clouds

Chantale Doyle, from the Greatest Store in the High Desert, Mt. Fuji General Store, was kind enough to let me try turning some of her delicate cloud drawings into letterpress. She upped the ante by coming down to LA to print, and we decided to break the rules by adding new inks without removing the old ink from the press (gasp!). excellent results (though i wish i had taken better photos). Chantale packed these prints off to shows in Vancouver and Japan & I will be slowly using the same plates for cards and books & will post them to etsy as they appear...

updates!

Alex (with a little help from Womack) ultra-kindly plugged away under the studio lights and photographed ALMOST all the new stuff from Renegade. and I am plugging away at updating the etsy site--I still have a ways to go, but I love how bright and cheerful everything looks in the shop. hooray for alex. I'll post the highlights here in the coming weeks, including the much-labored-over and miraculously-finished-on-time Produce Calendar, as well as the cloud prints I've been working on with the extremely patient & talented Chantale Doyle, owner of Mt. Fuji General Store.

post renegade post

lucy and aandrea looking tough.

we had a great time at renegade, or at least thanks to team krank (lucy, aandrea, alex) *I* had a great time at renegade. lots of people came, many krank pressed items went home with customers, i met new-to-me & inspiring co-vendors (see: sycamore st press, tugboat printshop, erinzam books, 3 fish studios, orangyporangy, mincing mockingbird to name a few)...

and alex is kindly going to photo the new items so I can finally refresh the etsy site, very very soon.

much gratitude to my helpers and renegade generally for such a nice experience.

RENEGADE!

Am thrilled to report that I will be vending at the 1st Annual Los Angeles Renegade Craft Fair. Renegade is the craft fair granddaddy, but until now was keeping to other locations (started in Chicago & have branched to Brooklyn and San Francisco). I'm looking forward to their posters as much as anything (always a cool drawing, always with a cool owl). And I only have seven weekends between now and then (though I'll be in Butte for one of them...)!! yikes.

new pattern incarnations

new sets of tags from the pattern prints:


and now the book sets come in a Krank Press bag:

business kards

job work

I have been lost in custom invitation land and am just now returning my sights to krank press retail adventures. Of the invitations recently printed, this is the one I'm most smitten with (especially considering that this was the second draft, after I scrapped a less-fun first idea...):

calendars, past and future

a sooper dooper belated link to krank press's mention in the NY Times moment blog way way back in January.

Am ruminating over which calendars will get reprinted for 2010, to join the new calendars currently in the pipeline. Alex has already compiled the 12 entries for a new LA history calendar--somehow he managed to find 12 equally giddy nuggets of history gold for round 2. And per Gina Kwon's *excellent* suggestion, I am also creating a southland-oriented seasonal food calendar (both what to grow in your yard and what to buy at the market). I think that one will be 'perpetual' (ie, not year specific)--we used to call them birthday calendars...

the bird calendar, in full

Victim of my own success, I had to reprint this year's calendar to meet my friends-and-family needs, so while I collated them the other night, I finally photographed each page for blog posting purposes. I'm going to try and figure out how to make some of these into cards--I'd love to have more ways of using the bird cuts, esp the owls, raven, roadrunner, quail, kingfisher...

LA Times

Unbeknownst to me, Krank Press's new bird calendar was featured in the LA Times today (I'm in Philadelphia right now, shrouded in fog). If anyone has found their way to this blog via the internets and is wondering if there are more calendars, there are indeed! I've reposted more calendars on Etsy and will keep an eye on the inventory to be sure they don't run out again.

the newest calendar

This year's calendar is bird-topical--it was going to be a global "odd birds" compendium, but once we started researching we decided LA has at least 12 odd birds of its own. The full roster: the belted kingfisher, the surf scoter, the burrowing owl, the california quail, the brown pelican, the black-necked stilt, the black skimmer, the greater roadrunner, a show rooster, the common raven, the long-billed curlew and the eared grebe. I'm super happy with how it turned out, so much so that I will post more pics of the calendar when I have a chance to take them.

taxis of tokyo

While standing outside of Itoya in Ginza, I decided I wanted to try printing a series of cards of the identical-but-for-their-color-coding 80's era taxis of Tokyo:

yard fauna card sets

I printed a card set with 5 of the animals from the yard fauna calendar (the bushtit, the possum, the coyote, the kestral and the raccoon).

pattern sets

I printed 5 patterns (polka dot, plaid, stripes, diamonds, and triangles) and turned them into cards:

gift tags:

and blank books:

new printed items pt.1

happy holiday version of the thank you cards. super happy with how they came out:

bird tags:

and exclamation cards and tags: