week twenty-two 2025

Last week was another busy week in the print shop. Our main business is wholesaling to retail stores. This is also the reason we have limited retail hours, I'm usually in back printing on our antique presses, cutting down cards and scoring them. All very detailed work and not great for interruptions. Last week I printed lots and lots of cards. It was quite productive! I previously spoke a bit about working with larger businesses and all the hoops I gotta jump through. Most of my week was printing for the giant order we got. I'm not even joking when I say 15 minutes after printing all their cards I got an email asking if they could increase the quantities by 200 on two styles. Which I gladly agreed too. But now I have to start from scratch with the barcodes, package labeling and may have to hop back on press. Sigh. I spent a good amount of time reading through their vendor manual again. It's a lot.

I got to spend one afternoon designing for holiday. I started one card and I'm a little wishy-washy on where to go with it. It might end up in the Work in Progress Folder and left there. But I have three other designs I'm hustling to finish. Faire, a wholesale ordering platform we sell through, gives you points for adding new product quarterly. This is how makers earn Top Shop. Which means those shops pop up first in searches and get a badge letting retailers know, they can rely on us for good customer service. Faire does this quarterly so the clock is ticking! June 30th is gonna be here quick. Stay tuned for some new designs.

I spent some time shopping for new-to-us Japanese pens, postcards and super cute stationery. I love finding new stationery to share, it's so much fun. At the moment my shopping cart is a little over budget, surprise, surprise. I'm excited to get some new products in for Stationery Store Day (August 2nd). Speaking of SSD, I'm in charge of designing the Chicagoland Stationery Store Day passport and am hoping to design a logo. I've sketched some ideas but haven't designed on the computer yet. Yeah, I'm old school like that. I prefer to take pencil to paper first, sketch a ton of quick ideas then mix and match elements before I hop on the computer. I find a blank page much more inviting then a blank screen, which feels intimidating to me. More on Stationery Store Day soon but mark your calendars, It's gonna be amazing.

This week is our Letter Writing Meet Up! We hope you can join us and some like minded neighbors to sit and share the magic of snail mail. As usual, we'll clear off our production table, set out fun pens, washi tape and even some vintage typewriters for anyone to use. You can shop stationery, cards, postcards or bring your own. We'll even supply postage for the letters written while you're here.
Thursday, June 5
5 to 7pm. BYOB

Random, randomness...
• Last Tuesday my ride or die friend Jaime and I went to an Astrology workshop at Dovetail Brewery. It was great! And my friends Jesse and Ben from Floriography Fellows took the workshop too. It was a very fun surprise and we had a great visit after, while enjoying some delicious German beers.
• Wednesday Tom and I took our friends Manny and Myriam from Him + Her Vintage to a Cubs game. It was a beautiful but chilly night. We always love hanging out with M+M and the Cubs won, so win-win!
•Tom and I spent the entire weekend working on house projects. I was determined to paint our dining room which happens to be the largest, and of course, not just one color. I painted the ceiling a metallic paint that required two coats then a third coat with a sponge treatment. That took an entire day. I then painted the walls, which required a lot of prep since I have a huge art collection in the room with tons of nail holes. It was a lot. I have muscles I didn't even know existed throbbing at the end of Saturday, only to wake up and do it all over again Sunday. But it's done and it's beautiful!
•Sunday night we went to the Metro to see Dope Lemon. After the opening band, the changeover of the stage took forever or at least over a half hour, which is forever after 2.5 days of home improvements. Dope Lemon didn't hit the stage until 9:15. We heard quite a few songs we know and love, then decided to leave early. It was a great show but we honestly could hardly stay awake, our bodies were so tired.
• Since I spent a lot of time on press this week, I had hours and hours to fill with listening. I started with my usual podcasts - Armchair Expert, Armchair Anonymous, AstroTwins Radio then I switched to music. At first I had Spotify mix things up for me. Then I heard one song from Veruca Salt and decided that was it. I wanted to listen to Veruca Salt Radio and I'm so glad I did. If you enjoy 90's raging women songs, listen! It's stellar and turns out I know 98% of the lyrics to every single song. Which makes work feel not like work at all. 

That covers Week 22! Thanks for following along.