A little press doesn’t hurt.

The Heidelberg Windmill 10 x 15 platen letterpress

A couple of weeks ago, our coolest and local-est newspaper Olympia Power and Light published an article by Lesli Baker written about the press. It’s always nice to get some press because it helps get the word out and I always see an increase in my business afterward.

It also gave me a little swoon to see one of my pictures of Heidi the Heidelberg grace the cover. Isn’t she just a beauty?

I’ve had lots of great comments from people and even a postcard from Arkansas! Since I am alone up here most of the time, it feels good to get some feedback.

Olympia Power and Light — “Rosewood is the new Helvetica”: Jami Heinricher on the art of letterpress.

I am just getting back into my exercise wheel like the fluffy hamster that I am after spending a stupendous week in southeast Alaska with my sisters and my dad and his wife. One of my sisters, Jackie and her husband Guy own a beautiful house in Tenakee Springs, off the coast of Juneau. We spent six of seven days on their boat fishing for salmon, crab, shrimp, halibut and managed to catch those as well as red snapper, true cod and rockfish. Every day we saw humpback whales morning noon and night. I saw two full breaches… it was absolutely stunning to see huge whales IN THE AIR. There were pods of orcas and Dahl’s porpoises and seals crisscrossing our path, too. It was like a crazy National Geographic expedition where the scientists eat a good portion of what they find and stay in a five-star hotel every evening. Narrator: “This magestic and complex creature turned out to be incredibly delicious later that evening, sprawled over a crisp romaine salad with a delicate herb dressing and a sensitively-chosen bottle of pinot gris.” It was such a crazy bounty and I suppose once in awhile it’s alright to partake. National Geographic meets Food Channel.

My beautiful sisters, Jackie and Deb.

Incredibly fun. Thank you, Jackie and Guy.

Just-barely-dead crab salad. Embarrassingly good.

 

 

 

 

Gracious

Designed the layout with papercut illustration by Nikki McClure, and designed the red "chop" logo for Jay T.

How time flies. Best of intentions, but busy, always busy. Blogging never seems to wind up at the top of my priority list. However, there are some favorite projects I’d like to share. I am just going to give you a visual sampling and catch up that way.

I did not design this, but printed and foilstamped it.

The spring has been a bit disappointing around here. The garden is really mixed. Some things prosper, others might as well get torn out of the ground. The weeds seem to be doing VERY well. But I still consider myself very fortunate to have my little bit of ground to work, and appreciate the general fertility of this planet which through all the climate disruptions, pollution, and other factors that make it appear that humans want the extinction of species more than anything, it perseveres… it does everything it possibly can, because it seems it cannot do otherwise.

Designed and printed this for my good friend Gregory Smith, who designed and built the beautiful Dohm Sayre Bindery here at the press.

I wish we could say the same about humanity.
With all we know about ourselves, we can’t seem to behave thoughtfully on a global scale. My facebook status a few weeks ago said “Aggregate behavior tends toward the irresponsible.” I do believe that. Each in our own little way, take a little more than we return to the system (as Americans we can hardly do otherwise), and this all adds up to one gigantic problem of scale. And since it appears that part of human nature involves taking for yourself what you fear others will take in your stead, it takes an extraordinary human emotional intelligence to relinquish the many, many conveniences and easy benefits our global culture has to offer. When corporations are falling over themselves to offer you every imaginable delicacy, convenience, style variation, and fetish object (like my iPhone)… when the system is geared to siphoning money off of every transaction, no wonder it relentlessly encourages us to spend, spend, spend. Prop this thing up. Inflate the bubble.

A fun project for my favorite coffee roaster... with an illustration I made from a classic scene from Spinal Tap.

I just love how we were recently schooled on the nature of the housing “bubble” and admonished that we did not take our lesson from the tech “bubble”, when the whole economy IS a bubble, and the prosperity of everyone, it would seem, depends upon every one of us expelling as much hot air into it as possible, even if we must borrow a king’s ransom to do so. Truly, if we all trimmed ourselves back to the absolute essentials, the whole thing would explode and come crashing down like the Hindenburg that it is. Think of all the people whose livelihoods depend upon our common agreement to  pursue extravagance. That is, almost every one of us. Letterpress is certainly an extravagance.

Kellie drew this lovely bee herself, and I worked it into a logo. She is a friend from elementary school, and my beekeeping bud and helper.

Just one piece of a large portfolio of wedding pieces for a wonderful customer. I love my customers!

It just makes me want to be thoughtful about what we really, truly need. I know this is a hackneyed sentiment at this point… even consumer culture has fetishized these notions and printed them stylishly on t-shirts and notepads and calendars that fly off the shelves, enriching someone. Yet, the question remains. It is irreducible. What do we really, truly need? If our communities were intact and observed the sort of interdependence that is natural to our species… if we took care of each other, healed each other, fed each other, fixed each other’s wheelbarrows, played with each other, and legislated the fact of our importance to each other, we would need very little else.

Cider Heads!

A letterpress coaster for the Northwest Cider Association

I recently had an opportunity to print for David White, a new friend whose design work I greatly admire. I first became aware of David’s work when I saw a beautiful catalog he produced for a company called Espresso Parts here in Olympia. Much later, I found that he was also the designer for the Olympia Coffee Roasting Company, a sister company to Espresso Parts, (and my total fave coffee roaster in Olympia, incidentally.) I finally introduced myself to David one day when I overheard him talking about letterpress and thought he might like to know about The Sherwood Press.

David White

David is not only an extraordinary designer, but he is also a cider head. I don’t know if that’s an expression, but it should be. He makes cider, seems pretty obsessed with the whole idea of cider, and has helped to form the Northwest Cider Association. He collaborated with a fellow graphic designer and cider-maker, Lars Ringsrud, on a promotional coaster for the association. He describes Lars as an east-of-the-Cascades version of himself. They are both cider-heads (still don’t know if that’s an expression), both extremely talented graphic designers, and both worked at coffee roasting companies. Weird, huh?

Lars Ringsrud's card

Well while the coasters were in the works, Lars also decided to get some business cards printed for himself. His design is elegant, perfectly balanced, and absolutely suited to letterpress, and therefore a joy to print.  I’m hoping that he will send more of his great work my way. It’s such a pleasure to print for a great designer.

I have to say, that I like cider, too, and was even thinking about building my own cider press with the help of a very capable friend this summer. (Or watching him make it, while saying appreciative things constantly, is probably more realistic.) I haven’t gotten around to it, because while I am pursuing a variety of household and homesteading projects, I must admit that the cider press is about halfway down on the list, which is dishearteningly long. Maybe by the time I start to get substantial numbers of apples, I will get around to building that press. Then, I can be a cider maker, designer, and, well, at least a serious coffee drinker.

Lars Ringsrud

Print and Popsicles!

It’s always fun designing and printing for friends, and this project was one of my favorites of the past summer: a punch card for a seasonal popsicle stand on the west side of Olympia. Friends Jen and Kim make all-vegan frozen treats from locally-sourced fruits and vegetables (“whenever possible,” says the copy on the reverse of their card). Well I am an aspiring locovore, but I have to say their frozen bananas are the serious banana bomb and I don’t care HOW FAR the fair-trade chocolate and organic bananas had to travel to reach me.

Jen and Kim both work at the beloved Olympia Food Co-op, and they are a crazy dynamic duo of urban farming, tiny-house building, artistic creativity and popsicle invention. They are also my marathon training buddies. We’re doing the half.

The adorable little character illustrations were provided, and I worked-up a typographic and color treatment to try to partially reflect the high refreshment quotient of the product. We chose a crisp white paper stock so the colors would pop-sicle. It’s so nice not to print something that’s brown and green. I mean, in the Pacific Northwest we have NOTHING BUT brown and green and grey. Yet everyone wants brown and green and sometimes, yes, even grey cards. Come on, people. I still say that the Scandinavians have it right. Lots of light neutrals punctuated by bright color to combat the northern dim.

Urban Farming Broadside Series has begun!

The latest letterpress broadside edition

This broadside is not precisely new, but is the first of a series of urban farming letterpress broadsides I have planned, so stay tuned.

You could say I’m in the midst of my own urban farming craze. Last year I started with my first fruit trees (and I have my first pie’s-worth of Spartan apples just picked two days ago), raised beds, an herb garden, strawberries, blueberries, elderberries and tomatoes. This spring I continued with my first chickens, first bee hive, and a three-stage composting system. I also added asparagus, potato beds, more tomatoes, grapes, an olive tree, two figs, and cranberries, the last of which are admittedly not doing very well yet.

And what’s next? A grape arbor, new beds cut from old lawn for corn, raspberries and dahlias, another apple tree, a new chicken coop, and hopefully another hive of bees if I can catch next June’s probable swarm in time.

Last year I also bought a deep freezer and filled it with hand-picked blueberries, the most delicious peaches EVER from the Olympia Farmer’s Market, local, grass-fed beef from Nelson Family Farm, local pork from Lucky Pig Farm, pink salmon from Lummi Island Wild Salmon (reefnet-caught), homemade salsa, homemade tomato sauce, oven-dried tomatoes, frozen cherry tomatoes, blackberries, and red plums from a friend’s unbelievably productive tree, which remarkably this year produced a fraction of the fruit of last year. And this shabby performance by local fruit trees appears to be the norm. What a spring…

And maybe I have gone a little overboard, but it was all a nice way to deal with ever-increasing negative feelings and anxiety brought about by what appears to me the slow-motion collapse of civilization.  I could honestly say that Sarah Palin and her ilk helped fuel me through the work that it took to peel peaches, can plum sauce, pick berries, and do an exhaustive amount of research on local meat producers, including hours of on-the-phone interviews with the farmers, who I found very pleasurable to talk to.

Being afraid of Sarah Palin might not be the very best inspiration for trying to become an urban farmer, but it’s something. And truthfully it has given me vigorous determination.

Peepers!

Greetings from The Sherwood Press!

Okay, so this WordPress site has been up quite a long time without any attention. But NOW IT’S TIME to do something about it. My plan is to keep this main page– which admittedly is really supposed to be a blog– more or less bloggy by uploading photos of printing I’ve been doing, so as to keep people informed of the cool projects going on here, sometimes with design and printing, and sometimes just the printing.

I love working with my customers. I spend a lot of time alone up in my little press, so I enjoy having customers come and spend some time telling me about what they are doing, what they need from me, and collaborating with them on design ideas. It often ends up that people spend far more time here than either one of us expected or intended. But it’s genuinely my FAVORITE thing about having a small business like this.