don’t really know what to make of the bloggers. My main points are:

Be nice. Don’t blow anyone off when they have a press pass because you never know. If you’re not familiar with the blog world, you don’t know if a major blogger has just walked in, but even if it’s a blogger who’s just starting out, it’s good karma. Be nice. Let them take pictures as long as they ask if they can take pictures. That’s the etiquette. You don’t come in and start snapping away because then they worry you’re a designer trying to copy their ideas. But bloggers are in a position to give instant PR to these exhibiters during the show where as a print publication might not mention them for another six months or something. The bloggers are there doing blog posts and tweeting and can give exposure in a way that is going to instantly send more people to that booth. So it’s just sort of being aware of what a blogger can offer you because they really can offer a lot.

Another one is, and this just goes for anyone who will be visiting the booth, to look positive and don’t be sitting there with your face buried in a pile of Chinese food eating or talking on your phone or something. It is a long show and it’s a long day and it’s hard to be on all the time. But definitely to look approachable and look excited to be there to the extent that you can.

And also to have a press kit and have those in the press room because I had a list of fifty exhibitors that I wanted to see before I ever got to Javits. I probably added about twenty-five more having seen press kits of exhibitors I haven’t heard of before, because I go to the press room before I start walking the show. So that’s another place to get noticed and to be added to people’s walking routes.

Really good advice to vendors. Thank you, that’s excellent.

Aside from seeing some great products, is part of the fun meeting different people at the show?

Definitely, and this just gets better every year. I think the first year or two, I was very shy and scared and sort of didn’t walk to talk to anyone and couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to talk to me either. As I’ve gotten to see some of the same exhibitors year after year, or as there’s more word of mouth about my own blog, I don’t get the blank stare anymore when I say, “Oh, I write a blog called MyMomShops. I cover the show every year.”

Now people will invite me beforehand to come see their booth. That’s a great feeling and everyone is just so friendly and excited to be there. I think another person calls it the paper geek camp or something, you know, paper camp. It’s like going back to summer camp and meeting your friends again from a year ago who have this same paper fetish that you do. It’s just a very warm, fun atmosphere and it’s great to know that you’re going to see these people at this event every year. So I’ve met a lot of great people.

You sound very comfortable being interviewed. Do you have a background in PR or something?

No, I did two web sites before this, in the previous stages of my life. In the year 2000, I started a web site about bridesmaids, being a bridesmaid. I started that with a friend of mine and we were interviewed by a guy from the Today Show that turned into a thirty second clip. We always say that was our thirty seconds of fame. Then two years after that, I did a site about wedding planning—how to incorporate philanthropy into wedding planning. So MyMomShops is kind of the next, corresponding stage of my life. But I’ve always done all my own PR, and again, I think because I’m very good at accessing information, I’m always on the lookout for good opportunities. I try to do it all on my own.

Gotcha. Today you Tweeted: “Thanks to the National Stationery Show, I wrote and mailed three actual cards/letters yesterday. I feel so retro.”

Tell me about that, the inspiration.

(laughter) I’ve found now that having attended the show several years, I get some samples in the press kits. Some of these vendors now are kind enough, before, during, or after the show, to give me extra samples to consider for review. So I have a small carton from each year’s show of the cards, mostly single note cards, maybe also some box sets, some gift-wrap here and there and notepads, and some of which again, are so beautiful that I love so much that I will never use. But some of them, the ones that I think maybe I could spare or I have extras of them, those are the ones that I love to go through when it’s time to send someone a birthday card or just a thinking of you card. It’s a cliché to say it, but in this digital age, it’s so rare to find the time, make the time, and take the time to put your pen to paper and actually send someone a note in the mail with a stamp. But for people who love stationery and paper, it’s such a joy to send that to someone else because you get this high from it also. So last night, I did that with three new cards of which I had duplicates, and I’m so excited for the people to receive them.

I’m curious. I just picked up on the ones that you can “spare,” so the ones you have duplicates of. Do you like to collect different stationery then?

It’s funny that you ask that because this really just occurred to me during this year’s show. I realize now that I do collect stationery and this just occurred to me now, where as other people might collect wine or something. I thought, “Well, I have a box here for every year and I’m organizing them by category and letterpress or by color or by occasion. It really is a collection.”

I remember there was an article in the New York Times maybe a year or two ago in the style section about a woman having a stationery wardrobe. Your stationery wardrobe is your working papers that you actually use that you write on and you send out, like you have your casual notepad or you have your more formal paper. And I do have boxes like that where those are the ones that I’ll use one a regular basis but I also have this separate collection of these little precious gems to me of the finest letterpress and of the most beautiful envelope liners and pearlescent envelopes and things like that that I love to go back and look at. Some of these things are five years old so I guess I am collecting them.

At some point, would you like to have the opportunity to mail them? I mean before you pass on in this life.

(laughter) I think I would save them for my daughter but she doesn’t seem as interested. She’s almost eight years old and the only thing she wants to know when I get back from the show is, “How many Hershey Kisses did you collect for me?” (laughter) Because the vendors all have the little candy dishes out. I’m hoping she’ll start to love it, but I live in New York City and space is a big problem. It’s not very conducive to be storing reams of paper in your hall closet. (laughter) But the smallest and nicest cards I think I’ll keep for myself.

Interesting, cool.

Have you taken away any ideas from the show that you wouldn’t mind sharing? Maybe you’ve already thought of a blog post or two for the coming weeks?

It’s always a fine line. I’m one of the bloggers who covers the show who has a blog that is not exclusively about paper. While many of my readers are also stationery junkies, I have to realize that not all of them are. So I have to keep the other posts coming and not be bombarding them with these posts with twenty different examples of my favorite letterpress. So I try to space those out a bit. But that being said, I will be giving about twenty examples of my favorite letterpress. (laughter) I’m going to be doing a post about different trends, icons, and graphics that I see reappearing in this year’s show. And I also do a post every year about kid’s stuff like baby and child-themed things, whether it’s birth announcements or camp stationery, kids party-ware like paper plates, napkins, things like that. So I try to put all of that into a post that maybe has some broader appeal to my readers.

So we can expect some reviews of things that you’ve picked up at the show for months to come?

Oh, definitely, and because my favorite vendors from each show, my favorite exhibitors rather, these become people that I follow throughout the rest of the year. A lot of them stay in touch with me and they let me know about new works that they’re doing. So these are people that I will keep my eye on and I’ll look out for their new products.

It’s impossible to cover everything. I took so many pictures that I want to share, so I do save some of those to go back to during the year so that it’s not too much of a blitz at the beginning.

And if people want to follow you, obviously they can go to your web site, MyMomShops.com, but would you also like to place a call out for some new Twitter followers?

Oh definitely. I discovered Twitter about two years ago and I was one of those Twitter skeptics at first but I love it and it’s also, again, been a great way to meet like-minded people. You can meet like-minded people for any subject area that interests you. For me, stationery is just one of the things that I tweet about and one of my groups. It’s a fantastic way to network and I welcome new Twitter followers. I think I’m just under three thousand right now.

Wow! Great! Go ahead. What’s your account?

It’s just @mymomshops.

Some people ask me when they want to know how to follow me on Twitter, they say, “Don’t I need to be tweeting myself or registered on Twitter to do that?”

And the answer is “No.” Before I joined Twitter, I did something very easy like anyone can do. You just go to Twitter.com/ and then the Twitter name or handle as it’s called of the person that you want to follow. Go to that page and then just bookmark that page. Anytime you want, you go to that person’s direct link on Twitter and you’ll see what they’ve been Tweeting. So you don’t need, by any means, to be using Twitter yourself in order to see someone else’s tweets that interest you.

Good advice, just bookmark it. You mentioned stationery is just one of several interests that you have and so you’re probably following groups of people on Twitter for other things. Name one other interest that Joanna is following on Twitter.

I’d say New York City people and places. I was born in Brooklyn, New York and then I lived in New Jersey for a while. I went to school in Boston but I’ve been back here and have been living in Manhattan since I graduated college, which I’ll date myself here, was in 1994. So this summer is seventeen years that I’ve lived here, and every year I love it more and more. It’s a great place for whatever interests you have. I’m very lucky that for so many of my interests there are wonderful things going on like the Stationery Show, like these events for bloggers now. It’s a lot of fun. So I have a lot of people I follow on Twitter, from other New York City bloggers to also New York City cultural institutions and play spaces for kids, events for kids, things like that.

–

Thanks to Joanna for answering our call for reports from the 2011 National Stationery Show. Do you have opinions and anecdotes to share about the show? We’d love to hear about your experience. Post a comment!

The DIY Bride, Khris Cochran, is the author of 2 books entitled The DIY Bride: 40 Fun Projects for Your Ultimate One-of-a-Kind Wedding and The DIY Bride Crafty Countdown: 40 Fabulous Projects to Make in the Months, Weeks & Hours before Your Special Day. Are you planning for your wedding and looking for creative ways to stay within budget? Well then Khris is your source. Her latest work, DIY Bride magazine, just finished a run on newsstands. In the following interview, we’ll talk about the special edition and the possibility of another magazine, another book, and her re-launched web site.

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #42 – Interview with the DIY Bride, Khris Cochran

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Khris, as a self-admitted craft-phobic, what paths did you travel to eventually writing DIY books and magazines?

It all started when I was planning my own wedding way back in October of 2000. To save some money at the time, I decided to try my hand at some do it yourself projects and that really started me on this whole trajectory to eventually start a blog and that lead to books and a magazine and other fabulous things.

Not everyone wants to share. Sometimes there’s a feeling of competition when someone’s creative. How did you decide that you wanted to use your experience from your wedding and share with people?

It was a natural thing for me. I enjoy sharing and at the time there weren’t a lot of resources out there for “do it yourselfers” and I saw an opportunity to share things that I was doing and I got a really great response from other people in the bridal community that encouraged me to keep sharing. Other people started contributing and sharing as well and that became this wonderful community of do it yourselfers that has grown tremendously over the last 10 years and has been fabulous.

Of course I’ve got DIY Bride in front of me, the magazine, so I definitely want to ask you some questions about it. In the introduction, you ask the question, “Is the savings worth the effort?” How important is it to try to answer that question before tackling a new project?

It’s very important to get that answer before you start. Most couples, about 60%, go over their allotted wedding budget. Even do it yourselfers on a tight budget tend to go over their budgets because they don’t look at all the elements that go into making a do it yourself project and they find themselves going over budget and getting in trouble. It’s very stressful to start out a wedding or a marriage with going into debt. That’s why I ask our brides and grooms to look at their finances and look at the projects from a financial aspect before committing to making it.

I understand that, limiting your budget or staying within budget but on the flip side, what about a project that might be overwhelming? Don’t people need to consider, “What is my time worth?”

Absolutely, absolutely, and often times a project may be within the couples’ budget or financial comfort zone but it will take a long time, several hours, that the couple doesn’t have. Again, that causes problems too because they get overwhelmed and that adds stress to an already stressful period in their life when they’re trying to plan a wedding and work and go to school and all the other things that happen during the engagement process. So taking a look at time commitment as well as financial commitment is of the utmost importance.

Continuing on DIY Bride magazine, a couple things immediately stand out as I’ve got to spend some time with the issue, the lack of ads and the focus on your original content, and then just a beautiful, tasteful, colorful layout. Were you pleased with the finished product?

I was delighted with the final layout. I do think it’s beautiful and my publishers did an incredible job with it.

The illustrations that accompany many of the projects, did you have a hand or direction in any of these?

A little bit, indirectly. When I submitted my project to my publisher, I include scrap art which are little doodles that I do during the creation process and then they send them those to an illustrator who translate what I’m trying to convey because I’m not a very good illustrator. The person that they had for these projects was just really incredible.

Yep. The drawings or doodles, how do those come about? Why do you do those first as you’re thinking about a new project?

It helps me plan out, map out the steps when I’m creating a project, and also, people are just very visual animals so for them to see a particularly difficult step perhaps, or something that may not be clear in just written words, to have a visual reference to what they’re doing is so helpful so it’s really important for me and also important to our readers to have that kind of reference.

So it sounds like it’s really because you’re a writer and you’re sharing your creativity that you’re already planning on how you’re going to share, so you want to illustrate.

That’s correct, right.

Now I’m on the web site, DIY Bride and just scrolling through and it looks like it might have changed recently. There are a ton of cool features here. Immediately I see questions about the “Book-A-Zine” and you say, “Hi all, My mailbox has been flooded…” and then I notice that you’re probably going to take those questions and answer some of them. Do you want to talk to me about the look of the web site and maybe that feedback feature and anything else that you’re excited about on the site?

Sure, sure, we just re-launched the web site. We moved from just a straight blog to a more dynamic site. The new site gives us the opportunity to expand on what we really wanted to do with DIY Bride all along. We’ve created our own social network. We’ve added forums and we’ll be adding online classrooms this summer. So beyond just presenting our content in a blog format, we can expand and better connect our readers with one another and better connect ourselves with our readers so we can have more of a dialog and help them create the projects for their wedding that they want to do.

Any specific new sections or active sections that you want to just mention to people in an effort to get them interested and invite them over to DIYBride.com?

We’re really starting to pick up our projects area so we’ll be adding more and more projects every week. That’s been kind of on the backburner while I was gone to write my next book so we’ll be picking that up again soon and we’re really excited about all of the new projects that are coming online in the coming weeks.

Back to the magazine, I notice you choose Microsoft Word for card layout. Why this program?

Most people have access to Microsoft Word either at home or at school or their office, so in creating projects I have to be very mindful of what our readers have access to. Since Microsoft Office is pretty ubiquitous in the word processing world, it seems like a natural thing to gravitate to for our readers.

And that’s exactly why LCI presents our free downloadable templates for all the invitations in Word, so that’s interesting. I wanted to get your take on that. Designers will sometimes immediately ask, “Why Word? Why not a true design program?” I think there’s the answer right there.

Right, for designers, Illustrator and other high end graphics programs are appropriate for them because they have different considerations they need to take into account, but for the average user, for the average crafter, Microsoft Word is excellent.

We assume here that designers are advanced enough to create their own templates.

That is true.

Will there be another DIY Bride magazine?

There will be. There’s another one coming out in January of next year.

Yes!

It will be very much in the same format as the last one. It will be on stands only for 3 months as was the first one. It’s a limited edition, limited time only thing. It will be featuring a lot of projects from my second book which came out last January.

What’s the name of your second book?

The DIY Bride Crafty Countdown

Okay. What other projects are you working on? You mentioned the second edition of DIY Bride magazine.

We have that coming out next January. I have another book that’s coming out in January as well. That is called An Affair to Remember and it’s another general wedding crafts book as the previous books have been. We’re really excited about that. It’s going to be a lot of fun. This summer we’re launching a digital version of DIY Bride magazine and that will be formatted differently. It will be more of a traditional magazine format and we’re really excited about that as well.

What devices might people use to view that?

The digital magazine will be available for viewing via web browsers and digital reading devices like the iPhone, iPad and other smart phones.

Great. With so much going on, do you mind if I ask… Is this a one person operation or is there a team involved?

It is mostly one person. I do most everything right now, but I’m expanding. I have volunteers and I’ve just hired a couple people to help out with some things for the summer like advertising sales and some editorial pieces. I’m really excited to be expanding. It’s an exciting time for DIY Bride because we’re now able to achieve our goals of reaching more people and having a staff behind me to help me do that is a real joy right now.

With the economy, I think it kind of lifts your spirits when you hear someone saying, “We’re expanding.” So I’m glad to hear that. I’m sure other people are glad to hear that as well.

Thank you, thank you, yeah. One of my goals is to put people to work if I can, and to be able to do that this year, especially in this economy, is something that’s very close to my heart and I’m very happy to do it.

If people want to follow your work, is there a way they can do so on the internet?

Yes, they can find us at diybride.com and they can also find us on Twitter at @diybride and at Facebook, facebook.com/diybride.

–

Thanks to the DIY Bride Khris Cochran for participating in this special interview for the LCI Paper Podcast. We hope to have Khris back on the show when her new book and magazine are released. To make sure you don’t miss this or anything like it, follow LCI Paper on Twitter and follow LCI Paper on Facebook. Thanks for listening!

Need a way to conveniently address your wedding envelopes that you purchased from LCI Paper or elsewhere? The Elegant Envelope’s President Jud Ashman would like to offer you an alternative to home printing or hand addressing your envelopes. His Maryland-based company can address your envelopes for you, with quick turnaround time. You just need to provide your guest list and of course the envelopes. So if you’re stressed out at the idea of printing or hand addressing your envelopes, consider purchasing them from LCI Paper and then using the Elegant Envelope’s addressing service that you’ll hear about in our interview.

Click the following link to listen now, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #41 – Jud Ashman of the Elegant Envelope

Here is a transcript of the interview:

In the early days of the Elegant Envelope, a milestone project must have been the calligraphy addressing of the special invitations for President Clinton’s inaugural ceremony. Were you with the company at that time and if so, can you tell me about that?

I wasn’t actually here yet, at the time of the Clinton inauguration, but I’ve heard the story many times. The Elegant Envelope had just been established and Shari, who is the founder of our company, was fairly new in town. Right after the election, Shari did a little research and found the name of a key person on President-elect Clinton’s transition team. She put together a bunch of samples of our work and couriered them over. It was a great idea. A couple days later, the Clinton folks were on the phone and we had our first job. It was a huge project for us. We addressed somewhere around 40,000 envelopes in all, but we did it and everyone was very happy with the result. What ended up happening from there was the business section of the Washington Post did a story on us and it was a huge help in sort of putting us on the map.

Was this handwritten calligraphy, or had you already kind of…

Actually, all of our calligraphy is computerized. It looks like it was done by hand, but it’s all computerized—that sort of high quality inkjet system.

How do you position the type of printing that you do on envelopes?

It’s the next best thing to handwork. It’s better than handwork in certain ways. We can get jobs out faster and more accurately. And obviously we can do higher quantities. It looks very close to handwork. We can do different colors. We can arrange addresses so that it looks as if it was arranged in a more natural way. And we can do more formal calligraphy styles too, or business styles. But the calligraphy and handwritten stuff looks very much like it was done by hand.

You know, I’m thinking about our customers who order envelopes and they’re thinking about 100, 200, 300 invitations. Addressing those wedding envelopes can be perceived as time consuming, even a daunting task for certain people. How would you approach someone that might be anxious about the process? How would you make them feel comfortable about handing the job over to the Elegant Envelope?

Well first of all, we totally understand every part of planning a wedding can be high stress. I know, I’ve been through it. We try to make it as simple as possible, and really, it only takes us a day or two to get a job done. What I tell our clients is,

Just send us your envelopes, email the guest list, and pick out which font you’d like us to use. We’re glad to advise on how to set up your list and help choose fonts and we certainly have a ton of experience with it.

I mean, I’m telling you we’ve dealt with some of the world’s pickiest brides and their mothers and everyone walks out of here happy.

Give me a bit of general information on your envelope addressing service. What kinds of options do you offer?

So, all of our addressing, as I mentioned, is computerized, but depending on the font choice, it can look very much as if it was done by hand or by a calligrapher or that sort of standard business look. We have hundreds of fonts and about 15 or so different ink colors to choose from so our clients can really tailor their envelopes to look exactly the way they want to. It’s a pretty efficient system which is great because we can do the small jobs and the big ones from weddings to the huge things. I always like to say anywhere from 50 to 50,000.

Do you ever run into someone that has a font on their system that you might not have?

Yes. Our system can work with any TrueType font. We’ve found some conversion tools too, so if you have a font that’s not in TrueType format, we may very well be able to convert it into a format we can use. There have been many cases where clients have come to us with fonts that we don’t have and they can send them over and we can make it work.

Do you print on metallic finish envelopes like the Stardream brand?

We do! We print on Stardream envelopes and some other metallic finish envelopes but we have, I have to admit, run into cases in which the finish will just not allow ink to adhere. So if a client has stock that’s going to be glossy or metallic, it’s always safest to let us test a couple first. We’re certainly happy to do that. But when it comes to textured stock or thick stock or lined envelopes, we almost never have trouble. We’re almost always good.

Besides envelope addressing, what other services do you offer and who might use those services?

So we do graphic design, print and copy work. We do mailing services, and by that I mean the stuffing, sealing, stamping, mailing. We manage some of our clients’ databases. For event planners, we can help with place cards and name tags for events, and we can do certificates. Our clients, the people we help out, are mostly fund raisers who use us for sort of high dollar solicitation work or their big gala invitations. We’re working with event planners who are also using us for invitations. And then there’s the smaller jobs, the wedding, Bar Mitzvah, social event type work.

How long have you been with The Elegant Envelope and how has your role changed over the years?

I’ve been here since 1995, so just about 16 years. I came in as an assistant manager and a few years later I bought the company, so my role has broadened quite considerably.

You’re located in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Did I pronounce that correctly?

Yes, you did. Where are you guys by the way?

We’re in Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Oh okay.

In between Boston and Worcester.

I knew about you guys because some of my clients have used you over the years. That’s how I found out about your company.

Good. Are most of your customers local to the Maryland or D.C. area?

Most of them are in the D.C. area, so Maryland, D.C., Northern Virginia, are where most are. But we’ve had a lot of out of town, a lot of out of the area work I should say, over the years and there’s really no reason why we can’t work very effectively with people anywhere in the country. It’s just very easy to FedEx things and e-mail files back and forth. And so there’s no reason why someone in California, and people in California have used us; there’s no reason why someone anywhere shouldn’t use us.

Okay and they can find you at ElegantEnvelope.com.

Correct.

How close are you to the day to day operations in that can you ever get feedback from a bride to be or a groom to be, for example, that has just received the work you’ve done and are just ecstatic and elated? Do you ever get that kind of feedback?

All the time! This is a small company. We have three people here including myself and we get a lot done. It’s a very efficient operation and I am in touch personally with all of our clients. One of the reasons why a small business like ours can stay in business for this long is a commitment to a high level of service you might not get from bigger places, and I think we’ve been very successful that way. So yes, I try to follow up with all of our wedding clients and make sure, just like everyone else, make sure everyone’s happy.

So how do you feel when you do get that double thumbs up?

It’s what keeps me going! I don’t think anybody grows up saying they want to address envelopes for a living. You sort of come about that. But what it’s really about is making people happy and serving clients and helping them out when they’re in a jam. That’s what it’s about.

Alright, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks Josh.

Thanks again to Jud Ashman of the Elegant Envelope for taking time to tell us about his company and the opportunity it may present our customers that are shopping for envelopes. If having the Elegant Envelope address envelopes purchased from LCI Paper is an avenue you’d like to consider, give us a call or post a comment so we can help.

Sandie in Connecticut returns to the blog to present her Christmas card from the past season. It’s a layered, three dimensional card centered around a wreath that symbolizes a warm circle of family and friends. We last spoke to Sandie over the summer when she submitted her wedding invitation design that we ended up selecting for our Share Your Creativity program. She was awarded a $25 coupon for her participation.

Sandie never stops creating, so she’s back to share how she made her latest creation. Here’s our interview:

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #40 – Sandie’s Three Dimensional Layered Christmas Card

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Last summer, we featured a wedding invitation ensemble that you designed for a friend. I was glad that someone commented on the blog article, saying that you had designed birth announcements for all three of her children. How busy are you designing invitations and announcements, I guess aside from your family cards?

I don’t do too many because I end up designing something that’s very labor intensive. (laughter) But I try to stay in with the latest papers that are out there and the ideas. I’m always toying with something so there’s always a project to work on.

How do you do that? How do you stay up on the latest?

I usually visit a lot of the stores and check a lot of the sites online and try and figure out how people are creating certain looks and adhering certain pieces to their cards because I like a card that’s really three dimensional. So I’m always looking for new ideas.

And then you come home and make them for a lot less money than what you see out?

I don’t know what it would cost to do it out, but I have a lot of stock and a lot of the products in my studio so it is a lot cheaper here. It is just labor.

Yeah, sure. Thank you for sharing your incredible 3 dimensional 2010 family Christmas card. And that’s what we’re talking about today. All five of us in the office were impressed and we have our guesses about how you made the cover flap and the unique, round, 3D window that showcases the metal wreath. Since everyone that listens to this interview will probably want all the juicy details… And of course, they’ll need to look at the photos that are on our blog at lcipaper.com/blog. But can we begin by talking about all the paper stocks other materials that you used for the invitation?

Well sure!

Let’s start with the front flap. It looks to be constructed from two layers of Stardream metallic paper, perhaps Silver and Mars colors. Is that right?

That’s correct!

Okay. And there’s a beautiful pattern. Do you want to describe the embossed pattern on the Stardream Silver?

It’s a tree branch and it’s got full leaves at the ends of them, with the actual tree branch to the lower left. It is an embossing template that I used with my Cuttlebug.

Can you remind people what a Cuttlebug is? A lot of creative people like you it seems are using them. It might be nice to kind of spread the love about this machine to other crafty people.

There’s a lot of other products that are on the market. There’s the Sizzix. There’s a couple other name brands. But a Cuttlebug is a small unit. It sits right on your desk and it acts as a tool die or an embosser. It presses your paper together and when you use a template, it impresses the actual template into your paper. It works really well with card stocks and papers. And then you can also use a die to actually cut the paper or the card stock. I like to use it a lot for the embossing for the three dimensional effect. And you can buy it over the counter. It’s under $100.

That adds another dimension to your invitations. Tell me about the circular cutout in the middle of the card, and the printed layer underneath.

Well, I used a large punch. I want to say it’s over 3” punch or 2 ½” punch for the cutout and then I set the cutout aside, that I released from the paper. And then I adhered the vellum that has the saying on it underneath the cutout. And then I placed the punched out portion back behind the vellum. So what you’re seeing is the nice card stock with the embossed feature, then the vellum, then you can faintly see the remainder of the pattern behind it. By placing the punched out piece behind, you line it up exactly where you punched it out and you continue the image.

Yeah, by reusing that round cutout, your branches, your leaves, everything that was embossed is perfectly lined up. What a great idea.

It has that nice vellum tone though because of the vellum paper.

Yeah, it makes that circular area frosted, a frosted look.

Right.

Nice. You attached the front flap with, it looks like 3/4 inch round cutouts, two of them. How did you adhere them to the flap and base section of your invitation? Because the cover is holding strong.

Sure. What I did was I created the card in two sections. I have the front card section which has those two buttons that adhere to its back flap. And then I also created the back box that includes the wreath.

So basically I designed the card first. It has two flaps that I would set down on the desk in front of me and I would place them just about a 16th or 8th of an inch apart. And I would adhere the cutouts that would act as hinges. I used regular Elmer’s Glue because that seems to work very well with card stock and I would let that dry. When you fold it, it’s a nice bond. It keeps the card intact.

When I was finished with the top piece and the bottom piece, I used my ATG Gun which is a very thin, double sided tape to adhere the card actually to the back box.

So that’s really how I created this piece, in two sections. The front section was designed as a card that had a large hole in it and in the back section is a piece of foam core with a cutout so that the wreath could set down. When the top pieces adhere to the bottom, it looks like a complete package.

You cut out the same size circle in the center of the foam core that you just mentioned?

Actually, I cut out a larger, square shape. The shape and size doesn’t really matter because you’re hiding it with the velvet. The velvet piece is on top of your cutout foam core and then your wreath is in the middle. And then I wrapped the back box with the gray paper. The gray paper is actually a backer for the portion that’s underneath the wreath. You can’t really see that. I needed something that was a little sturdy, so the gray paper is a tough card stock. That actually supports the back of it. And then the top portion–the card itself–is adhered to the top and it actually seals anything else out of site. In other words, you don’t get to see the edges of the velvet. You don’t get to see the edges of the dark gray card stock because everything is concealed with the top card.

You sure want to reach your finger in and touch that velvet though, don’t you?

(laughter) You do. You do. It gives it a nice rich feel, a nice rich look.

Printing on Stardream card stock wasn’t a problem for you?

It’s not, as long as you give adequate drying time. This time, actually, I had better luck. It wasn’t that long, I would say about overnight, and I had no problem with that one. And I did the envelopes the same as well.

The glittery, frosty compound or whatever it is that’s bordering the circle… What is that?

I have a glue called 3-in-One Advanced Craft Glue. It’s by Beacon’s. I ran it around the inside of the circle with my finger and then I sprinkled on some Tinsel Glitter. It’s a Martha Steward Craft that’s carried in some of the craft stores. And I let that dry. The 3-in-1 glue is a wonderful, quick-dry glue and it dries clear so it gives it that look of the glitter around. It kind of adds a little bit of sparkle to the inside of the card.

Yeah it does. It looks wintery. (laughter)

Where did you purchase the metal wreath that’s the centerpiece?

The metal wreath is actually something that I started with. It’s a piece of jewelry. It was in the jewelry section of a craft store and you could buy 4 of them in a package. I believe you can use it for necklaces and bracelets and such. I just thought that it was wonderful and I wanted to work it into a card, somehow. I wasn’t quite sure. My only big problem with it was that it is thick and I needed, somehow, to be able to close a card and not have it be defaced if it was mailed, because that often happens. So I needed to be able to sink it into a card. And that’s why I had to go with a piece of foam core. By cutting the piece of foam core out, I was able to put a piece of velvet down and the wreath actually sits back from the front of the card. So it’s just a jewelry piece that I found.

And what about the bow that’s attached to the lower portion of the wreath.

The bow is a pre-made bow. It actually is part of a ribbon. I found a ribbon that had a bow this small and I actually bought a couple rolls of that and cut the little bows off it and glued them on with the same glue.

I don’t think I asked you what the card stock is that actually makes up the box.

The dark gray is some overstock that I had so I can’t actually identify it. But it covers just a piece of normal, I want to say 3/16ths foam core board.

Any other special tools that you used to made the card that might be worth mentioning?

The punch-out and my normal cutting board—my paper cutter—and the glues and a lot of X-Acto blades. (laughter)

How do you feel about the card? Where does it rate with your others? You’ve allowed me to see some of your previous holiday cards. And then tell me about the reaction that your loved ones have to the card.

I received a few e-mails that people had said that this was their favorite and they weren’t sure how I was going to outdo my last year’s card. But after doing so many of them, I get really tired of it fast so it loses its appeal. This was all about a warm circle of family and friends. The wreath symbolizes that. When it all finally comes together then I’m really excited about it and it gets me through putting together 140 of them. (laughter)

I don’t know that I would say it’s one of my favorites. They’re always a little different but everybody has their own taste.

Are you taking on clients? Would you be open to that? Are you doing it on a small scale, and if so, do you want to give some contact info?

Sure, I can leave my e-mail address, sandieinparis at yahoo dot com. I do a little bit of work on the side. I’m trying now to branch into doing more production cards and to see if I have an outlet for that. I’ve been looking at some other avenues as well. But my full time job keeps me busy too.

Thank you very much Sandie.

Well thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

–

Thanks to Sandie for taking the time to talk to us about her Christmas card. What do you think? Post your comments right here.

Mary in New York state ordered a card sample so she could test it in her printer. She wanted to make sure she could print her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah cards from home.

As she was printing the card sample on her HP All-in-One printer model C309, she ran into trouble and called HP’s tech support. We were surprised to hear that they told Mary that not only would this printer not accept a 6 1/4 x 6 1/4 square card, but no HP printer can print non-standard card sizes. Maybe something was lost in translation, because we know, that simply isn’t true. HP printers can indeed accept non-standard paper sizes. The user simply needs to enter a custom document size within the print driver.

But Mary’s story ends well. LCI Paper’s Josh Birch was able to walk her through the process over the telephone and the card printed perfectly, giving Mary the confidence that she could now place her full order and print her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah invitations with her HP printer. We’ll let Mary tell you about her experience in her own words.

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #38 – Printing Odd Size Cards in an HP Printer

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Hello?

Hi, Mary?

Yes.

This is Kristen from LCI Paper.

Hi. Thank you for giving me a call back.

So Josh tells me you had a good customer service experience you wanted to talk about?

Yes, I very much did. I can tell you basically what happened. I called and ordered a sample of the Pochette Invitation Kit that you have which is the 6 1/4 x 6 1/4 square invitation. I started working on it today trying to get it so I could print it out and was having nothing but problems trying to get it to print out on my printer. So I contacted HP trying to get some technical support from them because I thought it was a printer error. How could they help me set up the printer so the printer would accept it? I literally spent 53 minutes on the phone with them on hold, waiting for them to figure it out. The first time and was disconnected. Then I called them back and spent another 46 minutes, and I refused to be put on hold again and I went through 2 tech support people. Both of them told me that #1, my year old printer would not accept an odd-shaped piece of paper. It would only take a legal or letter sized piece of paper. And #2, then I said,

Okay, I’ll go buy a brand new HP printer. I want to do these invitations. What type of HP printer can you tell me to get?

And they were like

Oh, there are no HP printers.

Another 46 minutes down the drain where they just couldn’t help me at all. And I have to tell you, my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah is basically 3 months away and today is the day I was going to be working on her invitations. So I’ve been spending most of the morning working on this and it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon now. So you can tell I was getting a little frustrated.

One last thing I thought I could do was just contact your company and say

Is there something else I can do? Can you recommend a printer I could buy?

I was grabbing at straws. I called and got Linda on the phone and she said, Well let me have you talk with Josh. I swear to you, within 5 to 10 minutes, he had me walking through my program… I am not that computer literate. I really am not. I’m a 50 year old woman and I’m not that computer literate. And he had me walking through it, figuring out how my printer could accept the invitation. He had it all figured out and HP couldn’t do the same thing. I mean it was just awesome. It was awesome that he did that immediately, and I’m not a computer person! He was so patient and he was like, Okay, well let’s try this. And he didn’t make me feel frustrated like HP, feeling like I’m going to go through the roof. And he was so cool to talk to.

Well good! I’m glad you were able to get your cards printed. How did they look?

They looked fantastic. I did a sample right when he was on the phone with me. I printed it out. So now all I have to do is order the full complement of cards and they’ll be printed. Because I had just ordered the samples cards from you to make sure my printer could do it. And now I know I can do it so I’m good!

Very good. Now you can print anything, right? (laughter)

Yes, yes! Oh, like I say, it was a godsend.

Good. That’s really what we aim to do, help people print at home and Josh is excellent. He’s very patient, like you said, and very computer savvy. He can just walk anyone through anything.

It was amazing. It was amazing. So I thank you. I thank him. That is huge right there. Anybody who asks me anything about printing cards, your company will be recommended, period, hands down.

Going from such extreme frustration… I was really upset. It was like, “There goes my whole idea of my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. Everything was kind of centered around the colors that I had picked out, the card I had picked out, everything, and it was just going down the toilet and he resurrected it all. I’m serious. This was huge! (laughter)

That’s quite a turnaround! (laughter)

You know, a lot was resting on his shoulders and he didn’t even know it. (laughter)

Well great! Thank you so much for your kind words.

Thank you. Thank you very much. It was great. My whole afternoon was made. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Have a good day, and have fun at your Bat Mitzvah.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Bye bye.

Okay, bye.

–

If you enjoy hearing from LCI Paper customers in their own words, then subscribe to our podcast. Find it by searching LCI Paper in the iTunes music store. Of course if you have your own printing questions, we’d be glad to help. Just get in touch!

The following audio interview marks our 37th podcast episode, a series where we interview our creative customers, invitation designers, and luminaries within the paper, wedding, and invitation industries. Today, you’re going to hear from Amy about her new invitation blog, InvitationsDIY. Amy is a Chicago based designer that is currently featuring some innovative Bar & Bat Mitzvah designs that we’ll talk about now:

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #37 – Amy from InvitationsDIY

Here is a transcript of the interview:

A number of years ago, you left your sales job and opened a custom invitation company. Tell me about that transition and what motivated you. The decision to leave your job must not have been one that’s easy to make.

Actually, the decision wasn’t as hard as you’d think. About a month before I quit my job, a close friend of mine, Shweta, and I discussed the possibilities if we were to leave our corporate jobs and start a business together. My friend was in the finance industry and I was in the internet marketing industry but I was a graphic designer back in college so I’ve always been creative throughout my life. We were both somewhat unfulfilled career-wise so we both took a leap of faith, quit our jobs and started a custom invitation and accessory company called Shwamy Creations.

A combination of your two names…

Correct.

Alright. When was that?

We started it back in 2002. Although Shwamy Creations is no longer around, I am currently working on some freelance projects on my own. I don’t necessarily have one area that I specialize in, but I seem to be getting a lot of people contacting me about Bar and Bat Mitzvah invitations.

This fall, you started your new web site, InvitationsDIY which is a great domain by the way. Was your sister’s work at the Mitzvah Market site an inspiration?

The reason why I created invitationsDIY.com is because due to the economy, I thought my modern approach and my 8 years of experience in creating and manufacturing custom invitations would really help the typical DIY person. I’ve actually been working with my sister from the inception of MitzvahMarket.com. I’ve acted as a consultant for the past 2 years and I help with the different aspects of MitzvahMarket.com from the design of the web site to e-mail marketing to creating graphics for the site.

So switching focus back to InvitationsDIY.com, let’s get into some of the specific invitations on your site which are really beautiful and creative, by the way, if I haven’t told you that already.

Thank you.

Yeah. And let’s start with the Bat Mitzvah invitations that you made from scratch for your niece. People can follow along by pulling up the post on InvitationsDIY.com titled Carly’s Bat Mitzvah Invitation, OY! on your site. Am I pronouncing that right?

Yes you are.

Oh ok.

Good job.

Knowing that the invited guests were aware of your reputation as an invitation designer, you decided to go all out, in my estimation, creating your own custom pocket fold, complete with a suede finish, crystal embellishments, and metallic paper. Give me an overview and then take me through the more unique parts of the project.

Well, creating an invitation for family is probably one of the hardest things to do next to designing for yourself, especially a 13 year old girl. So since I live in Chicago and my niece lives in New York, there were many, many conversations discussing the look and feel of her Bat Mitzvah and it always ended up with my niece saying that she didn’t know, she didn’t know and she didn’t know. So I ended up sending a few pictures of designs that I’ve created and still there was really no reaction or feedback from my niece or my sister. So one day out of frustration I went to my local Jo-Ann’s craft store to find some inspiration and within 10 minutes I found a simple border art punch. And as soon as I saw the random circles, I knew I had my design. The rest of the creation really fell into place since I have most of the leftover paper from my business in my home. I can honestly say that every cut, score, fold, printing, and assembly was done within the confines of my home and my own two hands. And the most unique part of the invitation was the embellishment of 9 different sized pink and silver Swarovski crystals on the front of the invitation. It was a bit of the unexpected element when the recipient opened the envelope. This was really the part that made the invitation stand out from the 90 plus invitations that my niece received last year alone.

Folks can really see this beautiful pink and gray suede silver and black invitation ensemble on the site and you even give dimensions about how you made these custom folding cards.

Correct.

They can really get some inspiration from this and maybe do something similar.

I kind of know that not many people would have the patience to do that type of invitation but you can definitely pull elements from the invitation and kind of do it on your own.

Have folks received their invitations and what has the reaction been, I guess most importantly, Carly and her parents’ reactions?

Well, Carly and my sister and her husband’s reaction were pretty overwhelmed when they saw the final creation. The event date was actually this past November 5th and my sister has received many, many compliments from her friends about the invitation, all the accessories I created for the event and a lot of the guests told my sister it was definitely one of their favorite invitations that they received.

Yeah, no doubt. So I’m a fan of Entourage. Tell me about the Entourage themed Bar Mitzvah invitations.

Well, even though we didn’t actually create the invitation for that event, it’s a perfect example of how someone can pick up some elements that were in the invitation and carry it throughout the accessories and their events. All we really had to work with was the color theme of black and white and just a very simple monogram. The Mitzvah planning mom had come up with the idea of HBO’s Entourage as the theme but really didn’t know how to creatively execute in the accessories. In my opinion, if you create a logo or brand your event in some way, everything else, all the different elements, will definitely fall into place and come together at the end. So the logo was seen on the table markers, the favor bags, and even the thank you notes had the Entourage logo.

Another idea that we had, since the kids generally spend most of their time on the dance floor versus sitting down for a full course meal, individual place cards are really not necessary for the kids. As their guests entered the venue, there was a large poster to show where the kids lounge was with all the kids’ names on the poster as well. These are just some typical ideas that any family can incorporate into their event.

Good tips.

Thank you.

Good tips for people out there. Another one of my favorites, the Camp Ally Bat Mitzvah invitation, another totally unique design. Tell me about how you created an outdoor camp theme.

This design was relatively simple to come up with since the Mitzvah planning family definitely wanted to stick with a rustic style look to their event. As a child, I went to sleep away camp for over 6 years, so the design was kind of easy to come up with, especially in my head. So since time was not on my side at the time, I decided to opt for a pre-made custom pocket folder by actually your company, LCI Paper. It was exactly what I needed to complete the rustic, campy feel. The difficult part was for the family to come up with the 5 inserts of information that was needed. Since they were asking for their guests to spend a weekend away, it was really necessary to let their guests know what to bring for the weekend. Since it was early September, the weather was also a factor. So I guess the moral of the story is that you always have to be prepared.

Early September weather… What was the concern there? I had a late September wedding and luckily everything was great, but what were you thinking about for early September?

Well the problem was is that the camp was located in Pennsylvania. Generally in Pennsylvania at that time, the weather during the day is nice and then at night, the weather drops about 20, 30 degrees and that’s exactly what happened. So during the day, people were in shorts and t-shirts. The kids had activities all day, but at night time, all the guests had to wear some kind of coats. At night, they had a surprise fireworks display and they had s’mores by a campfire.

Awesome.

Yes.

Any other projects that you’ve featured on your site or otherwise that you’d like to talk about?

Well, actually, the one that I did want to talk about was the circle invitation. That was my most recent post dated December 8th and it was somewhat of an interesting project. This client knew that their theme was polka dots and wanted to work with the colors brown, aqua, and pink.

So they sent us a picture of 4 different size circles that they cut out of construction paper and gave us full creativity license to come up with obviously a prettier version invitation ensemble. Normally this wouldn’t be such a difficult invitation to execute but since the invitation was circular, you don’t really have a lot of room for verbiage, so what we had to do was do 3 additional circle inserts for the response card, reception card, and a double sided directions/hotel accommodations card or in other words, we had to cut out 1800 circles.

(laughter)

Yeah. So in the end, the family was overjoyed with the ensemble when they got to see it.

How did you cut out those circles?

Since we owned an invitation company, we had made a small investment in a custom die cutting machine by AccuCut. We purchased 4 different custom dies that had different circles, so we were able to cut out the circles with our die cutting system.

And again, folks can see the invitation that we’re talking about at InvitationsDIY.com and the post is entitled Circle Bat Mitzvah Invitation, so follow along there. Amy, before we finish today, is there anything else you’d like creative people at home to know or to take with them from this

Even though some of my invitations may be a little bit more time consuming or intricate, all I really want is for them to be inspired to try something new on their own so they can create their own invitation.

–

Thanks for reading our conversation with Amy about her creative invitations. If you’d like to offer her any feedback, post a comment. Both she and the LCI staff would like to read your comments and interact with you. If you enjoy these audio interviews, subscribe to the LCI Paper Podcast in the iTunes music store.

For 15 years, Becky Nunn has been creatively working with metals–mainly pewter–starting with a seal and wax line and expanding into gifts, desk accessories, and stationery embellishments. Her current focus is jewelry that you can see at her web site. You may want to have the Nunn Design site open on your screen while you listen to our discussion about her jewelry and the beautiful invitation embellishments that she supplies us.

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #36 – Becky Nunn Interview

Here is a transcript of the interview:

When were you first called to work with metals and how long ago was that?

I first started working with metals about 15 years ago when I had a company that dealt primarily in stationery products in the gift industry. And at that time we developed a line of seals and wax. That’s a technique where you melt hot wax down onto an envelope and then you press a metal design down into it. I started to work with pewter at that time mostly because it’s very cost effective to set up production runs that are very small quantities. They set up processes very inexpensive so you can do a lot of different varieties of design. We launched a seal and wax line at that time.

Then as we started to get more into manufacturing and pewter, we developed other products that went throughout the whole gift line including embellishments that went on top of the journals and photobooks and desk accessories such as letter openers and paper weights and such. So that’s my first calling for pewter.

Is that one of your favorite metals to work with?

I like pewter. I think I would like just about any type of metal, to be honest. It really comes down to what is affordable to work with. Right now, sterling and 24 carat gold is outrageously expensive and it’s just untouchable for my marketplace as far as being able to manufacture in it. Also, I’m constantly looking at where we can be competitive in the marketplace and compliance is a very big issue right now with import coming in from China. So I know that it’s a very strong area for us to be, from a marketing standpoint and a business standpoint.

I’m not sure I understand about compliance and the metals.

Well, compliance issues have really risen in the last couple of years due to a lot of imports coming in from other countries. Compliance issues make sure that the lead content and nickel content and cadmium content of the metals are of standards to keep it safe for consumers, children especially with the lead content of metals.

Ok. People can see your creations at NunnDesign.com. Your necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and rings I really found stunning. What inspires you to create a new design?

Well, first of all, I want to say that a lot of the reasons why you probably find the items stunning is because of the artisans that were using or use our product. The product line itself is pretty straightforward and we’ve really designed it to be a blank canvas to allow artisans’ work to speak. So it’s very simple. It’s very elegant. It’s very classic. And that leads into so many different types of artisans to be able to use including glass artists, fabric artists, polymer clay artists, people who do a lot with photography, painters—they can paint little miniatures to reproduce them and make pieces that are off of their own artwork. So although the line looks stunning, I really have to put the credit where credit’s due. It’s really on the end user who makes it that way.

Ok.

What was your question? (laughter)

What inspires you to create a new design?

The numbers. (laughter) I’m very clear that we run a business and I’m constantly analyzing the market to see where there is a need for products and then develop products and test them and watch them and get feedback. I have quite a focus group that I’m involved with of retailers that purchase our products, artisans that purchase our products. I’m just getting feedback on what’s working and what’s not working. When I know that we’ve gotten a product, the question I’m always looking to hear is, “When is it available?” They don’t ask me anything else. They don’t ask me, “Well how is this going to be done?” or “How much is this going to cost?” It’s “When is it going to be available?” And that’s when I know I’ve hit on something that is going to be a good seller for us, that the marketplace hasn’t been over-saturated in, and that it’s innovative. So I’d say that the things that really, really inspired me to design products is just really looking at the innovation that we can bring to the marketplace.

You told me in our pre-interview, if I can bring it to a more personal level, sometimes you dream about designs. And you wake up and you actually have a sketchbook and a journal. Can you tell me more about that?

Sure. There isn’t a time where my mind’s not working and I’m constantly thinking about things and my favorite thing to do is just spend hours and hours “uploading” is what I call it. I just put tons and tons of information into my brain. That might be by just looking at books and magazines. It might be surfing the web. I like to shop a lot. I’m not a consumer myself but I love to shop to look and I love to junk. I love to go to flea markets and antique stores. So I tend to upload a ton of information into my head and then it just kind of just sits in there. It kind of all just shuffles around and I patiently wait for the inspiration to come. Sometimes I’m not so patient, but it happens at all times. It happens in the middle of the night. It happens in the middle of giving my daughter a bath. It just happens, and that for me is the process of creativity which I have really embraced and know how creativity works in my own life and in my own brain and in my own soul.

I’m constantly creating and so I carry around just a little notepad and I’m constantly pulling it out and I have several different notepads for different reasons. There’s little inexpensive things that you can buy, 99 cents for a simple little notepad. It doesn’t have to be any particular type. I write down and sketch and draw and record and just kind of compile all of my ideas. I take those journals pretty seriously. I go through them a couple times a year and really look for common threads, my own personal challenges that I want more support on maybe, or if it’s just ideas that I’ve come up with, I wait until I see them come up several times and then I gather all that data. I’m very analytical as you can tell as well as creative. That’s what the inspiration is around the products.

Cool. And you also told me you’re not opposed to approaching a random stranger who might have on something particularly unique.

Constantly. I’m just very, very into, right now, jewelry, and if I’m walking down an aisle to the airplane and something catches my eye and the airline stewardess is coming by and I’m often asking, “Can I see that?” People really like to show their treasures or things that have meaning to them. They’ve adorned their body with it so they’re typically attached to it or it has some sentimental meaning. I learn a ton about product lines, artisans’ works, from just total random places.

Let’s talk about the Metallic Brads that we carry. What inspired you to select the Daisy, the two different Moroccan Flowers, and the Snowflake?

Again, it’s really based off of what the marketplace needs and how a product can be crossed-merchandised or crossed-marketed. So for example, if you are specific in the sense that you have a flower, but it is elegant and classic enough that it can go across the board and be on a very elegant invitation, it could be on a very funky, fun, a loud, colorful… So I tend to design with all of these considerations in mind and select things that can be cross-merchandised also outside of just the invitation. It could go onto a party favor box. It could go onto a candle. It could go onto any kind of packaging. It could go onto a wedding album. So I myself am a very, very thrifty person and I like to buy things that I can use in many different places and so I tend to design, and as a business owner, select products around those criteria.

Gotcha. The metallic embellishments without posts like wedding rings, sand dollar, starfish, and the heart… Do you get a sense of how people are using these?

They use them in the same way. The whole beginning of our product line was really established when we went into the scrapbooking market. People were attaching the different types of embellishments and brads into their scrapbooking pages. And at that time, it wasn’t as urgent or as important that it be adhered with any particular type of medium. But as I started to move more into the stationery business and brought the same concept to adding embellishments to paper products to the New York Stationery Show, I knew that the items had to be in compliance with all kinds of postal regulations. They had to be able to be mailed through the mail. And so one of the glues that I really like to adhere my embellishments with is Bond 527 Cement. What I have found just in my years of testing that it has a very fine applicator tip that makes it easy to attach the small pieces to paper with the glue and it also is so incredibly strong that you literally have to rip it off of the paper and it will take the paper with it. So if you properly adhere it to the invitation, it will go through the postal mail and be adhered to packaging and you wouldn’t have to worry an item arriving at its final destination with somebody that you invited to your wedding and have all of the pieces fall apart. That would be just really embarrassing.

The products that we’re producing for LCI and the products that we produce in our Nunn Design product line are all products that we are manufacturing in the United States when it is possible. For example, the metal embellishments are brass. They’re stamped through several different processes and then they are plated and so all of those steps are done in the United States, the same with our jewelry components. All of the products are produced in the United States. When I say, “when it’s possible,” there’s a lot of manufacturing that unfortunately has been lost out of this country and is no longer cost effective for the United States for produce. So a lot of that manufacturing has died. For example, some of the pieces that we have involve glass. Glass has been prominently imported from other countries, even when US manufacturing was really strong, and so when we cannot produce in the United States in a cost-effective manner we do process outside of the United States.

How important is it for you and how important should it be to consumers to buy American manufactured products?

I think it’s important to buy products that are of good quality more so than it is that it’s a US made product. It just so happens that I feel that US made products are typically better quality so anyway… I for myself have found over the years that I’m wanting to purchase less and less of stuff but more and more of quality items that are meant to last. And I think that we are so price-conscious and we’re so driven by pricing that sometimes we don’t take into consideration that that item might not last for a long time and so for myself, it’s one of the reasons why I like to buy US made products. I like to buy items that are of very good quality. And personally, as I’ve learned more and more about manufacturing in the United States and I’ve gotten to build relationships, collaborative relationships with other manufacturers in the United States, I see how important it is for those relationships to stay in the United States. That money that we all are generating, I know the families that it feeds. I know the people that I’m supporting and for me, it’s not just about making a product, it’s about the collaborative relationships behind the product.

What is it like attending and vending at trade shows like the Craft & Hobby Association events and what kind of feedback do you get?

It’s very fun selling. I really, really enjoy selling. It’s also a lot of work setting up the booth, planning for the trade shows, booking it all out, making all of the arrangements, that’s hard work. But once the show lights come up and customers start coming in, it’s very exciting because we’re creative people and we’re creating creative products and we’re inspiring and nurturing other artisans to do work and we also are inspiring and nurturing shop owners and store owners and distributors. Education is a very big part of what we do.

It’s very fun to get feedback, see people get excited. People tend to really, really enjoy our products. They’re unique and we have a reputation in the marketplace of being very innovative. And so that part is really fun to know that we’ve done a lot of work and conceptually have come up with a lot of really interesting ideas and it’s nice to be validated.

My favorite story is in regards to last July. I was attending the Craft & Hobby Association in Rosemont, Illinois, outside of Chicago and I was a couple booths down visiting with another vendor and the vendor said, “Oh, are you from that booth over there?” And I said, “Yes, my company is Nunn Design” and I introduced myself. And he said, “Well, I have to tell you that your booth has been really packed and so I saw somebody leaving your booth and they came by mine and I said, ‘What do they do down there?’ and the woman turned around and looked and then she said, ‘Oh that’s Nunn Design. If you want quality, you go there.’” That felt pretty good.

It must have. Where and when is your next appearance where people can come out to meet you and see what Nunn design is up to?

(Laughter) Appearance… Well, we can be seen on the web at NunnDesign.com which you had mentioned. We have a wonderful gallery and a technique center that’s full of inspiration. We also have how to videos online that you can watch so that you can purchase the products and have great results.

Our next coming show season doesn’t start until the end of January. So I’ll be attending the Craft & Hobby Association (in Los Angeles) and then a couple shows in the Tuscon area that we’ll be attending. And then after that I will be teaching at a couple different venues. Then we do the Bead & Button show. It’s in Milwaukee and then the Craft & Hobby Association again in July.

You mentioned photographers, artists, scrapbookers… What other professionals, individuals, groups, do you see coming to Nunn Design and being interested in what you might have to offer?

I think that the products that we offer are designed so that they could attract somebody who is just interested. They’re curious. They’re interested. Maybe they didn’t have a lot of encouragement growing up that somebody was saying, “Oh you’re the creative one in the family.” But they’ve always had that yearning. They’d always had that feeling like, “I kind of feel a little jealous of so and so because they get to do those sorts of things.” Well, jealousy is a really good indicator that there’s something there that you want and there’s a need that you’re not fulfilling within yourself and I tend to really look at jealousy as a roadmap for me to identify for myself what it is that I want more of or need more of. It’s my little gage. “Oh, I’m jealous! Neat! I need to do that!”

So I feel that the line that we have developed is safe enough for that beginning person who might not have any experience whatsoever in crafts or any experience whatsoever in jewelry to be able to get started, have the support around them to get started, and then have great results. And then once they have great results they go out and show people and people give them encouragement. And so it gives them more and more permission to go on and on and on in their creative process. This is just a stepping stone. It appeals to people who might not have any experience and it appeals to people who have a lot of experience because they might be doing all kinds of creative things, but they haven’t necessarily turned it into a wearable art form. And that’s what the Patera line, which is Latin for “ornamental amulet” is all about, creating wearable art.

Becky, I thank you so much for your time today and I wish you all the success and please get in touch with me again. Well, I got in touch with you I guess…

(laughter)

But get in touch with me if there’s anything you’d like to announce. We’d love to talk to you again.

Thank you very much Josh, I appreciate your time.

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If you have any questions about Becky Nunn’s work, post a comment and we’ll make sure she sees it. Or if you’d like to share a creative piece where you’ve used the Decorative Metals Brads that we carry, tell us about it!

Click the following link to listen to the audio, or right click and “save as” to download the audio and listen at a later time.

LCI Paper Podcast #35 – Interview with Nicole Block of The Nic Studio

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Read the transcript of the interview below.

Nicole Block is an illustrator and custom invitation and stationery designer based in New York. You can see examples of Nicole’s beautiful designs at thenicstudio.com. After learning that Nicole recently created a unique promotional piece using Pop-Tone paper – a brand we very recently started carrying, I reached out to her to learn more. The very friendly Nicole was kind enough to take the time to discuss her design with me, and tell me a bit more about the perks of using Pop-Tone paper. Welcome to LCI’s podcast. My name is Kristen Desrosier, and my interview with Nicole starts now.

Nicole, please begin by telling me about Nic Studio. How did you get started?

I actually graduated college with a degree in illustration, but I made the move into design not long after, and I worked for a small publication for about four and a half years. I was their senior designer, and I art directed their magazine. All of a sudden one day the magazine was dissolved and the corporation decided to take their business in a different direction and let go of a third of us. I was married just four months before that, and I was doing some projects on the side for other brides and people that I knew. So about ten minutes after I was told that I was let go, I said, “ok then, I’ll start another business!” And literally – I don’t know if it was just the shock, and the, you know, the adrenaline; I don’t know what possessed me to say “oh that’s fine, I’ll just do something else!” – but the next day, I launched my Nic Events site, which was all my custom stationary, and it sort of just grew from there into the Nic Studio. So now I have everything that I do – all my paper products, and my illustration work, and my artwork, and everything – is under one roof.

Good for you! You definitely made a good decision!

Yeah! Yeah, I’m happy with my decision!

And what services do you offer?

I do stationery on all levels, custom – primarily wedding of course. But I do do corporate stationery, corporate and event invitations for that end of things. I also do illustrations, commissioned artwork; I do some illustrations like editorial illustrations and otherwise. I am also expanding as we speak into some more ready to order stuff. I have a small ready to order wedding invitation line right now, and I am expanding that and also expanding the offerings into note cards and printed posters.

Great. I was browsing through your site again this morning; and all of your work is beautiful by the way.

Thank you, thank you!

Alright, let’s talk about these notebooks you designed. They turned out great! Will you discuss the ideas behind the design?

Yeah, they’re actually supposed to be fake sketchbooks. They’re promo pieces that are getting mailed out to different publications and some different event planners than the ones that already know me. I mailed them out to mostly corporate and celebrity event planners. This is just the first round. There’s a lot more that have to go out. But basically, I was trying to come up with an interesting concept for a promo – one that would get me noticed and get my selling points across, while still delivering my spirit – which is – I’m very friendly, I’m very personal, and that’s how I like to run my business, and that’s how I like to communicate with my clients. So I wanted to showcase mostly my illustration skills and that was the idea behind the sketch book; so that they would receive a sketch book with my pieces in it as though that’s where they were originally drawn. When the recipient gets the sketch book, they are invited in to – participate with it – with a personalized handwritten note on the front and a little pencil, and as they enter in the sketch book, I sort of offer to help them with the sketch of their ideas and then it goes into my work. There’s even a few original illustrations from my process with a couple of the pieces that I’ve worked on. Eventually they get a little personalized note at the end about my business and me. Then, the rest of the sketchbook is about ten blank pages that they can use on their own, as the functioning sketchbook or notebook to sort of develop their own ideas.

Looking at the pictures you sent, I definitely got the personal vibe. I love the handwritten note. Now, did all the notes say the same thing?

No the notes on the front are pretty much all the same, they‘re all handwritten, to the recipient, and they say, you know, “what would your ideal invitation look like,” and then, “why don’t you sketch it out?” Then when they get inside, every sketchbook was different according to who was getting it. So, some people got different pieces in it; everybody got a different note on the inside that was customized to them, and either their publication or their business. No two are exactly alike, and they were all hand made, so that makes them even more unique – each one.

I assume the cover of these was card stock, and then the insert sheets; were those text weight, or were they all cover? I couldn’t really tell from the photo.

Yeah, um actually they were all cover, but they were the lightest cover stock weight that Pop-Tone came in, which was sixty-five pound, which was one of the things that actually first drew me to Pop-Tone – because they had a nice cover weight stock rather than the heaviest text, which would still not be as heavy.

And what did you use to print on them?

I printed them all out on my Epson R1900 printer, cut them all down myself.

What about the Nic Logo on the front?

That is stamped. (ok) And I have a stamp of my logo and I used white pigment ink for the stamp.

Besides the weight of the paper, what else drew you to use Pop-Tone for this project?

Well, I love French Paper, and I’ve used them quite a bit. Especially for my own personal projects, I tend to gravitate towards their paper. So I was investigating their paper first, really, to see if they had anything that I wanted to use for this project. You know I needed something that was white, but I wanted something that really felt like sketchbook paper, and it couldn’t have too much texture, and I didn’t want it to come off like newsprint either. So, so the Pop-Tone line had. . . the two whites that they had were great, and I just sort of had to choose between the Sweet Tooth and – what’s the other one , the Whipped Cream? – and then I investigated it; and actually by your response on Twitter, as well as a good friend of mine who is another designer and illustrator – he’s worked on it a number of times and gave me a whole run down and told me what the paper weight was like, and what the texture was like, and I just liked the idea that it was nice and smooth, that it didn’t have any real flecks in it, but that it printed really nicely; because I needed something that could deliver the color well. It’s not something you often get, unfortunately, when you’re printing at home, on uncoated stock. You know, that can be a little difficult to deliver color right. This friend of mine told me that it had great paper color delivery, and the nice smooth texture, and then I looked and I saw that it was sixty-five pound, and I said “Oh, we’re in; that’s the winner,” It was perfect. It delivered the right sketchbook feel. I really wanted it to feel like a high-end sketchbook.

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We’d like to thank Nicole for taking the time to discuss the Nic Studio and her awesome sketchbook design with us. What’s your experience with Pop-Tone Paper? Post a comment, and tell us about it. We’d love to hear from you!

Pop-Tone paper is now available in 15 vibrant colors. These candy sweet colors will make your creative project pop with flavor, and every sheet in the Pop-Tone line is manufactured with clean, renewable energy. In this episode of our podcast, we sit down with Brian French of French Paper Company. We’ll ask him about the Pop-Tone color palette and we’ll even get into some of the history of the mill at French Paper Company, a family business going on 140 years.

Click the following link to listen, or right click and “save as” to download and listen at another time:
LCI Paper Podcast #34 – French Paper Company Interview

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Brian, what is your current role with French Paper and how has it evolved?

You know, the best way I can really answer that question is to say, a little bit of everything. As a small, independent paper mill, we really have to take on multiple roles so I do whatever I can to play my part in that. My grandpa always says the best way to be a business man is to be well rounded, so what better way to do that than to have my hand in as many things as possible. I do anything from sweeping floors to web site support all the way up to traveling sales; so kind of a little bit of every single thing.

So three generations of French’s at the company currently?

Currently we have my grandfather who’s 86 years old and he’s here every day, my father who’s the president—Jerry French, and then myself.

What’s your grandfather’s name?

My grandfather’s name is Ed.

Can you give me some history on the mill and French Paper Company in general?

Yeah, definitely. There’s plenty of history around here. Next year will be our 140th year so we’ve been around for a long, long time. We’re in little Niles, Michigan in the southwest corner of the state. We’re currently on our sixth generation if you count me so we’ve been family-owned all the way through. A lot of people think we’re from France because of our name but we’re definitely American all the way.

We created the industry’s first non-animal imitation parchment in 1949; we pioneered recycled papers throughout the 50s; and we installed a hydroelectric generator in 1922. So we have been green before it was the cool thing to do or before people really asked for it.

Can you give me any more details on the generator that produces the electricity for the mill’s operation?

Yeah, definitely; like I said before, in 1922, it was actually my great grandfather [Frank French] who was running the company at the time. The mill is situated on a river, the St. Joseph River, here in Niles and what he did is built a dam and put in a hydroelectric generator to supply the electricity for the paper machine. As the years have gone by and demand grows with production, we’ve installed more generators. Now, we’re in our 88th year of hydroelectric production and we’re actually up to 4 generators now.

A lot of our competitors brag about buying energy credits from power companies and things like that. We actually do it right here on the site the old fashioned way. Not only is it environmentally responsible, but we find it pretty fiscally responsible as well for the company. It helps us keep our costs down and supply better, cheaper paper for our customers.

Believe it or not, when we’re not manufacturing paper, we sell our excess power back to the energy grid. So we support our community that way as well.

So the river is able to produce extra energy, wow.

Yeah, exactly right. It’s always going whether the paper machine is going or not, so the energy is coming out one way or another. We’re up to 4 generators now to make that happen but our paper machine in the mill itself actually runs entirely off those generators.

Gotcha. Now we’re talking about Pop-Tone today as well. When was the Pop-Tone line launched?

The official launch was in the summer or 2007 so it’s roughly 3 years old at this point.

		Banana Split
		Berrylicious
		Blu Raspberry
		Grape Jelly
		Grapesicle
		Gumdrop Green
		Hot Fudge
		Jellybean Green
		Lemon Drop
		Orange Fizz
		Pink Lemonade
		Razzle Berry
		Sour Apple
		Tangy Orange
		Wild Cherry

Our staff is excited about the new colors that Pop-Tone brings to our lineup at LCI. It really fills a void that we had here with some of these really more vibrant colors and I guess some could be described as pastel and then some are deeper. What was French Paper trying to achieve when selecting this color palette?

Actually, as with most of our paper grades, Pop-Tone was generated based off the needs of the design community. As we travel the country and meet with designers, we listen to what they are missing in their color palette. 3 years ago, we heard a lot of people saying, actually complaining, that most of the text and cover paper mills were discontinuing all their color lines and kind of migrating toward creating whites and ivories. We never want the design community to lack options in any way so we decided to make a new grade with as wide a color range as possible. That’s kind of what came from Pop-Tone. Once we got the colors picked out, they pretty much named themselves and the grade created itself. Still today, it’s one of the largest grades on the market as far as popular color choice.

We’ll continue talking about Pop-Tone a bit. I’ve never seen a paper manufacturer guarantee printing performance in home grade printers like laser and inkjet. Can you tell me more about that, as many of our customers print the papers we carry at home.

Yeah, definitely. As a small paper mill with a lot of history, we know our customers expect a lot from the sheets we create, no matter what the end use is going to be. Whether it’s a home user or a large commercial printer, they’re going to expect a lot from the printing on our sheets. And over the life of our mill, we have been able to develop a good sheet that’s successful across the full range of printing techniques. So we feel very comfortable about our sheet when it comes to that. However, with the difference in brands and models of printers, we do always suggest a test run before paper purchase. But our guarantee is limited to the replacement of the paper if it’s deemed defective by the mill. I can tell you in my two years of being at the mill; I cannot honestly remember a single negative result though. Very rarely do we stumble upon something like that.

What has the overall reaction been to Pop-Tone since the launch in 07?

It’s been absolutely fantastic! We’ve seen it used from everything from personal stationery to band posters all the way up to corporate annual reports; people have really taken kindly to it. We were worried when we first brought it out, because the colors were that popular style of color. We didn’t think a whole lot of large corporate companies would get into them. But what it’s come down to is a lot of companies can see a color in there that really matches their logo or type of branding they really like and it gives them a lot more options than they had prior. Since its release, the sales have shown double digit growth the entire time. As far as we can tell, they’re going to continue to do that. It’s been very, very popular.

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That wraps up our interview with Brian French of French Paper Company, the environmentally friendly manufacturer of Pop-Tone specialty papers. If you haven’t seen these new colors, see our selection of Pop-Tone paper card stock and text weight sheets.

To save the audio to your computer, right click and “save as.”

Here is a transcript of the interview:

I am here with Christen and Kevin and they are tying the knot later this year. They sent me a beautiful save the date card and I had never seen a save the date card like the one that you two shared with us and I have so many questions for you. First, how did you decide on the presentation of a decorative box to house the monogrammed napkin and the glider card? How did these three items come together-the box, the napkin, and the glider?

Christen: For me, it pretty much began with my gown purchase, which I never thought I’d say that, but I was very much inspired by Claire Pettibone. She is a designer out of the Beverly Hills area. She does beautiful work. She actually started as a lingerie designer and designed a friend’s wedding gown and her career just kind of took off. In seeing her line of gowns, she uses a lot of embroidery and just different, fresh types of details that I hadn’t seen before. Conceptually, that sparked a lot of the art direction that I’m bringing into our wedding. The save the date was actually the first piece that we produced for our wedding, so we wanted to really set a tone for the overall event. And a lot of our guests will be from out of town and are going through a lot of effort to be there on our special day, so we really wanted to do something unique, with a personality of its own and set the tone for a south Louisiana wedding.

Christen, are you the one from Louisiana?

I am. I am.

Ok. The French last name I guess fits as well.

That’s correct. (laughter)

Tell me about the creation of your monogrammed napkin. How did you choose the decorative mesh that wraps around it? Was that inspired by the gown you just spoke of?

Yes, actually the back of my gown… I shouldn’t probably say this in front of Kevin. (laughter) There’s an area on the gown where the organza type tool just sort of spills out and it’s a design detail that is fabulous and that inspired using that overlay mesh to give an extra layer to the hanky, basically so it wouldn’t be as plain per say. Everything she [Pettibone] does just really digs into detail and I really wanted to instill some of that in that piece to kind of pick up on some of the elements. The gown has, pretty much top to bottom, really delicate embroidery. That’s what encouraged me to find a local vendor here in Maine to work with on that. And so Kevin and I designed the KC logo for our wedding-that’s our branding-and went to speak to the vendor about it and he was all about it. He had never done hankies before so he was excited. And we got to choose our own colors which we matched the thread to the gown sample swatch that I had. And the mesh just kind of added a little bit of sparkle, right?

Kevin: Yeah.

Christen: …added a little bit of what it needed, little bit of something extra.

Yeah. Did the glider card happen to fit perfectly on the left flap of the box?

Actually the glider cards were about a half inch too long for that opening panel of the box. The boxes were purchased with the hankies. I knew that the hanky was going to be a good fit for that particular size package. That had all been speced out really early on. The glider card was sort of a secondary thought in terms of trying to figure out the presentation for that opening panel. When I came across LCI and found that particular type of card… I had been doing quite a bit of research and I hadn’t come across this anywhere else. So it immediately struck me and when I saw the size I said, “Oh well, this will be easy. You know, I’ll just have them trimmed of course.” Initially, I was going to do them all by hand if I had to, but again, a local vendor here was super excited that I brought the job to them to print the cards. They made sure that the cards would be a nice snug custom fit for the glider card-the backings . It worked really nice. We actually used a Mohawk sheet that Unisource had provided. The printer was all about recycling our paper samples which was good. So that was one less purchase which helped to save some budget and recycled paper I might not have otherwised used. And the glider card really set that paper stock off from the surface. The interior of the box is sort of a plain cardboard finish and the glider card has a nice, smooth, metallic sheen to it. And then the save the date card-the Mohawk stock-is more of a matte ivory cover stock.

I was assuming you used our glider insert card, but no. Ok.

We actually intentionally saved them because we’re going to reuse them as the table cards.

Oh really? You’re going to fold them?

Yeah, yeah. So we had plans for them and we thought we were going to use them for the save the dates, but then we realized it would probably be easier, since they’re already trimmed, to use them in that way. So they’ll be like little tent cards.

Ok. On your mailing label, you’ve thanked a number of people and companies. Would you care to mention each one and share why you thanked them? That’s kind of intriguing.

Oh sure, sure. Camden Printing is again a local vendor that I met through this project specifically. They run a digital press and I knew I wanted to stick with a one color black imprint. So they did a sample card for me on my sample sheets and all came out really well so I gave them the printing on that piece. They also did the labels for me. So they were a real pinch hitter with this project.

Unisource out of San Diego, California-the corporate office there, I worked with a lot on various creative projects when I was in San Diego just a few months back. And we lived there for about five years. They’ve always been a really great resource-creative resource-for me and I was happy to actually use some of the materials that they had provided for this project.

I’ve been in house-corporate in house-for quite a few years now, so I very rarely get to do these types of creative projects where, from start to finish, kind of like the sky’s the limit.

LCI of course, you guys. The glider card and that eighth inch black satin ribbon-those two little details, they made all the difference in this piece. Had I not found them, I don’t think I would have the same piece that I made. I think those were important details. LCI is a really creative company. I love the DIY aspect. Their marketing’s really good for what they produce and what they sell.

And Embroider This, who’s out of Massachusetts; that was also a new company for me. In researching the embroidery idea of which this was my first embroidery project, they really came though in terms of their pricing is really great. The quality is really great. They had a variety of handkerchiefs and other lace elements to choose from. We had a pretty good selection to choose from. They were great about samples and letting us see the product before we purchased.

And then Squeegees which is another local vendor that I met through this project; they actually encouraged me to push forward with the embroidered monogram. After showing them the artwork and the actual packaging and the handkerchief of course, they could really visualize it and see it working. They did a sample for me as well as a few test runs. And then we got the imprint positioned just where we wanted it and sized just like we wanted it. They were really easy to work with.

Pen Ventures is another local vendor here in Maine; a shop that sells rubber stamps and different types of scrapbooking materials. I went in for inspiration and came out definitely inspired. And that’s how I chose my Fleur-de-lis stamp that was used on the wrap on the exterior of the package.

Of course my mom, Sharon Bourgeois, who’s in Louisiana, helped us to fund this fantastic project and we’re very grateful. She’s excited that her only daughter is finally getting married.

And Gail Singer which is Kevin’s mom-she’s in New Jersey-was also a super huge help in this project. A little learning curve; we had to rip the backing… When they embroidered the handkerchief, there’s this white…

Kevin: Like a paper type backing…

Christen: Yeah, a paper type backing that we had to rip with our fingers which were very numb by the end of the weekend. But we finally got it all ripped off and out of the little tiny grooves that are between the embroidered imprint and got them cleaned up a bit-enough to at least send.

Cool, thank you. Kevin, do you mind if I put you on the hot seat for the next one?

Kevin: No, that’s not a problem at all.

If you were to describe the save the date ensemble in just few words, how would you describe it?

A few words is just my style.

Alright (laughter)

It’s simple, Southern elegance in and eight inch by eight inch package essentially.

I like that very much. Well done.

It’s really neat to see all the details kind of pulled together-the Southern style, the handkerchief and the lace details, and seeing Christen work so hard on all the design elements, bringing in the Fleur-de-lis and the stamps. And I’ve spent a couple hours late nights assembling the packaging…was just a lot of fun too, and there’s a lot of fun in the creative process of being able to spend time together and enjoy each other as well as being able to put something together that looks great.

Christen: Tell them you enjoyed cutting all the tulle; that was your favorite. (laughter)

Kevin: Oh and I loved… Yeah, I was magnificent at cutting all the tulle as well and let me tell you, that was just an adventure. I’m an engineer as my brain thinks about how exactly to cut and minimize waste, all that fun stuff as well.

Ah. It’s nice to hear you talk about doing something together and that’s really what do it yourself invitations are all about I think, is when you can spend time and make it fun for each other.

Yep, I completely agree. I mean it was just… The late nights, you know, working on it and having fun…

Christen: There were a lot of late nights. (laughter)

So if this is your save the date, what are you planning for the actual wedding invitation?

Ok, so a lot of our friends and family-our recipients in general, vendors included-thought that we went a little over the top with our save the date, but again, it was a tag team project. We really had this concept and we wanted to push it forward. For the invitation, what inspired the size was the save the date because I wanted to stay square.

Ok.

But I’m going to go smaller, minimizing it by three inches. We’re going to go to a five by five, approximately. The invitation card itself will have a piece of fabric. “Moda” is the brand name. “Fig” is the actual design and it’s a charm square–a fabric charm square. And Moda, the company, sells a variety of fabric charm squares and different types of designs and Fig was just sort of inspirational because it really had a vintage look. It had a lot of rose tones and greens and reminds you of spring. And our save the date was sort of monotone-Kevin and I were just talking about this-sort of monotone in color which was intentional. With the invitation, we wanted to just breathe a little more life into the design. In using a similar element to the handkerchief but without going the route of embroidery because that was an added expense, we decided to use the fabric swatches-these charm squares-that are already cut to the size we need so there’s less labor involved. The design-what’s cool about it is that no two are alike kind of thing so each invitation will essentially have a different design because it will be a different fabric swatch. Instead of them being per unit cost, they come in packs of almost fifty. That saves budget also. We’re going to use a backboard. It’s called “butter board” is a coin term for it-sort of a recycled paper backing that’s really soft to the touch, sort of ivory in tone. And we’re going to put wax paper behind our fabric charms and iron them onto the backboard. So it will be about an eighth inch thick. And then we’re going to use the same Mohawk sheet-the ivory cover stock that we used-with a one color black imprint like we used for the save the date, a typeset in a very similar manner, and affix the card to the backing. So that will be the main invitation piece and then we’ll also add in a response card and map directions. And those smaller pieces will be in the little five by five packet as well.

Please just tell me that your wedding is going to be full of so much personalization as your invitations.

(laughter)

I hope!

I hope so too. It’s going to be a very simple wedding. I mean creatively, I know we’re going though a lot of process so like Kevin says, this is what we enjoy doing out of all the details. It’s in south Louisiana. It’s in a garden. It’s informal but yet formal and everything’s in one place. It’s at a small bed and breakfast-a three bedroom bed and breakfast-on a family estate in St. Francisville, Louisiana and everything is very vintage and heirloom and antique and old in style. We’re going to have our ceremony, a cocktail hour and then a dinner/reception afterwards, all in one house on the outer deck near a fountain overlooking a little pond. We’ll have a lot of opportunity to be personal, hopefully, with our guests.

Kevin: One example of us personalizing the event are the food choices. You know there’s a lot of southern flair from Christen’s background. I’m originally from the northeastern United States so there’s a lot of New England type tradition. Additionally, we spend a lot of time in southern California so there’s a lot of Mexican, southern California, kind of Tex Mex type feel to it as well. Kind of bringing all those elements together in a somewhat appeasing way for the palate, but being able to personalize in that way to share what we’ve been through in the last couple years of our life together and the experiences we’re having and where we’ve been in bringing those elements into the meal portion of the wedding.

Very nice you guys. I wish you so much happiness as you spend the next few months planning together. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Congratulations.

Christen: Thank you.

Thank you both for spending a little time with me and the LCI customers and potential customers and folks who might be thinking of putting together their own save the date card. I’m sure you’re going to inspire them. So thank you once again for taking the time out.

–

Following their May 2010 wedding, Christen and Kevin sent us a beautiful card with their photo on the front, thanking us for the interview. They’ve allowed us to share the card with you, our blog readers.

Christen & Kevin own OneWillow Studios, a boutique design and brand communications company rooted in Mid-Coast Maine. They specialize in Art Direction, Graphic Design, Brand Identity, Packaging/Product Design, Web Design, Marketing, Advertising, Publishing, Copywriting, Photography, and Illustration.

Recommended Link:
Glider Cards

Joshua Birch

Kristen Blake is a wedding invitation designer and wedding photographer. You can see examples of her work at her web site, Kristen Blake Photography and Paperie. She recently submitted a wedding invitation she designed for one of her clients that uses a Stardream Bronze pocket fold invitation.

To save the audio to your computer, right click and save as.

Materials

• 6 1/4 Square Stardream Bronze Pocket Fold
• 6 1/2 Square Stardream Bronze Envelope
• 80lb Natural cover stock cut to various sizes

Here is a transcript of the interview:

First of all, tell me about Kristen Blake Photography and Paperie. How long have you been designing invitations?

I started in 2007 when I graduated from college with a graphic design degree. My friends were asking if I could design their wedding invitations and stuff like that. So that’s kind of how it started to take off. Then their friends started asking me to make invitations for them so it was just kind of a snowball effect.

How did they know to ask you?

Oh my friends?

Yeah, yeah

Just from work they had seen me do from my job-my 9-5 job-or from college.

Gotcha. Tell me about the photography side of your business.

That actually started, again, after college when I started to do weddings with a friend of mine-photographing them just as an assistant. He just needed a second hand. He knew I was good at it. I got involved with a couple of photographers in the area and I started again with the friends, doing their engagement sessions, their weddings, small weddings, and then I got a little more confident in what I was doing and I branched out on my own.

Nice. How long have you been doing it on your own then? A year or a couple years?

Just about a year now.

Let’s talk about the dandelion invitation set you created with the Stardream Bronze Pocket Fold. Whose idea was it to use a dandelion theme?

That was actually the bride’s idea. She had seen something in a magazine and she really liked that idea. It’s a fall wedding. She pretty much gave me creative license to run with it, so that’s how the color came about. I knew her colors were like a chocolate brown and ivory so I wanted to stick with that. I thought the single dandelion was really a strong element on it and I think it makes it a little romantic.

Tell me about the printing. What types of papers and what colors are those that you printed on-the invitation card and the other cards in the pocket?

Ok. I used a digital printer in my area locally and we print on an 80 pound… It’s called a Natural cover stock so it’s not white and it’s not yellow either. It’s just a really soft white, so it’s not as stark as a bright white.

Ok. So that wasn’t a challenge because that’s just a smooth matte surface.

Yes, yup.

Ok. I think many of our customers would love to layer their response cards, direction cards, and reception cards as you’ve done inside the pocket. Do the cards rest all the way to the bottom of the pocket?

Yes they do. I created them in such heights that they would stack appropriately, about about ¾ of an inch for each one, so that way they could see what is this card. It is a reception card. It’s the response card. So I wanted to make that clear and I wanted to do it in a presentable fashion.

So about ¾ of an inch from top edge of the card to the next top edge of the next card that’s under it?

Correct. Yep.

Ok. Do you do your own custom cutting?

No, my printer does the cutting as well.

Gotcha. How did your client print the addresses on the envelopes? You used Stardream Bronze envelopes, is that right?

Yes, yes. I gave her a gold pen. That way it shows up on the actual envelopes so we don’t have to use labels because that’s a big no no in my business. So whatever you do, do not use labels. So I advised her to get a gold pen and it worked out beautifully.

Good. And can you just tell me about the overall reaction of your client to the beautiful invitations when you finally presented the finished product?

Sure. She absolutely loved them. Both her and her fiance were just completely starstruck almost. It was a great feeling. They both loved it. They both loved everything about it—the colors, the design of it—they just really loved it.

Thanks to Kristen for sharing her Bronze Autumn Dandelion pocket fold wedding invitation design. If you have questions for Kristen, post a comment.

Sandie in Connecticut sent us a beautiful handmade wedding invitation ensemble that she created using a combination of metallic, vellum, and linen specialty paper and embellishments. Her two colors, Mars (red) and Autumn Hay (cream), are special papers with a mica-infused metallic finish. Watch our video for your introduction to the world of metallic papers and see how each Aspire Petallics metallic color reacts in different light. In this interview, you’ll hear directly from the designer as she talks about the paper selections she made and the tools she used.

Materials

• 105lb Stardream Mars card stock
• 80lb Aspire Petallics Autumn Hay text weight paper
• 29lb Translucent Vellum paper
• Linen card stock
• Aspire Petallics Autumn Hay 7 1/2″ Square Envelope
• Aspire Petallics Autumn Hay A7 Envelope
• Aspire Petallics Autumn Hay Response Envelope
• Interlocking Silver Hearts Favor Charms

To save the audio to your computer, right click and “save as.”

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Thanks for submitting your beautiful wedding invitation design for our Share Your Creativity program. How did you first discover that we were seeking designs from our customers?

Well, I received an LCI e-mail, and there was, I believe, an icon on the side or a clickable graphic of some sort about submitting a design. So I pursued that because I had done this wedding invitation for some friends of ours; I believe it was about a year ago.

Let’s talk about the design you submitted which you made for the bride…who is a good friend of yours?

Yes, she is. She actually worked at a local YMCA where my children attended daycare. I’ve known her for many years.

Ok. You went with an interesting and pretty two color combination of Autumn Hay which we sell and Mars which we don’t carry at this time. Were those a close match to her colors?

The Mars was a beautiful, deep, I want to say candy apple red and it happened to be a really good match to her wedding colors, specifically her bridesmaid dresses. I was a little concerned when she had mentioned that she was having red dresses, but she had brought along a fabric swatch and luckily it was a really nice, deep red. So we were trying to match that. There were other reds that we had considered but they were too pink or too orange or too burgundy and we really wanted this specific color. It was just a nice, rich, classy color. We felt that this particular paper had a beautiful metallic finish and it gave us the look that we wanted.

Now the Autumn Hay is a warm, creamy off-white which I needed to contrast the red. It helps the left-hand panel really pop out and it helps to draw your eyes over to double intertwined heart charm. And that was the focal point for the invitation. It was the purpose of this particular custom invitation. It was the celebration of the union of two hearts. It all fell into place once we looked at all the papers and the finishes.

For this invitation ensemble, you printed on at least three different types of paper which is interesting-the Aspire Petallics Autumn Hay, a vellum layer, and a linen layer. Can you talk about your printing results from each because sometimes metallic paper can be challenging.

Oh yeah.

Did you use laser or inkjet?

Well, the printer that I use is an old Canon inkjet. I’ve done a lot of testing with it, mostly of the trial and error type of course. But I’ve had some pretty good luck with it. Generally, with all the coated papers, they’re not as porous and so the inks take quite a while to dry or to seal. Like for example, the envelopes I did on the Petallics Autumn Hay, and I had printed them and I would spread them out on large sheets of foam core and let them dry for a full day and then they were usually good to go. They wouldn’t smudge and such. The vellums are a little better for printing. But the only thing with vellums is you need to make sure that you invest in a heavy weight vellum because they tend to curl, especially after you’ve printed them. If you want it to lay flat, you’ve got a problem. The linens are very porous paper so it really soaks in the inks well and they dry pretty rapidly. Another thing that I ran into, at least over the summer, was that when you’re dealing with humid weather, it tends to also effect an invitation, so you’ve got to be careful there.

Yeah. For both the wedding invitation and the front of the thank you card booklet, you created a tall, raised and layered section that gives the cards depth. Can you tell me more about this unique look? I’m also curious as to how you achieved the embossing on the metallic card stock.

Adding different layers and textures helps to create a more three dimensional invitation and I tend to try and create something that’s a little more visually stimulating, you know, interesting. This particular paper, the Petallics, have a really good tolerance for an embossing. It’s a paper that’s heavy enough to maintain rigidity, but it’s still not too heavy to actually crack or buckle when you’re embossing it. And how I achieved it? Well, this is actually pretty easy. I don’t know if you’re heard of this, but I have a Cuttlebug. It’s an over the counter, hand-crank, die cut embossing machine. What I did was I would cut the strips first and then you’d put them in through this machine with an embossing folder. Basically it presses the paper into the shape. I tend to use the Cuttlebug for a majority of things that I do because it just gives a really nice added dimension.

Does it come with different patterns for embossing?

Well, you buy different folders. Yeah, you can purchase them.

Folders

Yeah, they’re called folders. They’re two sided. It’s basically a plastic folder. One side is a positive imprint and the other side is a negative imprint. So when you place the paper in there and you put it through the press, it basically forces the embossing. And it’s very fast which is wonderful because I could put three or four panels into one folder. You roll it through and then you start the process over again. I think I did a hundred and fifty invitations within twenty minutes-for that little portion of that invitation.

Oh great, great. What did the bride and groom think of your gift of invitations?

Well, they loved the invitations. But you have to remember, they were a large part of the design because they had seen many iterations of the design over a period of a few months. Really, the guests whom received the invitations were the ones that were surprised because they hadn’t have been part of it. And actually, at the end of the process, I had asked for their help and so they came on board and helped with assembling everything.

Oh good

Yeah. That was a big help because custom invitations like these tend to be incredibly labor intensive. So it may not look like it, but it does take many weeks to get through a hundred and fifty of them or whatever. It was nice to actually have a little get-together with the bride and groom and they were very excited because they got to be a part of that.

Exactly. That seems like the fun part.

Yeah. (laughter)

Good. In your e-mail, you told me you have a full-time job and you love your *hobby* of creating lots of cards and invitations. Can you talk more about that?

Sure. My full time job; well, I’m an architect. I work for a large, multi-discipline firm that’s here in Connecticut. But a small percentage of architects are actually designers. It’s the rest of us, the ninety-eight percent that actually help to make those visions happen. So I did my own custom wedding invitations about fifteen years ago. And after that, there was no stopping me because people had seen them and it was an opportunity to do all the birthday invitations and lots of other things that came down the pike. So I do this on the side and I try to come up with some new ideas and everybody looks forward to getting my holiday cards.

I bet

A selection of Sandie’s family holiday cards:

It’s been interesting but it’s been very creative to do something different than my full-time job.

I thank you very much for your time. I think this went really well.

Well thank you Josh. I really appreciate the opportunity. It’s very nice to be able to share your work with the public because if you can’t see what other people are working on, I don’t think you can be as creative. I think it’s a big plus to be able to see what other people are doing and especially if you can help somebody else do something a little bit quicker; get something done without struggling. I’ll find something that somebody’s created and I think, “Oh gosh, now how did they do that? Did that take forty-five minutes or were they able to do it in ten?” A lot of times it’s good to be able to look at somebody’s work and actually read through the directions and see how they got it done a little bit faster.

–

Sandie just hit the nail on the head and drove home what our Share Your Creativity program is all about-our creative customers sharing their ideas with us and in turn, others learning about the creative process and being inspired by what they see, read, and hear about on our site. What kind of success or challenges have you experienced printing metallic paper, vellum, or linen paper? Post a comment and tell us about it.

Joshua Birch

To save the audio to your computer, right click and “save as.”

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Let’s go ahead and get started and let’s talk about your invitation. I guess first I’m wondering if you are a designer and what is your connection to the young lady who you made the card for?

Well, I never really thought of myself as a designer because I spent over 27 years in corporate America, and after being downsized a few years ago, I started dabbling in rubber stamping and cardmaking which eventually led me into making invitations and favors, which is really where my heart is. I get a lot of gratification from making invitations.

I was contacted by a friend who wanted to know if I could do a Quinceañera invitation for a friend of hers-her daughter-whose birthday was coming up this coming May. She told me she was looking for a yellow and black color theme and she also wanted sunflowers which she thought wasn’t very interesting, you know? And immediately I said to her, “Oh my goodness! That’s easy and it’s going to be so pretty.” Because I immediately started visualizing Crocum and Ebenum. I immediately started visualizing those two colors together. I spotted those colors on your web site a couple of weeks prior and I immediately fell in love with them and I said, “Oh my goodness! I wish I had a project that I could use those for.” And sure enough, two weeks later the opportunity arrived, so I was very happy with it.

A sunflower is a little bit more orange, so you adapted your design to the Crocum pocketfold?

Yes I did. You’re right about the sunflowers because I played around with a lot of different sunflowers ‘til I found the right one with the right shade of yellow. What I really liked about that particular design was the black line art around the edge of the sunflower.

Yeah, me too.

Because I thought it worked very well with the play of the two colors together. It really popped.

It does, yeah.

And it was just a matter of getting the right layout for that particular sunflower.

And if folks are just listening to this and they haven’t taken a look at this invitation, please go to www.lcipaper.com/blog and do look at this beautiful invitation that Cheryl’s telling you about.

Thank you.

Yeah, it is so bold, the yellow and the black.

Yes it is.

I’m looking at the top flap. Can you tell me about the seal that you made and also the way you attached it?

I layered it with the Crocum and the Ebenum. I reversed the paper to show the smooth side for the tag on the front of the invitation. And then I used a magnetic strip for the enclosure under the tag or under the flap.

And is there another magnetic piece under the bottom panel of the pocketfold?

Yes there is. And it lays flat that way too. Probably a lot of people use velcro. I didn’t like the idea of using velcro because I find it a little bulky.

I love this idea of a magnet. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. How neat. Wow.

Thank you.

Yeah! What did you print on—your beautiful sunflower design and your text—what paper is that?

Well that’s a paper that’s manufactured by Domtar and it’s called Cougar DigitalChoice. It’s their Super Smooth white cover stock. And it comes in three different weights. I used an 80 pound weight—for all of my invitations. And I used the same weight to print the sunflower on the tag as well.

It’s a digital paper, so what kind of printer did you use?

I really want a laser printer but right now I have an inkjet.

But it prints fine on the digital stuff?

Oh absolutely. It’s gorgeous. It’s very smooth.

Ok. Is there some kind of texture to that invitation layer?

No, but you know what I did do? On the bookfold invitation, I did use a different paper. I was experimenting. I used a linen paper which looks really quite nice and that prints very nicely as well on the inkjet. And I used a text weight linen paper for the bookfold invitation.

What did the young lady think of this? Has she seen it?

Oh they loved it.

Ok.

They loved it. As a matter of fact, they’re trying to decide which layout they like best between the pocketfold and the book fold. They went away for the holidays so they’re going to make up their mind after the holidays.

I think folks know what a pocketfold is. It’s sort of a tri-fold card with a pocket down on the bottom portion so that you can add your RSVP card, a driving direction card… And then you attach the invitation card into the middle panel. Now tell folks about your alternate design with the bookfold you were mentioning.

Well I always like to give customers two choices when they come to me and they don’t really have a firm idea as to what it is that they’re looking for. So I like to give everyone a couple of choices and I always make two sample layouts for a client.

Had you worked with the Vice Versa stock before?

No, this is my first time and it will not be my last. That paper is absolutely gorgeous. I love the vibrant colors and the texture. And I think the weight of the paper really makes the texture pop out a little bit.

That’s true. Your sunflower design is really bold and then I guess the weight of the paper and that ribbed texture is bold as well.

Right. And it just makes it really stand out.

How did you make the favor boxes?

I have an AccuCut die machine so I use that for my favor boxes as well as for some of my layouts.

Can you describe that machine?

Well, it’s a commercial die machine. I guess it’s about 3 feet by 1 ½ feet wide and a lot of the craft stores have this. They create a lot of die shapes, letters for customers… And I decided to buy one a couple of years ago when I started playing around with the wedding invitations. Because, although I had a paper cutter, my cuts weren’t coming out as straight as I would like them to have been. So I get a much straighter cut with my AccuCut die machine. The end result is a lot more professional.

Tell me the name of your business, and where are you based?

Well I’m based in Newburgh, New York and the name of my business is Paper Flourishes. My e-mail is paperflourish@aol.com.

–

I want to thank Cheryl for sending photos of her sunflower design and for taking the time to talk to me about the design process. I hope her story inspires you to be creative. If you like what you heard and have something to say, visit our blog and post a comment. And if you’d like to submit photos of your invitation, visit our Share Your Creativity page.

To save the audio to your computer, right click and “save as.”

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Thank you for sending one of the menus that you designed for your daughter’s wedding.

Thank you.

It was great to receive. Everyone in the office really liked it, so we have some questions for you. First of all, how did the homemade menus go over with your daughter and the guests?

Well, I think everyone really loved them. I originally wasn’t going to have menus and then I decided that we could use a little color on the reception tables and actually, that green backing ended up being the main color for her invitations. It was a green foliage. And then all the bridesmaids’ dresses were that color of green. I just decided that that would add a little more color than just the basic ivory linens to the reception tables.

Ok, so the Herbeus green was really pulled from the colors of the bridesmaids’ dresses then.

Yes, exactly yes. And her flowers were a combination of a lot of white roses but they also incorporated rose with a greenish tinge to it and then some green hydrangeas. So those were her main wedding colors-the green and the white.

Nice and natural looking, great.

Right, and perfect and Springy for April.

Good. Well, let’s continue talking about green. People in the office love the custom flower at the top of the menu. One person in particular really liked how you used the brad post through the flower into the printed invitation card. But then it stopped there. You didn’t actually poke it right through to the backing layer. Tell me about that.

I got the inspiration for this menu card from your web site. You do feature a menu card. And I had actually ordered the spiral clips and I was going to just use the clips but then I actually happened upon these little green flowers at a national craft store in their bridal department. They come in various colors and this green was absolutely perfect. And then I started looking at the brads that they had. I decided that that would give a little more accent to the menu card. I used a very small 1/16″ circle punch. I just punched as deep as the throat of the punch would let me on the white menu card and centered that and just fed the brad through the flower and then through the white card and that way the back of the brad secured the flower on the back of the white card. Then I used adhesive mounting squares-I think they were in the scrapbooking section-and I just applied one to each of the upper two corners and positioned it. And that way it was secured just fine and the brad stayed hidden through the back of the green card.

What is the craft store that you purchased these from?

Michaels crafts is where I purchased the little green flowers. Actually, the company that makes them, the label says Brides. I know they had pink ones, maybe black ones-several different colors. And then of course the brads were also from Michaels. The 1/16th circle punch was also from Michaels. The little adhesive corners I actually got at Hobby Lobby. Everything was readily available. There were so many cute little brads to choose from, I considered using one that looked like a little rhinestone or a little diamond, but opted for just the plain silver brad because with more of a nature theme, I thought that fit better than the blingy brad.

And the focus is maybe more on the flower and less on the brad.

Right, right. And I think if I would have used the other one it would have made the focus on the brad so thus I opted for just the silver brad.

The printed text on the menu card looks great.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah! Tell me about that. How did you lay it out on the card and then how did you print?

I used Microsoft Word. That’s just generic card stock. I put in the sizes according to the border that I left. I believe the sizes actually were what you sell as a two piece set with the Herbeus card and the white for your menu sets. [Note: Marilou is referring to our Printable Slim Layered Menu Card Green.] So I put in all those sizes on my Word document and I selected to center all the text. I dropped it down at the top to accommodate the little flower. I did just a one up on this and then I decided… I was kind of running out of time so I called my local Kinko’s store and said, “Hey, if I send you this document and run in and show you what I’m trying to do, can you do this 2-up for me?” And, “Sure, no problem.” Kinko’s printed it 2-up. They used their ream cutter where they could cut fifty sheets at once as opposed to me manually cutting each sheet with a T-square and X-acto knife and spending hours doing it. So I did utilize Kinko’s services. They were very easy to work with and it was a real time saver when you’re crunched before a wedding.

That’s really good to hear that they would do that for you and they made it easy. Good.

They did. They made it very easy. Of course I could have gotten the card stock from you but I just used what Kinko’s sold. I could have run it all through my printer, but as I said, it would have been pretty laborious and I would have had to have hand cut every single one. I actually ended up making two hundred menu cards so this was a big time saver to let Kinko’s do what they do best and help me out.

I think the way you described your Word setup will really help people realize that that’s really what it is-you take the size of the card you’ve got and you set up those dimensions and you set up your text.

Right.

That’s great that you explained it so simply like that and it worked for you.

Right, it did. And of course you have to go into your layout and look at what you want for spacing after the lines and I did play around with that for quite a while to get it just like I wanted. I probably printed out maybe a half dozen samples at home on my printer before I was actually happy with what I had.

I think people might be interested in knowing that the way I did this… First of all I’d like to say I ordered samples from you guys first. So I got this Herbeus green card and then I also ordered a green slider card and I was considering using that card also but it had a little bit too much iridescence to it for me. But I was amazed at how fast the samples came from you guys. I think it was within two days time. And then when I decided on the Herbeus card and placed my order, I think your order actually arrived within two or three days so very excellent service from your company.

Good. Good to hear.

And then another thing I might want to mention is that I think with the cost of the stock and my brads and those little flower doodads, I think I had maybe fifty cents in each completed menu card which I know you would have probably paid two or three dollars easily if you would have ordered them from and invitation shop.

Yeah.

I thought it was a nice way to add a little extra to the table.

Then with those little flowers, I went a step further and instead of using the tent cardboard cards which-I didn’t find your web site until pretty close to the wedding-but my daughter wanted these little frames for place cards so I printed out all the names of the guests and then I actually took one of those little green flowers and free floated it in the corner of the frame. So we had the little green flower in the card too. But if you were to use the tented cards that you sell that you can print off on the computer, you could also coordinate your place cards and use the brad and the punch and put that little flower on the place card or table cards too, so it would be an easy way to embellish and coordinate all your paper.

Good point. Did you have a great time at the wedding?

Oh yeah we did. Yeah, we did. (laughter) It was two weeks ago and I’m playing catch-up now but it was a wonderful celebration and it was great. (laughter)

Excellent.

And the project, I really enjoyed doing it. It just really I think added a special touch and it was really fun to do something for her wedding versus farming everything out to the invitation shops. Your web site gave me the idea and you have a lot of great ideas and… I don’t know how I found it. I was just searching the web for green papers or something. I see you have programs and invitations and pocket invitations. Well, I’m glad I found you guys because you have great products and great service, so I thank you for that.

–

Thank you Marilou for the kind words about your experience with LCI Paper. And thank you for taking time to submit your menu card to our Share Your Creativity program. We hope Marilou’s experience inspires others that might be listening (or reading) that they too can use LCI Paper’s blank stock and make an idea become a reality. Hear more stories like Marilou’s and subscribe to our podcast. Comments about Marilou’s design or about homemade menu cards in general? Post comments here!

To save the audio to your computer, right click and “save as.”

Here is a transcript of the interview:

When and how did you start Paper Daisies Stationery?

I started when I got married six years ago with my own wedding invitations. I could not find what I was looking for in the price range I liked. So we decided to make my invitations. It just kind of grew from there-word of mouth. My friends received my invitations and I was at the marrying age so I ended up doing a handful of friends’ invitations and it just kind of grew from there.

What paths did you take to try to find invitations? Where did you go?

Oh, I think I went to some stores and looked through books. I really feel like I was on the cusp of just this great energy with invitations. It really feels like when I got married, people were just starting to get really creative. So, the ones that were kind of standing out, they tended to be more expensive. And now, you can pretty much go anywhere and get some really interesting, fun, unique invitations. And that’s kind of what I was looking for when I got married and they just weren’t as available as they are now.

Just the fact that do it yourself trends have really picked up the past few years, where a lot of brides are able to do invitations themselves or work through people like me where they have their own ideas and we can work together towards getting their design and their theme put together in an invitation and it’s really unique and it’s not the kind of stamped, big company where you might actually get the same invitation that you’ve received a year or two before.

I know you are a teacher or you were a teacher, so you’re…

I did. I used to be a high school art teacher.

Ok, so you’re a creative person anyway. And what’s your background in art and design?

I taught high school art for a few years. I had actually quit teaching for a year and was painting murals on sides of buildings and I also did decorative painting in people’s homes while I was working on my invitations. I’m not a graphic designer by trade. I definitely never had any formal training. I’m self-taught. I work on a small, little, tiny program. But after a lot of hard work, I taught myself how to create different designs. And if I can’t find something, then I draw it and scan it in.

Tell me about how the business started. I know you had quite a lot of good feedback from your invitations at your own wedding.

Uhuh, I did. I did some kind of neat things with my wedding. I did a postcard reply card which saved on the postage and that was really something that was not widely done. Pretty much 99% of my brides will do that and it’s just a great way to save money and it’s something unique and fun. I did square invitations which, at the time, weren’t really widely done. After I mailed my invitations out, there were about three or four jobs that I received within a few months after that. Just through friends of friends it just kind of started up. Never in a million years would I have known I’d be doing what I’m doing. (laughter)

Tell me about the web site. PaperDaisiesStationery.com has a redesign, correct?

Yes. I started that web site about a year ago. For the past five years, I’ve actually only had a web site that had personalized stationery and smaller invitations-birthday, wedding shower, baby shower, personalized note cards. I just never had time to get any of my wedding invitations on my web site and so last year I finally kicked it into gear and I launched PaperDaisiesStationery.com. And that links to my personalized stationery which I still do have. It’s a web site that mainly showcases the jobs that I’ve done. It’s not the kind of web site you would go to order off of. I really enjoy meeting with brides for consultations and doing everything custom. I think it shows my style. A bride can go on and look through and see all the different designs. I work in pretty much any style you can imagine from traditional to modern to whimsical to cute. No two invitations really are the same. And I love, I just love simple. I think if you keep things simple, you can pretty much make anything look good-work in any style.

Looking through the invitations that you have showcased there, I definitely get simple. But I definitely get fun. I don’t get boring. You know, I don’t get necessarily traditional.

I really don’t enjoy those kind of boring, everyday wedding invitations that have been around for a really long time. It just makes me sad when I get one of those in the mail because they don’t… There’s no personality. You can’t… You know, there’s almost nothing to get excited about for the wedding. I like to think when guests get my wedding invitations that they’re kind of like a little present. They’re fun to open. They’re like nothing they’ve ever seen before. If I work with a bride and she wants something traditional, maybe I’ll work with a monogram or I’ll work with traditional colors. But it’s not going to be that same boring cream invitation that you’ve gotten twenty times already.

Gotcha. One of the invitations, Betsy and Brian… It’s just one that caught my eye and… First of all, I love the colors the dark blue, the navy blue and the white. Love the flower designs… And that’s your little on, yeah? So if you need to break away at any time, feel free.

Oh that’s fine. He just wanted to peep in.

Ok.

Yeah, Betsy and Brian’s wedding… Betsy actually came to me with the design that she found somewhere that she really liked. And so I took that design and manipulated it a little bit and redrew something that really said exactly what she wanted. And then I’d played with it. I took different design elements and put them in different places throughout the invitation. The lining-it’s kind of the entire composition of the flowers and the leaves. And then I kind of took parts of that. I took parts of the flower out. I blew it up, made it smaller, took part of the leaves… And I really do not like the way an invitation set looks when it’s matched. I really like things to compliment each other. I think it just gives it a little bit more of an upscale, a little bit more of an expensive look. I think we used navy, a navy blue. We used kind of a taupe color on parts of the invitation. And also, there were parts that probably aren’t on my web site but that I did with our table card and seating card where we brought in some paler blues and it was a really pretty invitation set. I like that one a lot.

And you lined the envelope as well-custom lined.

Custom lined the envelope, yep. And I think I had said that was an LCI envelope. I love your big square envelopes. I love that size. I think it’s so much fun when you get an invitation that’s just a big, large square. I don’t know. It’s exciting, you can’t wait to open it, and again, very different than your boring, regular old cream invitation.

Tell me about the connection you make with your clients. I mean, to design something as personal as a wedding invitation must at least take some getting to know each other.

It does. I love my brides and actually I love some of my grooms too. They come along to some of the consultations. My process is to have a complimentary consultation with brides and a lot of times their moms or their sisters or their best friends will come. Sometimes the grooms come along. We sit down, look through all the different portfolios that I have and the different designs. And through that process, I do get to know them. I go back to my home office and I create complimentary samples based on the discussions that we’ve had. And I do everything. I make the invitation set. I make the programs, table cards, seating cards, menu cards, save the date-any things that they think they might need for their wedding stationery set. I mail those to the bride along with a price list. And all of that is complimentary. So there’s absolutely no pressure on the bride to feel like she needs to work with me before she’s even seen anything. And that’s really important. When she sits down and gets her samples she gets to see her look in her colors with their names, maybe their monogram, their design. And then they can decide if we would be a good fit. And through that process it’s always so exciting.

I just got an e-mail today from a bride. I worked so hard on her sample. I just had my fingers crossed because she was very particular about what she wanted and she just loved it. So I was so excited to get that e-mail from her today.

A lot of my brides, I work with them through the entire wedding process-from save the dates to table and escort cards so we do get to know each other. And a lot of times, a year or two later, I get a call back and they’re pregnant and they want me to make their baby announcements. Or they’ll be doing bridal shower invitations for their friends. I work a lot of word of mouth so a lot of times brides that I do know will give my name to one of their friends or a couple of their friends and I end up knowing kind of an entire wedding party. So it’s a lot of fun. At least to this point, I’ve never forgotten a bride and a design.

Is Paper Daisies your full time job?

I feel like it’s a full time job. I work Paper Daisies Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and I have two little boys–three and one, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I stay home with them. So I am a full-time mom and a full time stationer, at least that’s what it feels like. But it’s the best of both worlds. I really love it.

Perfect. How do you get the word out about your business? And tell me about some of the networking you’ve been doing recently.

Definitely word of mouth has been a huge play in making my business grow but I also work with wedding planners in the metro Atlanta area. Two successful planners here are Ashley Baber Weddings and Wedding Soirée and they both send me a whole lot of business. It’s great, kind of to have my services, as a wedding planner, because I give their brides something complimentary. So it’s a great thing for a wedding planner to have. I also recently joined a company called The Bridal Bar. They’re a new startup company here in Atlanta. They have two stores out in California-San Diego and LA. And they’re a great service for brides. It’s a complimentary service. They choose up to six vendors in each category and they’re very, very specific and particular about the vendors that they choose. They try and get variety, good quality, excellent references. So I’m one their stationers. If you go in to the Bridal Bar as a bride, newly engaged bride, you can have a consultation. They give you champagne. You can go in with your mom, your sisters, your friends, and they will actually sit down and try and pick vendors that will fit your budget, fit your look, fit your style. And it’s just a great service. I’ve had a lot of fun working with them so far. I haven’t quite done the Facebook or Twitter yet. I’m a little bit computer illiterate at that. (laughter) But maybe down the road I’ll get a little better.

Thanks to Lisa Hladish for taking the time to tell me about her invitation design business, Paper Daisies Stationery. See her designs at PaperDaisiesStationery.com.

Joshua Birch

Left to right: Jessica Mann, Nancy Jacobi

The Japanese Paper Place is a Toronto-based wholesaler of several thousand kinds of Japanese papers. The various colors, textures, and patterns of their paper is astounding, and when you see them and touch them, your creative juices start to flow. Enjoy this interview with owner and founder Nancy Jacobi and webmistress and U.S. sales associate Jessica Mann.

To save the audio to your computer, right click and “save as.”

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Where is The Japanese Paper Place located and how many years have you been in business?

Nancy: We are located in Toronto which is in Ontario which is in Canada. And we’re at the western edge of the downtown of Toronto, and we have been here since 1982.

That’s amazing. 1982. Wow. Well, let’s talk about your product. For someone who isn’t familiar with Japanese specialty paper, can you tell us why a creative person might want to utilize the paper in their projects?

Nancy: Sure. There are several reasons why we have — I have — focused on Japanese paper for all these years. And they’re the same reasons that creative people, I think, are attracted to it too. The first one is the range. There’s just an unbelievable range of paper that they make in Japan, and have made for many, many years. So it allows anybody with creative impulses to choose something very specific to a project or to a taste, and that’s a thrilling thing for many creative people.

The second thing is, you may have heard the word “Kaizen” applied to business practices in Japan. It’s a Japanese word that refers to the continual improvement of something. And that’s a wonderful word to describe Japanese paper because they have, this Kaizen has been the way they have dealt with the paper from the very beginning. And that beginning was 1,400 years ago when Buddist priests brought it from Korea — brought the invention from Korea to Japan. And so ever since then, they have been continuously improving and stretching the range of the paper. So I think that’s a marvelous thing. And often, craftspeople will tell us that there is nothing like this paper to cut, to paste, to fondle, to deal with as a craftsperson. It’s very obedient because it’s been refined for such a long time and the quality is really high.

I guess the other thing, and it’s something that people know about Japan even if they don’t know the paper, is their wonderful ability to combine color and pattern. So perhaps because Buddhism has been so strong in Japan for so long, and Buddhism has, as part of its tenets, this beauty, this reverence for beauty and for nature. And then art became such an important part of Buddhism in Japan. That that’s carried over to everything they do. And often, people, when they come back from Japan, will remark on just how fantastically beautiful and well-designed everything is there. So that ability to combine color and pattern I think is also very appealing to creative people. And the fact that the papers themselves are routed so far back. There’s a kind of resonance that we have for design like that, that isn’t just parachuted into the present.

But the last thing I’d like to suggest for crafters, people who are doing craft, and a reason to use it is that environmentally, these papers are really good. Many of them are made from renewable resources — plant fibers, which are grown as harvests. But even if they’re not made from those natural fibers, it’s a conserving society.

They don’t waste. They don’t waste water. They don’t waste materials. They don’t waste time. And they don’t waste energy. So even in the machine-made factories, small, usually family-run businesses, the quality control is terrific. They just don’t waste. And it’s very rare that we ever have a paper that we receive, out of the millions of papers we’ve gotten over the years, that is anything other than perfectly sellable to you. And that’s another reason why crafters won’t waste their time if they choose these Japanese papers. Sorry, that was a very long answer Josh.

Yeah, fantastic. I really appreciate the context and I think the listeners will to. Nancy, what lead you to Japanese papers and starting your own business?

Well, I lived in Japan in 1975. I taught English there. But I’ve always been a lover of paper. And it was there I discovered the paper. But it was really after that, that I started to explore the range. And you know, as a kid, I collected what we call here street car transfers. Tram transfers and bus transfers and tickets. That was my beginning. And I think I’ve never really recovered from that and a love of books. But I thought that we really… You know, although in the States and in Canada, we have so many forests, and we have a lot of potential for paper here. But especially at that time, there was so little fabulous paper around, and I thought that if I brought this paper in, that it would really encourage creativity. And I think it’s that potential for creativity that still excites me very much about this commodity.

Two women who work at LCI are Japanese, and Naomi in particular was intrigued that I was going to be interviewing you folks and she was wondering if any of your papers are imported from Japan and it sounds like many would be.

All the papers we have in our 10,000 square foot warehouse, they’re all Japanese papers. And as I mentioned, it’s because we think that Japanese papers are second to none in the world. They’re just so consistent and so wonderfully varied and refined. It’s all Japanese.

I would think there are other folks touting Japanese specialty paper that possibly aren’t even imported from Japan.

Yeah, that’s been kind of confusing over the years Josh, because Thailand, you know, grows a fiber that’s similar to what they use for a lot of the paper in Japan. And even the Japanese companies started to go to Thailand for some varieties that were much cheaper and so forth. But they just weren’t made with the same care, the same clean water, the same conservation mindedness. So it got very confusing. But we are very, very clear that we want only papers that are made by very excellent papermakers in Japan itself.

Alright. Jessica. Let’s get you involved. When did you start at The Japanese Paper Place and what lead you there?

Jessica: I’ve been here full time about four years, doing both sales and the web site, working on the web site part time a few years before that. My first interest in The Japanese Paper Place actually was when I was eight years old. I was really into Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, at the time, and the Japanese paper place, at that point, was the only place you could really get Origami paper in Toronto and really, in Canada. So my mom took me down to the store one day and I walked in and my eyes became very wide and I fell in love with the paper on the spot and promised myself that one day I would work there. So I stayed in touch with Nancy over the years and it took a long time, between her looking for someone and me actually having the time to look for a job, at the same time for it to finally work out. But here I am, many, many years later. So it’s been a life-long passion for me.

Awesome. Great story.

Nancy: And we are so delighted to have her here, for many reasons other than her Origami skills.

Well, you guys have done a great job with the web site. It looks very Zen. It’s appropriate. And I really enjoyed looking at the “Who We Are” section and reading through the staff bios. Everyone seems really friendly, and a very nice presentation on that page in particular.

Jessica: Thank you. Thanks very much.

And can you explain the terms “Washi” and “Chiyogami”?

Nancy: “Washi” is a Japanese word that literally means Japanese paper. So “Wa” is a Japanese word for Japanese and

“shi” is one of the words for paper. So literally, it’s Japanese paper. But really, it refers to the papers, the traditional papers, that are made by renewable plant fibers by hand, virtually the same way they’ve been made for 1,400 years. Those papers are much narrower that what the terms Japanese paper refers to. But Washi are those handmade papers. And Washi — one of the reasons that we continue to promote Washi, which are these hand-made papers available mostly through art supply stores, is because 100 years ago, there were over 100,000 families who made those papers by hand. And today there are around 300. And even since I started the business 20 some years ago, it’s less than half of what it was then — the number of makers. So these papers are really in danger — the real Washi–and that’s why we also promote them. That’s Washi.

Then the word “Chiyogami” is a very specific word. Nobody is exactly sure of the derivation of the word. One popular belief that is means 1,000 generations but that hasn’t really been documented too clearly. Chiyogami is the brightly-colored patterned papers that you have at LCI that are silkscreened by hand. The inspiration for them came from Kimono patterns. And in the 20th century, when women stopped wearing Kimonos so much, and the Kimono dyers were struggling, somebody, several people said, “Well, why don’t we just put those designs on paper.” And that’s kind of what we have. That’s how that Chiyogami grew. And today we have almost 800 patters of just Chiyogami. But we can choose from sample books that have probably 10,000 designs. They’re just unbelievable numbers.

Within your warehouse, you have a space called the Artist Resource Centre. Tell me about that, and tell me about some of the people who have been in to take advantage of the service.

That really is a center for people who are interested in art, on Washi, or who do it themselves. So we have a wonderful collection here of art. And it includes some Origami. It includes all sorts of prints and drawings. It includes boxes and books. We have three dimensional works that are stitched — a wonderful collection that we’ve gathered over the years. So this is a place where artists or art interested people can come and see what other people have done with Japanese paper. And it’s used really to inspire other people to know this wonderful commodity and to understand how to use it. And we will spend time with those people, if they need it, to explain about those papers.

How often are people actually in on the premises using the center?

Well, not as often as we would like. I would say in a week, what would we have Jess?

Jessica: Oh I don’t know. 10 to 20 people maybe?

Nancy: A good dozen? Yeah. The atmosphere here is very quiet because so much business these days is done by e-mail and by fax. So people love to come here because of the quiet. But I guess, yeah, maybe a dozen people a week. And sometimes we will have tour groups. We had an exhibition recently of books and boxes from around the world and we put that up for a group of American bookbinders who came and had a conference here. And they came on a tour to the warehouse and we showed them through the Artist Resource Center.

Jessica: It’s definitely best to call and make an appointment. We are primarily a warehouse and office. The passion for sharing these papers directly with people which has us have the Artist Resource Centre as well, but we do appreciate it because serving walk-ins can be problematic if we’re on the phone or what have you. It’s more helpful if we know when people are coming to make sure we set aside the time for them.

Now let’s talk about some of the professionals or hobbyists who do come in and use your products and services.

Nancy: I’ll mention three groups. The first one is graphic designers. And they’ve always been great users and lovers of the range of paper because they can create a truly customized look for their clients. And at LCI, you offer a big range of our papers. And so even on your web site, people can mix and match and create something that is really quite personal to them. So graphic designers will sometimes specify it for an end sheet in a book or for division sheets in pamphlets for advertising something. They will often use it as photo backgrounds. Textured papers become spreads in magazines. And even with just black ink, you can create something quite wonderful without having to go to the expense of your color printer. These days, of course, they are many self-professed graphic designers because you can use a lot of the text weight paper on your printer at home and I know that a lot of your customers would be doing that. And that’s a wonderful way too, to get words onto the paper.

Interior designers are another group that’s… I feel this is fairly unexplored, but the possibilities are just huge for interior designers to use the translucent paper to let light through. So, to put it into shutters, to make folding screens, to just hang in a window, a small window on a piece of bamboo, doweling…all sorts of ways to use it that way. Chiyogami itself, speaking of Chiyogami, that is used particularly in England. We have a customer in London who sells it quite often for wallpaper. I don’t know if you know the chef Gordon Ramsey?

Yes, haha.

Haha, everybody seems to know him. And his restaurant uses Chiyogami as the wallpaper.

Ok

And we have another store in London — two stores — that use it to really make arresting wallpaper. But because those papers, incidentally, were originally designed to be used for paper dolls and small house accessories, so the scale of the patterns often works better when they’re used in small ways. That’s why they’re great for invitations because you can make a little border and it just…the flowers peek out, or the design. Or you can use it for an envelope liner. The scale is just right. I find maybe wallpaper — I haven’t actually seen it used like that but it sounds like a bit much, doesn’t it? A bit too much of a good thing maybe. Maybe a small wall…

Then, the other group I wanted to mention are printmakers who use Japanese paper really a lot. And the first printmaker who ever used Washi was Rembrandt. And many, many, many of his etchings in Holland, in the 16th century…the 16th century? I think so. I’m not sure…used Washi Kozo paper from these natural plant fibers for his etchings. So he was the first one. Today, Yoko Ono chooses it to…she has John Lennon’s, a lot of his drawings silkscreen printed, and she chooses different sizes of the natural papers to print them on. But printmakers in the States use them a lot for layering. So you have a thin piece adhered to a heavier, western paper. And then the print is done on an that, on a Chine-colle. And that’s a very big, big group of users. So those are some of the, the of the main users.

Jessica: And what’s also remarkable, and a lot of people don’t realize, is just the breadth of uses you can put it to, which is something that frequently astonishes people.

Let’s talk about your presence in Toronto. Tell me about some of the workshops… Well, we covered those. Or maybe there’s more to it. Exhibitions, charities, and awards shows that The Japanese Paper Place has been involved in.

Nancy: Ok. Well, let’s maybe start with the plum, which was this year in June. We organized a very big event called the World Washi Summit. And we invited three papermakers from Japan. We invited our customers, like you, from all over the world, to come and have a look at the potential of Japanese paper. And we had the papermakers do demonstrations. We had all kinds of workshops on how to use it. We had a bazaar where people who used the paper in different ways sold their things. And it was a really wonderful event. And we organize things like that to try and keep the papermakers in Japan feeling good about what they’re doing because they’re under so much pressure to stop doing it. And so this really helps to create awareness of Washi and a great respect for it. We had 50 galleries, I think, who showed works on Washi during that time. And that was really, really a wonderful, wonderful way to get it out there.

We also have regular workshops in bookbinding and lamp shade-making…

Jessica: Printmaking…

Nancy: Printmaking, Jess has done the odd one on Origami. But from the beginning of the business, I realized people… It’s so different, this paper. And people needed instruction on what to do with it. And that continues. It’s always a great challenge for us to help the world know what to do with it.

The summit just sounds amazing. How was the response to that?

It was just terrific. All of the workshops were sold out weeks ahead. There were huge, big crowds and everything. It was just wonderful. We got a lot of press here, and we’d like to do some more things like that, maybe in other cities to help our customers there — the stores that we sell to and the businesses — develop their market more thoroughly.

I’ve heard great things about the cutting, that there’s just no fault at all in any of the papers we receive. The cutting and the packing — everything comes perfectly as ordered. Would you like to talk about that, and possibly talk about any customer service notes that are important?

I would love to talk about that, Josh, because I think we have a really incredible staff here. And I think the reason that our customer service is good is that most of the staff — there are about 12 of us here — really love the paper themselves and they use it. Many of them have university or art college backgrounds and they are, in the rest of their life, they are working artists, in a way, some of them. So, they want, they want more than anything else for other people to know the pleasure that it gives to use these refined and very special papers. How much pleasure it is, and how great the results are. That’s what drives us I think. You know, we’re driven more by our absolute respect for this material and for the people who make it in Japan and for the potential that it has.

Jessica: Yeah, we all have a bit of a passion for it, hahaha, which sounds a little strange, but I mean most of us who came to work here, you know, we came here not because we were going to get paid the most of any potential job or any other particular reason other than that we really love the paper. And it’s just such a joy to be able to bring that to other people, as best we can, so, that sounds really cheesy but it’s true.

Sounds like it works.

Nancy: But I think, you know, another example of this is that Peter, who is one of the two fantastic packers that we have, he’s an art college graduate too. And he, amongst other things, he makes violins. So he uses those same skills that it would take to make a violin with such great care, he applies that to every single box that’s made for orders that go out. Most of them are custom made for the orders so they don’t jiggle around, and that’s why they come to you so perfectly, and we’re happy to know that. And Walter, Walter is our cutter, and we are sorry we’re not recording this, because Walter is the most precise person I think any of us have met in our lives.

Jessica: Yes. His art is cutting. It’s amazing. He’s just incredible the way he knows every paper and a lot of them can be quite difficult to cut, some of them at least. You carry one called Sukashi which can be very slippery. But he knows exactly the way to intersperse it with pieces of cardboard and how to press it so that you get an exact, precise cut every time. It’s really remarkable to watch, hahaha.

Nancy: Walter is very, very proud of his cutting and so he’ll be so happy to know that you mentioned it.

We are recording this, so he’s gotta hear this.

Oh good.

Jessica: That’s true! That’s a good point!

Nancy: That’s right! Oh yeah, that’s right. This isn’t just a telephone conversation, hahaha.

Jessica: You can tell we don’t do this very often.

And let’s see, there’s just… Any notes about the relationship with LCI? You’ve been very kind with some comments, so if there’s nothing more, that’s fine. But I want to give you the opportunity if there is anything.

Nancy: Oh yes. We wouldn’t want to miss this opportunity. You know that we are coming up to our 5 year anniversary with you guys. In January, it will be 5 years since we started to deal with LCI. And I like to think of you as a model customer, seriously. You are steady. You are very open to our ideas, and you have good ideas of your own. And you’re willing to ask us for special requests that will make your business grow. And after all, that’s what we both want. And so, you know, sometimes you make us peddle pretty hard there and we have to turn around those orders lickity split to get them out to you. But we respect that. We respect the fact that you run a tight ship there. You’re a pleasure to deal with because of that. We know that we’re not wasting our time by racing around lickity split here, that you know what you’re doing.

And the other thing that I have had tremendous respect about is that for several years, we have met Larry, your owner, in Frankfurt, at Paperworld. And we know that you travel the world to find the best papers. So we’re honored that we’re amongst those. You know, there is a lot of paper out there and we know that you’re not just shopping the local markets for the paper that you’re selling. You’re looking for the best in the world and that’s a marvelous thing.

And the last thing that I’d like to say, I’m sure Jess has comments about this too, but we think that we have a story to tell. I didn’t tell you that this business began in the trunk of my car 30 years ago or something like that. And it’s been an interesting journey along the way. We had a terrible fire in 1993. We were completely wiped out by fire after 11 years in business. But because everybody who works here is doing it because we believe in it, we survived. And somehow we were able to grow after some tough times. Anyway, I could go on and on but we do think it’s an interesting story and we’ve been interviewed by newspapers and things before, but you’re the first to ever ask us about that story to go on the web and I think it’s fantastic and thank you very much for asking us.

Jessica: I would love to say a few more words about our relationship with LCI too. We’re a fairly tight-knit group here, which is why Nancy knows so much about our relationship with you guys. But I’ve been your customer rep for three years and also have nothing but good things to say. Nancy covered a lot of the points. But I did want to add that, A, it has been a pleasure to watch the relationship grow and specifically to see you guys emphasize cut paper. You’ve grown a real niche, out of all of our different customers that we resell paper to, on having cut papers that are really easy for people to take and use right away. And watching you develop that line and really make it your own and work very hard to find papers that work best for your customers in particular has been something that, A, it’s been a pleasure to work with you on, but, B, it’s been really good to watch you care that must about your customers. And to speak to the speed with which you guys make us work sometimes, I appreciate that because you, in turn, are very responsive to your customers, and you guys also have a very fast turnaround time to your customers. So it’s nice working with people who care for their customers as much as we care for ours.

Nancy: We hope that in these times that are not easy for anybody, that people will choose quality… maybe take more time to choose. I’m thinking of your customers. And so this kind of interview where quality is emphasized, hopefully will help people to say, “Ok, we’re only going to get married this once (I think) so I should choose real good paper.”

Useful Links:

• The Japanese Paper Place web site
• Shop Japanese Paper At LCI

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Here is a transcript of the interview:

What were the circumstances that led to the creation of Mitzvah Market?

Well, I’m a PR [Public Relations] professional and I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for probably a little over twenty years and it really started as an idea on the train commuting back and forth to my PR job. In my personal life, I was planning for my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah and my son’s Bar Mitzvah and us working moms on the train, that was kind of the focus of conversation for weeks on end and I realized that the moms who had been through it before were a wealth of information and they were almost like experts. And at the same time, I was looking to make a career change. I wanted to find something closer to home so I wouldn’t be commuting so much. I ended up launching the web site about eighteen months ago in November of 2008 with a former colleague. Erica Salmon is my other co-founder. She’s not involved with the web site any longer because she was working on another business venture at the same time and she’s really devoting a hundred percent of her time to that. But Erica had a different internet business called Fantasy Fashion League. So she had a lot of internet experience and she’s also a writer, and I had the PR experience and I was a real life Mitzvah planning mom. So we teamed up and she would do all of the writing and I was doing a lot of the research, talking to a lot of the kids, searching the internet, and looking for advertisers and that’s how we kind of divided up our responsibilities.

We launched in November of 2008. We had about 500 registered users or registered readers in our database. We launched as a web site but really as an e-mail newsletter. We call our e-mail newsletter Mitzvah Market Mail and we send that out twice a week and we deliver clever, useful, and entertaining ideas to all of our Mitzvah planning families. We’re hoping to make their planning a little bit less stressful and more fun.

Nice. For someone who doesn’t know the joy and the importance of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, would you like to just tell people what it’s all about?

Sure. In the Jewish religion, a girl is Bat Mitzvah’d at thirteen and a boy is Bar Mitzvah’d at thirteen and these kids go to Hebrew school starting… You really can start as early as you like but most of them start about third grade so I guess they’re about eight years old. And they go once, twice, or sometimes three times a week and they’re learning all about their history and they’re learning how to read Hebrew. And the culmination is this Bar Mitzvah service where they get to read from the Torah. Then, most families have a party-whether it’s a luncheon, or a daytime party or a nighttime party-to celebrate. A lot of areas across the country, these parties have become sometimes a little bit over the top. And if you live in a highly Jewish populated area like I do, the Temples release the dates and they give you a specific date for your Bar or Bat Mitzvah service almost four years in advance.

Wow!

And believe it or not, you really have to start thinking about booking a venue so that you can kind of lock yourself in and not have conflicts with other children because that’s the last thing you want to do is have two parties at the same time and then the kids have to decide which one they’re going to go to.

So the Temple is handling the actual dates. What if there’s a Temple across town with other kids and the kids are sharing friends? Those dates might conflict wouldn’t they?

Yes, well there lies the problem. So my daughter, for example, goes to sleep away camp, and she goes and has become very friendly with kids from all across the Tri-State area. We live on Long Island. So there’s been quite a few weekends where she’s had to make a decision between a camp friend and a home friend and sometimes she’s going to three parties a weekend. Sometimes she’ll go to the cocktail hour for one party and then you take her to the rest of the party in another location. I’m actually part of a carpool with six people and we have an Excel spreadsheet to keep it all straight.

(laughter) Thanks for the background on Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

What was the original mission when you launched the site in 2008? Has your focus changed since then?

It really hasn’t. The idea was really to deliver this mom to mom advice. There are plenty of web sites out there and they’re very good. If you’re planning a Bar or Bat Mitzvah you can certainly visit them and get a lot of information. But the thing that seemed to be missing was that mom to mom conversational tone. And so we tried to create that voice with our newsletters and really make it a friendly place where moms could get great information, whether they were looking for a do it yourself centerpiece or a florist who’s going to do a centerpiece. We wanted to provide cost-saving tips. We wanted to provide any kind of different and unique idea that we came across and kind of do the legwork for them.

You did touch on the newsletter and that’s an important part of the site. I know it was at launch, and is it still one of the most important parts of the site? If someone was to sign up for the newsletter, what might they expect?

Yes, the newsletter is a big part of Mitzvah Market and we encourage readers or Mitzvah planning moms and vendors, whether they’re an advertiser or not, to sign up for our newsletters. It’s all free. The moms can expect to receive all kinds of clever and entertaining ideas.

We also profile kids and their Mitzvah projects. In conjunction with a child having a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, sometimes Temples require you to do what’s called a Mitzvah project which is really some type of community service and some kids just choose to do this on their own. And we have found that these kids are making a real difference in the world and we love profiling kids from all across the country who are coming up with great ideas as simple as collecting pennies and then donating it to a charity or collecting baseball caps and donating it to a hospital children’s unit so kids who are going through cancer treatment have something to put on their head. Another child who is very creative made note cards and sold the note cards, and the money that she raised, she donated to a charity of her choice. These kids are doing amazing things and these organizations are recognizing that these kids are making quite a difference. The Michael J. Fox Foundation actually contacted us and they said, “How do we get these kids to maybe select us as the organization that’s the beneficiary of a Mitzvah project?” So we love profiling the kids.

And another feature that’s become extremely popular are our Mitzvah family spotlights where families supply us with photos from their celebration and we’re able to show our readers ideas that they’ve come up with, whether they’re unique and different or cost saving. Everyone loves seeing how other families celebrate-the themes, the colors, all the special touches that they use.

The other thing I just want to mention why we encourage vendors to sign up for our newsletters, we send out a special newsletter called Vendor Mail once a month. There are now three of us on the Mitzvah Market team and we’re all PR professionals with different kinds of backgrounds and we love to share PR and internet and marketing advice. We basically launched as a startup and I come from the world of corporate America where I had big budgets to do things. I’ve had to learn and I’ve learned a lot of free resources that are available on the internet and I love giving those tips and advice to other vendors when I can. So we send out something called Vendor Mail once a month.

Let’s also talk about your videos now. They’re extremely well-produced.

Thank you.

Tell me how you’ve been able to achieve that high level of production. And feel free to talk about the content, but the production blew me away.

Oh thank you. Well, my background is in television. I worked many years at NBC and CBS and then I was at InStyle magazine and I spent a lot of time with crews doing behind the scenes stories with a lot of celebrities. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that video on the internet is really huge. We wanted to have some videos for the moms to see.

So the first thing I did was I got in touch with a former producer from Entertainment Tonight and Good Morning America and she did a couple of our first videos back in the early days which only was eighteen months ago, but we attended a few of the Bar/Bar Mitzvah showcases. We realized that not everyone can attend these showcases so we were trying to bring the showcase to our readers, if they didn’t live in the Tri-State area, so they could still get a sense of what was out there.

And then we recently teamed up with a production company locally called Symphonic Media. Simon Miller is the producer and he did all of our Mitzvah Minutes which are one minute, some type of informational, “servicy” kind of advice for the moms. One of them is about mailing out your invitations and how you’d like them to be hand cancelled so it’s a good idea to show up at the post office with a smile and a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. That usually does the trick. So the Mitzvah Minutes were really our attempt to deliver the same kind of information but in a different format.

Did that producer bring his set and equipment to you or do you go offsite to film those?

We went offsite to his production studio and ironically, the screen that I sit next to is something that we reported on. He developed that screen. Lots of times, you go to these Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and they have a whole area for the kids set up so that they can do all of their video games-Guitar Hero, Wii, Rock Band-and he created those screens so that the kids could be playing these video games on something very cool. And he has a little camera built in so that you can actually record the kids rocking out to Guitar Hero and then you give that DVD as a favor at the end of the night. So those screens are actually something we reported on and then it worked well for the production value of these videos also.

Read the article, Mitzvah Find: DIY Custom Napkins

Wow, ok. How did you find LCI Paper and our custom printed Bar Mitzvah napkins?

Well, we have Google Alerts set up which is one of our tips in our Vendor Mail. Every company should have this. It’s free to set up through Google and anytime there’s anything on the internet that talks about Bar or Bat Mitzvah-we use all kinds of different keywords-we get alerts. My colleague Bonnie actually found you guys through one of these Google Alerts and we thought it was such a great product and the moms are always looking for ways to do things on their own and it just fit the bill perfectly.

If people wanted to contribute in some way to the site and support what you’re doing, what would be most beneficial for you?

Well, we love it when the moms write in to us and either tell us about something that they did that was creative or maybe something that they saw on the internet. We love it when vendors write in to us and tell us about the latest, greatest thing that they’re doing so that we could let our readers know and use it as editorial. We love it when families want to share their children’s Mitzvah projects with us or do a Mitzvah family spotlight and share some of their photos.

Excellent.

In the last eighteen months, I have learned so many amazing, cost-saving tips from some of our moms that I’ve actually taken my act on the road so to speak, and I now have a seminar that I offer at Temples or people’s homes called Mitzvah-Nomics: Cost-Saving Tips for Bar/Bat Mitzvah Planning. One of my absolute favorites came to us from a family who didn’t want to do the usual sign-in board. A lot of people will take a photograph of their child and blow it up and leave it on an easel with a Sharpie pen and then the guests sign. She wanted to do something different so she took the closet door from her son’s bedroom off the hinges. She painted it a solid color red. She put lines across the top and a little eye hook with a lock hanging off so it really kind of looked like a locker door. She brought this closet door to the party with the Sharpie pen and had people sign it. She brought the closet door back home, re-hung it-and you can re-hang it with the signatures on the inside or the outside-and there is her sign-in board which cost her basically nothing and is back hanging in the child’s room.

Yeah, a thirteen year old would have to love that. That’s awesome.

I just thought that was so clever and I have about twenty other things like that that I thought were so great, so I go around and I talk to these moms because it is overwhelming and it could cost lots and lots of money but there are a lot of very, very unique things that you can do and shave thousands of dollars off of the cost.

Do you have any up-coming dates to announce?

Next week, I am going to be at a Temple in Cold Spring Harbor [NY]; I mean it’s very localized. And then in May, I’m in Oceanside, Long Island at a JCC [Jewish Community Center] so it’s very local. But anyone in the Tri-Star area who is interested, I will travel anywhere.

How would you like those folks to get in touch with you if they’re like to book you?

My contact information is on the web site, but it’s sheri@mitzvahmarket.com and Sheri is spelled S-H-E-R-I.

Thanks to Sheri, co-founder of MitzvahMarket.com. Do you want to share a story or a tip about planning your son or daughter’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah? Post a comment!

Recommended Links:
Bar Mitzvah Invitations
Custom Printed Napkins For Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, Or Any Special Event

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Here is a transcript of the interview:

Your design for your daughter’s Bat Mitzvah invitation is so creative, it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the invitation itself, which has a fantastic story associated with it. Tell me first about your wood block carvings.

Sure Josh. I’ve done some printmaking and screenprinting and etching and that kind of thing in art school. It [wood block printing] was something I’d been meaning to try and then this is something that I was sure I would finish because it had to go out.

(laughter) It’s so important!

Yeah. So many times you try and do something new and you just let it go because there’s more important things. So on the invitation itself, I made two colors so I had to make two different blocks. I carved them out of poplar boards. There’s text that we used for the invitation with a date and time and Eliza’s…all about Eliza and that kind of thing. I also included floral elements that I had lifted from wall paintings of a synagogue in Poland. It was part of a project I had been associated with. There’s an art teacher at Mass Art where I went named Rick Brown and he does all these kinds of projects; some people might have seen him on PBS like raising an Obelisque or something like that in Egypt. He recreated this wooden synagogue. We looked at the paintings and tried to recreate the paintings on the inside which were done with a kind of water paint.

When you say you guys were recreating the synagogue, what do you mean by that?

I’d be surprised if he doesn’t want to rebuild it. It was a wooden building and we recreated the inside parts and the panels of the painting on the roof and cupola which has a certain kind of architectural elements. It’s kind of interesting, these buildings were sort of very drab from the outside and then had inside, different architectural elements like domes and things like that. So we did the inside.

In the ‘20s, these Polish art students; maybe they were Ukrainian it’s hard to know; they went to a few of these wooden synagogues around Poland and Ukraine. It’s in this book called Resplendent Synagogue by a guy named Thomas Hubka. And they took black and white photography of the inside. They did architectural elevation drawings as well, you know, measured it. And then they did some color renderings because it was before color photography was really available to them, so they did color renderings of as much of the
painted interior as they could. They were painted in a totally decorative…just a riot of different flowers, amazing animals, all kinds of things that you would never imagine. They’re very different from modern sacred decoration and that kind of thing.

In World War II, they were all burned down pretty much by the Nazis who marched through Poland—just dismantled them, burned them down, or just destroyed them. There’s one in Israel that somehow was just taken apart and left in like someone’s backyard and then recovered after the war, but most of them were destroyed.

So Rick Brown has maybe as an ongoing project of recreating the inside of this. He gets high school students to work on it and things like that. So maybe he’s built another one, I don’t know. I don’t know how many art classes he’s going to have to talk into this project over many years of rebuilding.

But you liberated this design from the synagogue, and…

Yeah. Oh sure. (laughter) You know, the thing about these designs is they’re so joyous and my daughter really, when we asked her, “What color would you like?” She said, “orange and red.” She just wanted something fun. She wanted people to have fun and she had so much joy about it and I really thought that this has some religious connection to her and it’s also that kind of spirit of her ‘cause it’s just happy, excited, and then it’s sort of also over decorated and decorated and decorated.

How did you get the design into your woodblock?

I think I drew it out, Xeroxed it, and then using a pencil and a Xerox—you know, a thick, dark pencil—sort of rubbed in the parts I wanted to be on each plate. Then I had to flip that over. There’s all kinds of ways to do this, but you could do it like any kind of reverse rubbing where you rub the back of a paper and the pencil goes from the front of your drawing onto the plate so everything is reversed. All the text is reversed, all the designs are reversed and hopefully it all lines up in the end, although that’s not always that easy to do either. So once I had done that, I had carved them out with Ex-Acto knives and a Dremel tool, you know, a motorized tool with different carving bits.

How many hours would you say you put into this?

Oh a long time! I was supposed to be done before we went away for vacation but I wasn’t so I took the whole kit with me—and I don’t really have a press either—so I took the whole kit with me down on vacation and worked on it there too. And then I even had to re-carve all of my blocks because they weren’t deep enough. I had to learn about printing inks and the different papers that I could put it on and the different ways to get it to print without destroying the paper. It took probably a week’s worth, so forty hours at least. (laughter)

As I show this around to people in the office, one of the guys, Will Collins, said when he was a bit younger, he tried his hand at woodblock printing. He just was wondering what paper you did use for this.

Ok, gee I don’t remember. I think I used a kind of hot press woodblock paper I got at an art store. I can’t remember which one it was.

And then I couldn’t use a real press. I used clamps from Home Depot to push the paper onto a block and I had to apply a lot of pressure so I had to put on four clamps on each print and then undo them.

Wow!

Yeah, it was hard.

For each single one…

Yeah.

And do you recall how many you did total?

I think I did at least a hundred and then I had to do them all twice because they had two colors and then, you know, it’s lining it up (laughter) and then, yeah.

Alright, well you need to get your credit and you will get it in this article.

Oh good! (laughter) Finally!

You really used probably some of the finest papers that you could get your hands on. The envelopes are an Aspire Petallics brand metallic copper paper.

Yeah.

You’re using an orange Japanese linen paper as well.

Yeah.

The ribbon that you used, is that like a natural Raffia? Is that how you pronounce it?

I don’t know how to pronounce it. That’s my wife’s business. But she got the natural, sort of a reed-type ribbon as well. We wanted to work with her colors and then you have several different elements; you have your envelope, the reply card, reply envelope, the invitation itself and the different inks that are going to go on there. So I think we had two colors and a white, if I’m remembering. And then in addition we had the element of the tie. So all of that stuff together… I didn’t want to have three different colors where it starts to get confusing. It’s a general balance of papers and inks between boring, on the one hand, and then confusing on the other hand and so hopefully you try to land in the middle. The metallic really complimented the invitation where I was able to mix white in with some of the ink too and that it a metallic look to go with the paper.

So we were thrilled with the paper when we found your company. We had gone to store after store after store. Especially in this case when you’re trying to use some of your labor to offset some of the cost, so we knew that I was going to be doing the invitation myself; I was going to be doing the graphic design on the other elements myself. We had been to art stores; we had been to paper stores and it was hard to find things that would go together. We really appreciated the guidance you guys had and the great price on the paper was helpful too. And all the different elements that you could bring together with the envelopes and the cards themselves…

Your wife has been fun to work with. She’s been in a couple times as you know.

Yes. (laughter) Now we know where to go.

For people that don’t know how important a Bar or Bat Mitzvah is, as a father, can you talk about how significant the event is?

Ok, yeah, sure. I’d love to. Certainly for my wife’s family, this is a very important thing. They’re not tremendously religious, but this is an important family occasion, almost as a study project for your child as well, starting to get a little more serious about their life, the things that they want to do, and the kind of person they want to be. So you’re approaching that from a religious perspective at that point. How does this influence your behavior? How you become an ethical person? In addition, you’re learning Hebrew passages in a very intense way, and you got to communicate them, you got to express yourself publicly, so that can be nerve-wracking for your child and for you because it’s a performance now. You’re hoping that they do well in front of the family but also you just want them to… I don’t know where to go from here. (laughter)

Obviously you want the very best for them.

Right. You want them to be happy and not to have a breakdown at the same time. So you want them to start growing up; this is one more step.

So was it awesome?

Yeah, it was great. She did well. She had a tough passage but she did them both well and got through them. And her friends were great too. They really helped out in the service and everybody was impressed. I was impressed with her friends and how well-behaved they were.

Nice. You’re an artist and a designer. Tell people about your work.

I’m a painter. I do some work in graphics and some animation for the internet. I work in Adobe InDesign mostly and the Adobe graphics programs such as Illustrator and Photoshop. I can do most kinds of graphics projects and multi-page brochures, annual reports, that kind of thing.

What is your web site?

It’s EricMauro.com.

Thanks to Eric for telling us about the unique woodblock printed Bat Mitzvah invitations he designed for his daughter. We hope his hard work and passion will inspire you to create something special for a friend or family member’s up-coming event. If you have any comments about anything that Eric covered, feel free to post it here.

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Here is a transcript of the interview:

I really want to get into why you chose the Stardream Onyx. It’s a black metallic card stock and printing on the stock would present a number of challenges for a lot of people. First, it’s a heavy, thick card stock. Second, it has that metallic finish. And third, it has a dark finish. How did you decide on the stock and how did you overcome the printing challenges?

We not only wanted a unique card, but a high quality unique card. And what actually happened first was that I bought the paper in the business card shaped cutouts. I saw it was very cheap for me to buy it where I could just get forty little business card sized sheets of it. So I bought that as a tester, if you will, to see just exactly what kind of quality this card is, how flexible is it, is it thick enough…all these things first. After I got that was when I decided that this was going to be the right paper to use.

Now, when we thought of doing business cards, again, we said we wanted something unique, but I think we knew that we wanted to use black paper. The interesting part is when most people get black printed business cards done, they print them on white paper. They spray it out with a whole bunch of black ink onto white paper. Well, what this does over the long run is the corners of your business cards start to fold and it doesn’t look as good. So instead of doing the brush ink over the white paper, we knew we wanted to use black paper. And we took it a step further to actually use the Onyx because the Onyx kind of has that metallic look as well.

And what about the printing? Did you farm it out to a professional printer?

Yes, yes, we actually did. We had to shop around for that because not very many places can print on the black paper let alone do some of the designs and stuff that we wanted on our cards. So we actually ended up finding a place that said that they could do it. We thought about two different things. We thought about using blue ink on the card first but then soon we realized that the blue ink was not going to work because it wouldn’t show up as well. That’s when we decided to use the gold and silver which is what you see on our card now. What we again thought about, we were going to use raised lettering first. We decided not to go with the raised lettering because it didn’t really do too much extra for the card. The card itself and the paper itself was so unique and different that we really didn’t have to do anything extra to it besides put our information on there. The beautiful thing about using the Onyx paper was it was already so cool and so interesting and so different from what everybody else had, all we had to do was just make sure that we could get our information on there and it could be read.

You’re good Darius. Are you a marketing guy too?

I am, yes. Our company… (laughter) Our company is an engagement marketing firm. It’s A’Dunte & Associates. A’Dunte is my middle name and what we specialize in is engagement marketing. If you really look at advertising now, you will see that one way communication advertising is dead. And what I mean by one way communication advertising, I mean simply creating a mailing list and sending out some cool, creative brochures to your target audience is just not going to work anymore. When people evaluate people’s brochures and potential customers look at your different web sites, they form their own opinion about it, right? There’s nothing you can do. They will form an opinion about it regardless. And so what we have created is an engagement process which really is one that collectively gives your company or your brand, should we say, mechanisms to actually interact with people talking about your brand discussion. You actually have a vital role in your brand discussion. So you’re telling people about your brand. You’re giving them the insight of why it actually has high quality and then getting a response from them. We do a listen and response type process where we listen to what you’re saying about our brand, we respond to it, then we tell you something and you respond back to us. So it’s an engagement process. It’s a two way street. And that’s really the only way that advertising can work now a days because there’s so many options out there. People are using the internet. They can find out about a company in two seconds by typing it in on Google. We really focus on trying to interact with your audience so that you have an active role in your brand discussion.

Is this a fairly new business? It’s definitely a business for the modern age.

Right, yes, yes. Well we’ve been in business a little over a year now. We’re definitely way ahead of the curve in our thinking and our logic. And I think we know that too and we really try to use that to our advantage because we are ahead of the curve and we definitely are a company that is future focused.

And folks can visit you at ADunte.com, is that right?

Yes.

Any anecdotes about your interaction with Barry? He approached me that you’d be a good candidate for this, so do you have any impressions of him?

Yes, I have a wonderful impression of Barry. He really did a great job. When I actually called and talked to Barry, I was one of those customers who was calling confused. I had no idea what I wanted. I had no idea what type, thickness, or quality of paper, none of that, and Barry really broke it down in layman’s terms for me. So it really helped me to discover what we were actually looking for and what we actually needed. He said, “Hey, check out a sample of something and see if you like it. I really think this paper might be good for you.” I did so and was thrilled and I have just been ecstatic about these cards ever since.

We especially appreciate you guys thinking of our company for a podcast or anything like this. It really, truly is an honor to be considered for this.

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Thank you Darius. And thanks to everyone that listens and subscribes to the LCI Paper Podcast. We hope you’re inspired by people like Darius Walker who use our blank stock in interesting ways. If you have comments about Darius’ experience or you’d like to share your own business card story, post a comment! We’d love to read your feedback and interact with you.

Recommended Link:
Stardream Onyx Business Cards

Joshua Birch

To save the audio to your computer, right click and “save as.”

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Well, as far as the booth goes, I was at an end of an isle which was a great location.

Good.

Still, a lot of people don’t know who I am, what we make so often they would stop and kind of look and I’d have to kind of invite them in. And then once they would start seeing it, literally, their mouths drop as they go, “Oh my god!” There was one time when two people said it at the exact same time and the three of us just cracked up because it was like, you know, that should have been on film. So the reactions are always really positive and really fun to see people who had never seen the products see them in action.

I didn’t actually get out of my booth but maybe twice. So I didn’t get to see an awful lot that was out and about. I can say it looked a lot smaller that in past years. Although I got an e-mail today from CHA saying that it was bigger.

I guess you would know, is a booth quite expensive?

Well, it’s all relative I guess.

Of course.

I have a fairly small booth. I think it’s a pretty expensive undertaking especially for some of the bigger companies. They have larger booths and they have more people in the booths and they go to quite a big expense in making the booths look like little stores and I really don’t do that. I’m more into showing people how to use my products or answer questions about their crafting in general.

Well, you had just a minute ago mentioned there should have been a video camera. But craft fans can catch a glimpse of the show and learn more about you and your products through a video on YouTube right now featured you being interviewed by Donna of Custom Crops.

That was really fun actually. (laughter) When they stopped by and asked if they could video, first they came by and they just saw it; their eyes were just popping. And then they asked if they could come back and they came back with a full crew. And Donna who interviewed me was just adorable. She also just kept going, “Oh really!” You know, just really excited… So that was fun. And it wasn’t that she was putting it on, it was just it’s fun to watch that.

Yeah, you can see that it is genuine. Videos like that are proof of why it makes sense to display at a convention like this because you got this great promotion out of it. That will be up on YouTube forever, and who knows how many hundreds, if not more, are going to be watching that.

I agree and I actually use that to try and explain it. It’s one thing if you have products that everybody knows about or understands how to use them just because of what they’re called, if they’re a punch or whatever. But when you have fairly innovative products that don’t have…it doesn’t bring into mind what they are just by saying their name, then a picture’s worth a thousand words.

Do you want to talk at all about the benefits of being at the CHA’s shows every year?

Sure, yeah. Some of it is absolutely sales at the show, but I really think that a big part of it comes after the show and that would be from press, you know, people like you Josh, you know, calling and saying, “What’s going on?” Maybe I saw them at the show. Other companies, possibly international, that will be ordering-cause it takes some people longer to go back and process it-and I think the interaction from other companies. There’s a number of companies that I saw at the show that possibly will be picking up my product-or could be. And like I said, I rarely got out of my booth, but when I did, it was mostly to talk specifically to other companies. And I really don’t have that opportunity unless you’re at a show like that.

Yep. Let’s talk about the other video…

(laughter)

…that you directed me to on Vimeo.com and it features you promoting the Perfect Printing Pouch and your other products and your angle was a magic act. And you had told me last time, I think after our really great, in-depth, two part interview that this sort of thing, the marketing or the promotion side, kind of stepping out and being the face of the product, isn’t maybe one of the aspects that you’re most comfortable with.

Yeah, that’s saying it lightly Josh. (laughter)

How did you decide on getting up there and doing this sort of magic act as the theme for your presentation?

Well, it was at The Creative Entrepeneur‘s kind of workshop, I guess-convention, and we were asked to present but do it with kind of some fun. And so I was trying to think, “What would be fun?” And last year, CarrieAnne DeLoach had a review of my Perfect Printing Pouch in her Scrap n’ Art e-zine. And she basically says how she loves magic shows and what could be more intriguing than this and blah blah blah, and she goes on to say that when purchasing a tool which claims to accomplish certain tasks, she wants to be sure that she doesn’t need that pretty assistant that she doesn’t get to bring home with her and make sure that it works.

(laughter)

I kind of had that in my mind that a lot of people, when they see my product, especially that very first thing that I always do where I take a marker and I scribble on vellum and then I wipe it with the pouch and I scribble again and it’s so different, and people always go, “My gosh, that’s magic! What do you have in there, fairy dust?” So it kind of just all hit me that that’s kind of an underlying theme of my products is that they seem that they work like magic because you don’t really have to do very much to get them to work. That’s where it came from.

Well, it was a fun watch, and you look really cute too with your top hat.

(laughter) Thank you. I was very, very nervous and what’s kind of unusual is I was a teacher so I’m used to speaking in front of crowds. I could tell you if you want to know how to use my products or whatever, I can do that pretty easily. But when I was standing there and having to go through a routine; I’m definitely not going to become an actor.

(laughter) It didn’t show that you were nervous, honestly.

(laughter) Thank you again.

Recently, you announced the Best Glue Ever. And this is your latest product?

Yes it is.

You want to just tell me about it?

Sure. It kind of is an offshoot from my last product from last year which was Embellie Gellie and Embellie Gellie let’s you pick up and place tiny objects. And they could be die cuts or letters or little sequins and gems. And it seemed like the natural extension. While you’re picking them up and placing them, you need to have an adhesive that works really well for your project. So all the things that I like and didn’t like in adhesives that were available to me were what went into my list. I worked for about the past year with a number of different companies. When I would get one-I’d get a sample and I’d say, “No, this isn’t sticky enough.”

And they’d be like, “It’s so sticky!”
“It’s not sticky enough.”

And I’d get another sample and it would be, “Well, you know it’s kind of stringy because it’s a solvent.” And so I wanted a water base. So each time I would kind of keep narrowing it down and narrowing it down. And believe it or not, one of the biggest things for me was the bottle. The spout had to be very fine-tipped because I want to be able to use it to put out the teeniest little dots when I’m doing letters that are cut out with my die cut machine. Before this, I’d have one one adhesive that would be in a pen, so it would have a very small tip and I’d have another one that would work with metal and I’d have a different one that I could use with fabric. You know, if you look at my adhesive shelf, it’s crazy! So that’s where I kept going, you know, “I want a glue that can do all materials, that has a fine point; it dries quickly; it’s very tacky.” You know, all of the things I say that this glue does in that little video, and I love it! So that’s why it was called the Best Glue Ever and it works really well will the Embellie Gellie as well.

And is the glue something you had designed to your specifications or did you completely fabricate…?

No, I don’t do the actual chemistry, I just say, “This is what I want.” And then I worked with chemists who give me samples and each time I would give them feedback on what I’m looking for. So it’s basically being made to my specs and then bottled how I needed it to be bottled. And then there was another glue that I like a lot that is similar to this in many ways, and one of the things about that one is that it’s in about the same size bottle in height, but it has .83 ounces in it. My glue has 2 ounces of glue. And it wasn’t something that I realized; for years I had been using a glue-paying for a fairly large bottle-and not realizing that it didn’t have much glue in it, so that was another issue for me.

Amy, is there anything else we should touch on?

Oh Josh, I don’t know. I suppose the question is what’s coming next and I don’t have the answer to that so here I brought it up and don’t even have an answer but I guess one of the things is that I don’t really sit around thinking of what the next product is. It’s more or less what I’m having an issue with so I don’t know.

You’re a person who enjoys being creative. If you see a need, personally, you assume that others might have the very same need.

Absolutely, abolutely.

Cool.

Only what’s getting to me now is the fact that I can’t keep designing products from scratch and do everything in the business. So that’s why the links with other companies are so critical to me, so that I can continue to do the things that I think I do best and not try to do everything.

–

Thanks for Amy Roszak, creator of the Perfect Printing Pouch, for taking some time out to talk to me about her experience at the Craft & Hobby Association’s 2010 Winter Convention & Trade Show in Anaheim, California.

Recommended Links:
Buy The Perfect Printing Pouch
Perfect Printing Pouch Creator Amy Roszak – Part 1
Perfect Printing Pouch Creator Amy Roszak – Part 2
Amy Roszak’s ScaPerfect web site

Joshua Birch