Ladyfingers NewsLetter Press: Email #3
Greetings readers! You may notice this email is arriving on a Friday instead of the planned Thursday arrival. What the heck was so important yesterday that we couldn’t finish the newsletter in time? Well:
- Kid #1 fell off bike on the way to school, applied first aid to the knee (she’s ok)
- Tried to prevent Kid #2 from throwing a shovel full of dirt on another kid before school started (was unsuccessful)
- Walked an energetic dog
- Finished building our new blog!
- Had therapy (wew, couldn’t miss that one!)
- Wrote an instagram post about this cool project we did a few years ago
- Reformatted it to post on our blog
- Spoke with a nurse about this weird armpit rash I have! (TMI sorry)
- Met with our press operator who is psyched (as are we!) to introduce new programming! Stay tuned!
- Picked our kids up from school, coordinated a playdate for Kid #1
- Got a text from a single parent: “hey, my car broke down and can you watch my two kids until I can pick them up?”
- 90 minutes later the kids get picked up
- Finally took Kid #3 to the skate park, who has been waiting patientlyemotionally for Morgan or I to take him
- Coordinated pickup for Kid #1 from playdate
- Dinner (woof, don’t judge us, but got the kids McDonalds because after a day like this, we just needed SOMETHING to be easy.)
- Realized that my video in our blog post had annoying background sound, fought with Adobe Express to try to fix it. Got very grumpy.
- Baths for kids, bedtime
- Stared at the lunar eclipse for a long time and took these blurry photos* through our telescope that we got for free!
- Wrote a response to a 2-star google review (keep reading!) that I may or may not actually post but it felt really good to get it out of my system
- Finally, bedtime at midnight
- OMG did you really just read all that
So please accept my apologies for not getting these words to you sooner, it was on my to-do list, I promise.
As a consolation, I have a present for you all! Well, it’s actually a present that you gave yourselves lol. I collected all the songs and album recommendations that you sent me from last week’s newsletter and made one big playlist! There’s some real gems in here. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I have!
Brave Irene's
Moving on to something that is just as life-fulling as music, while also being life-fulfilling on so many more levels, as if that’s possible, have you heard of Brave Irene’s? Geez, how do I summarize Brave Irene’s. Hmm. Well, maybe I’ll start by saying it’s headed by one of the most magical people I’ve ever met in my life: she’s a writer, a poet, the kind of person who reads weekly with incarcerated women, the kind of parent we all aspire to be, the kind of friend who always shows up, the kind of human who lives by their values and their belief that there’s still magic in the world and would like to share it with you—Mia Alvarado.(How is it possible, that, after re-reading what I just wrote, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface?)
Brave Irene’s is basically a kind of Mia-esque bouquet of connection and goodness, manifested through events, literature, community work and more. They have an instagram. They also are having a fundraiser! Mia came to the shop a few weeks ago to print her beautiful invitations on the riso, and as what usually happens when you start a conversation with her, our casual studio chatter soon engulfed me like a moth to a wildfire. I hope you have the chance to interact with and support Brave Irene’s, even if it’s virtually.
Project Showcase
If you missed our instagram or (more in-depth!) blog post from yesterday, I shared a project we worked on a few years ago that holds a special place in our hearts. We’ve been eager to share a peek into our process as well as the finished product… it just took us a little while to get around to it.
Morgan and I have always been passionate about historic preservation, which we learned a lot about from Lucie Searle in Providence. We use 120-year-old presses to create our work. Morgan drives a car from 1985. People say, “they don’t make ‘em like they used to,” and they’re damn right.
So when the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum reopened after a two-year HVAC and restoration project, we were thrilled they came to us for invitations to celebrate the grand reopening. Sure, we talked about logistics: where, when, how many… but I’ll never forget sitting at our table in the shop as Curator of History Leah Witherow beamed with enthusiasm about the wonderful things going on there, including their initiative to add more works and artifacts made by women artists to the museum’s collection and their commitment towards telling the stories of the land through a more informed lens. How do we present and honor the truth when our city’s history has mostly been written by white colonists? How do we make access to this information as easy as possible? They’re doing the work, and doing it well.
We toured the museum while it was still under construction and noted decorative and architectural details that inspired our final design. Hopefully you’re able to watch our video, which shows how I started with a sketch and refined the design—all by hand, albeit on an iPad—and included key features that were site-specific to this historic institution. We letterpress printed the folded invitations on thick cotton paper using our Vandercook Old Style 219 letterpress, with a tipped-in card and added risograph printing for details that needed extra time to finalize.Like so many other awesome projects that are sitting in our basement archive under the shop, the story of this project has collected dust for too long. I look forward to sharing more stories about this work!
I'm Having Libra Problems
This week I was sketching some ideas for an anti-flock poster design, but I can’t seem to make up my mind. Which one do you like best? Should we make more than one? Time to bust out your art school critique skills and send me your thoughts!
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These newsletters keep getting longer, but as one reader wrote back to tell me after the last one, “I do not know the last time I read a newsletter down to the footnotes, but thank you for spreading joy!” Hopefully you feel the same!
Now, as the final cherry on top, I give you a tale of two reviews, both received this week. My, how they differ!
Since there seems to be some confusion over our hours, perhaps this is a good opportunity to shed some light on the subject. In case you've missed our messaging around this choice like this poor chap on the right has, think of our storefront as a farm/farmers market metaphor. Sometimes we're busy growing our vegetables at the farm, and sometimes those veggies are for sale at the farmers market. However, our stall would be empty if we don't tend to our crops! Our store is only open 3 days a week because the other 3 days are filled with making the work to sell not just in our shop, but in a whole bunch of other ones, all over the world. (And yes, lucky us, we get one day off!)
If you’ve read this far, you're likely aware we’re more than just a store. Sometimes our customers are quick: grab a card and go; other times, people want to come in and talk to us about their cancer-stricken loved one, and do we have a cancer card that’s funny instead of somber? Or, they’re relocating from Florida/Texas/Insert-Red-State-Here and want to know what it’s like for a family with a trans child here? Which school districts are the most inclusive? What neighborhood offers the smallest chance of a hate crime being committed upon them? Do we have a card for someone who just got a hysterectomy?** We keep a box of tissues behind the register for the customers who hug us and tearfully express their gratitude that our store exists and that we make the work that we do. Sometimes this happens more than once a day. As you can imagine, it’s hard to design, manufacture and distribute our 600+ SKUs to over 1,000 shops around the world when we’re locked in a meaningful embrace with a stranger, so we made the decision a few years ago*** to partition our time between working to sustain our business and working to sustain a vibrant and diverse community here in Colorado Springs. Some people get it. Like the customer on the right. Others... not so much.
I don’t often respond to reviews, but this cheery fella who has no idea how our business works (but feels the need to call us selfish! 😂) may receive the honor of a reply. Stay tuned to see how that goes 😬.
Footnotes:
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** Been meaning to make a hysto card, and when someone asked for one recently, we busted this one out on the riso the next day.
*** I know this archived email said we'd be open 2 days a week starting October 11, 2024, but we added a day this summer to accommodate the (actual, not the metaphorical) farmers market that happens across the street in Acacia Park on Sundays. We'll continue to be open on Sundays until it starts getting cold.
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