Font Frenzy

Tearing your hair out, trying to decide between Zaphino and Garamond for your next party invitation? Or maybe it's the choice between Letter Gothic and Univers for your new business card that gotten you all worked up? Help is on the way! Thanks to the So You Need a Typeface poster by Julian Hansen - and a special thanks for Apartment Therapy for posting about this today.

Pick up your own copy of the poster here for $22.

Salt + Wine + Chocolate + Flowers = Super Content Rachel

OK - nothing to do with paper (well, maybe a little, because they sell books?), but I wanted to share my favorite shopping find from our trip to Portland: The Meadow.

I know. I'm usually a sucker for the stationery stores. And Portland had some great ones - more on that tomorrow. But for now let's stick to the more sensory pleasures - specifically taste, touch and smell.

I was in sensory overload the minute I walked into The Meadow - a store dedicated to salt, chocolate, wine and flowers.

Best things on earth.


So what did I walk away with? Well, the first thing that drew me into this store was the display of Himalayan salt blocks, dredged from the mountains of Pakistan. Snagged one in that looks like this:

We bought the tableware-grade block, meaning it can't go in the oven, but they have both table-ready and oven-ready blocks. More details on where these slabs come from and how to use them on the Meadow's site:

The Meadow's Himalayan salt slabs, salt blocks, plates, platters, bowls and dishes of Himalayan pink salt are found exclusively in Pakistan's Himalaya Mountain Range. There we find a quarry where men and mules pull massive boulders of luminescent pink ore from the earth, glowing like freshly harvested meteorites. These 500 million year old boulders of salt are then sliced into cubes and platters and planks and chunks for use on your table.

Serve thinly sliced apples and Mozzarella on a cool salt brick and experience how a delicate saltiness is infused into the tart apple and creamy cheese. Try beef carpaccio or ahi tuna sashimi on a salt brick and watch the salt cure the edges of the fish. Heat the Himalayan salt slab on the stovetop and sear thin strips of flatiron steak (right) or medallions of kobe beef!

With that write up, how could I not pony up? Here's what it looks like all dolled up:

We also picked up a bottle of meadow flake salt, pictured below, which our meadow tour guide told us was excellent on salads (true story).

The least desirable part of this store is how incredibly far away it is from DC (and how ridiculously heavy those salt blocks are - man! That thing weighed a ton in my carry-on bag!). But don't fret! Word is The Meadows is opening an East Coast branch in New York City in the coming months. Perfect timing. More details when I get them.

Paper Art

Thanks to my friend Jaime and his lovely girlfriend Amy for cluing me in this week to paper art - a community of artists and designers who work with, as opposed to on, paper.


Artists like Miami-based Jen Stark (see her work Afterglow, below) start with construction paper and an Exacto knife and end up with paper sculptures that that literally leap off the page, incorporating vibrate colors and patterns. Learn more about Stark's creative process here.
Others, like Danish contemporary artist Peter Callesen, take a more subdued approach to paper art, focusing much on the open spaces created by paper cutting as on the paper itself.

Peter explains his choice of medium on his site:

Lately I have worked almost exclusively with white paper in different objects, paper cuts, installations and performances. A large part of my work is made from A4 sheets of paper. It is probably the most common and consumed media used for carrying information today. This is why we rarely notice the actual materiality of the A4 paper. By taking away all the information and starting from scratch using the blank white A4 paper sheet for my creations, I feel I have found a material that we are all able to relate to, and at the same time the A4 paper sheet is neutral and open to fill with different meaning. The thin white paper gives the paper sculptures a frailty that underlines the tragic and romantic theme of my works.

Want to learn more about paper art? Check out Papercraft: Designs and Art with Paper. I thumbed through this book at Powell's bookstore in Portland last week. It's fantastic. Interested in bringing paper art into your home? Etsy offers a number of pieces of sale, like these whales by UK-based Mr. Yen:

Look What Came in the Mail This Week....

My sister-in-law's lovely wedding invite!! Congratulations, Joanna and Ryan. Nice paper products. My camera phone shot does not do this invitation justice. The paper feels so soft and yummy (Crane all the way), and the letterpress is super elegant.

Jo, mind if I share your secret? Invitations by Designers Fine Press, out of Ohio. Calligraphy by John Valentine of Pen Palette.
Less than two months till the big day. Very exciting!

Summer Travels: Visit to the Crane Papermaking Museum

I know......I've been bad this last month. Work, like the District itself, has heated up big time, and I know that's not an excuse, but it's hard to sit down with Blogger after a long day in front of Excel.

Summer hasn't been all work though. I've found time for some pretty good play time, too. Like our trip two weeks ago to the Berkshires where I had a chance to tour the Crane museum of papermaking - my own personal heaven.

Driving through the tiny town of Dalton, Mass, it's hard to imagine that this Berkshire town would exist without Crane and Co. Every building seems to bear the Crane family name.

Now in its eight generation of family ownership, Crane still makes its paper using the finest white cotton ...

Our tour of the museum took past cabinets filled with of stately sheets of presidential paper, invitations to British royal galas hosted by H.R.H, even MLB All-Star Game blowouts hosted by the home team.
But when I asked our tour guide about Crane's social stationery lineup, he said sales of personalized paper have dropped dramatically over the last few decades. Invitations and stationery once represented half of Crane's sales. Today, he said, social paper represents about a 1/6 of sales.

Social papers aren't even made on the premises anymore -- instead they're subcontracted to a company in Wisconsin and then shipped back to the Massachusetts HQ for the finishing touches, such as engraving and bordering.

These days the Dalton machines are used primarily to manufacture currency paper complete with all kinds of ingenious security measures and durability standards that are a bit more rigorous than the standard wedding invitation.

So I thought I was walking distance to a social stationery mecca -- not quite. Still, the museum and Dalton did not disappoint. There were stacks of free samples on the way out (stationery, not currency). See what a happy camper I was?