There is still time to order a gift or card for Mother’s Day! We have a new frameable print of Becca Stadtlander’s Flowers Card image and a fantastic new Happy Mother’s Day Card by Martine Workman! Place your order by tomorrow (May 8th) and ship via USPS Priority Mail for delivery by Saturday (US only).

Our old pal & LO artist Martine Workman is going to be at the Brooklyn Zine Fest in Williamsburg this weekend with her new cards and Water and Fall mini book that she made for us, her newspaper project The Methow Mill, Prince Food (her zine about food in Prince songs), and the perennial favorite Hunks, among other goodies. Admission is free and open to the public so go meet some great artists and writers!

You can read an interview the Zine Fest did with Martine and there is also an article about the Fest in the New York Times.

Brooklyn Zine Fest 2013
Sunday, April 21st 11am-6pm
Public Assembly
70 N 6th Street, Brooklyn, NY
FREE, all ages & open to everyone

The awesome UK graphic arts festival Pick Me Up starts this Thursday at Somerset House in London and provides the perfect opportunity to finally share one of our big projects with you! One of the international rising stars of the graphics arts world specially selected by an industry panel to be featured in the Pick Me Up Selects artist showcase is Daniel Frost and we’re thrilled to announce that he’s working on a children’s book with us!

The picture book takes place in his wonderful fictional town of Frostville–it’s a charming place populated with colorful characters and humorous city life. We love Daniel’s elongated figures, use of bold colors, expressive simplicity, and sense of the comical.  It’s been fun working with him on developing the book and we’re super excited with how it’s coming along. It won’t be released until the fall and we’ll be posting updates, but you can get sneak peaks of process and ideas on Daniel’s blog and if you’re in London, you can meet him and see his work-in-progress at Pick Me Up!

Pick Me Up (London, UK)
April 18th-28th, 2013
Somerset House, Embankment Galleries
Daily 10am-6pm (Last admission 5:15pm)
Thursdays 10am-10pm (Last admission 11:15pm)
£8, concessions £6, Festival Pass £15 (buy tickets online)

San Francisco artist Jennie Smith (who recently created two great cards for us as well as several amazing poster calendars) has a new art show called “Sending Out A Song” opening this Thursday at the Rena Bransten Gallery. Jennie is an incredibly talented artist and her work is the kind that must be seen in-person (and if you go to the opening you can meet Jennie herself!). Here is the description of her show from Rena Bransten’s site:

Jennie Smith’s delicate graphite drawings and watercolors continue to express her concern with specific ecological issues, such as the floating continent of plastic debris known as the great Pacific Garbage Patch, the migration of indigenous people, and the ecosystems of small, vulnerable animals. Equally enchanted by natural phenomena – wind, animal habitat, whale songs – and the creative, mythical, and crafted remnants of the human world, Smith responds with metaphorical renderings that entwine narrative threads to describe the gravity or wonder of her subjects and their relationships to the forces of nature. She says, “I draw what is close to me, what is beyond my physical reach, and what is from the realm of the imagined.”

Jennie Smith
Sending Out a Song
March 21 – May 4, 2013
Reception: Thursday, March 21, 5:30-7:30pm

Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street (between Kearny and Grant)
San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 982-3292

 image from Rena Bransten Gallery

After 7 years of making cards, we’re finally taking the big leap into specific holidays! We’re kicking things off with this upcoming season’s popular slogan of  “moms, dads, and grads” with new artwork by our good pal Martine Workman. While the cards are off at the printer, we thought we’d give you a preview of our Mother’s Day card and a peek at the process.

Martine started sketching out her ideas during her residency at VCCA and we zeroed in on this drawing in particular as we felt we hadn’t seen anything like it before as far as Mother’s Day cards go (or otherwise). “Fancy string” made us think of bakers twine and the typography was just something unusual. As you can see, it started out as a very rough idea, so the next step was for her to draw and ink the lettering and try out some colors.

Next she added the detail to the string and cleaned up the drawing. Harking back again to bakers twine, we thought blue and green would make for a nice combo–it’s feminine without using the typical pink. The standard red, while most familiar, was a bit too candy cane/Christmasy for the occasion. The lettering looked great, but felt too stark on just white so she played with lots of combos for the background, pumping up the color for the lettering so it wouldn’t get lost in the mix.

There were a lot of great options, but in the end, we both had a gut response to one version as being the one, and thus our new card was born! We can’t wait to have the final printed product in our hands in a couple weeks so we can share it with you and the moms in your life.

There is still time to get your holiday gifts in time for December 25th (in the US)! Just use our handy shipping guide below!

US Orders:
USPS First Class Mail or UPS Ground: order by Monday the 17th
USPS Priority Mail or UPS Three-Day Select: order by Wednesday the 19th
UPS 2nd Day Air: order by Thursday the 20th
UPS Next Day Air Saver: order by Friday the 21st
USPS Express Mail: order by Saturday the 22nd

If you choose Free Shipping it is unlikely that it will arrive on time.

It’s another holiday sale weekend of double the fun here in Portland! December 8th and 9th bring us two days of overflowing craftiness in the form of Crafty Wonderland‘s Super Colossal Holiday Sale at the Convention Center and the 2nd Portland Bazaar at Sandbox Studios. Admission to both events is free so come on down and say hi and make a huge dent in your gift list!

Crafty Wonderland Super Colossal Holiday Sale
Oregon Convention Center, Hall C (we’re at booth 23)
777 NE MLK Jr. Blvd, Portland, OR 97232
December 8th-9th, 11am-6pm
free admission

The Portland Bazaar
Sandbox Studio, 420 NE 9th Ave, Portland, OR 97232
December 8th 9am-5pm, December 9th 9am-4pm
free admission

Hey Seattle, the Urban Craft Uprising huge winter craft show is this weekend (December 1st-2nd) and not only are we going to be there with lots of LO goods, we helped facilitate this year’s show poster/t-shirt art by our good friend, LO artist, and former Seattleite Martine Workman! Martine won’t be able to make it out from D.C., but we’ll have her awesome zines and mini newspapers available for sale. So come out and see us (booth 58) at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall from 11am-5pm. It’s free to get in, the first 100 people in line each day get a free swag bag, and there are free raffle drawings, craft demos, and book signings each hour. What a great way to shop for the holidays!

Urban Craft Uprising
Seattle Center Exhibition Hall
321 Mercer Street
December 1st-2nd, 11am-5pm
admission is free

We’re excited to bring you two new cards from our long-time collaborator, SF artist Jennie Smith! Jennie has brought her love of nature to these hand-drawn cards spilling over with plant life. Through her mediums of graphite and water color, her unique hand gives you a great way to send a Birthday message or Holiday greeting. Both cards are printed in Oakland, CA on 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. They’re available in our online shop now and at our SF Mini Store at the end of the week!

On Friday October 4th, 2002 around 2pm, we took the newspaper off of our windows and opened the doors to our store called Otsu at 3253 16th Street in San Francisco. It’s been a long and short ten years since then. Our business has gone through many permutations, from selling vegan shoes and bags and handmade goods and comics, to making artist t-shirts, to having two stores in two different states, to launching a paper goods line and changing our name, to running our store on Valencia from a state away, to being a publisher with just an online shop, to where we are now. Neither of us came from a retail/business background and it’s been a matter of organic turns and discoveries and flops and learning on the job. Every year that we celebrate an anniversary is a small victory in itself, but turning ten seems to be a more momentous occasion. It is humbling that we are able to do what we do and take these crazy chances that succeed more often than not–it is a bounty that we are genuinely thankful for.

And of course we would not be where we are today without the help and support of lots of people and we want to express our gratitude to everyone who has contributed to the longevity of our little enterprise: all our customers, all the artists we’ve worked with, all our vendors, anyone who has ever written about us, our families & friends, George, Kirk, Amara, Alexa, Anna, Crystal, Kate, Lart (happy birthday!), Martine, Tony, Chi-hui, Tommy, Jennie, Dave C., Greg S., Amy & Richard (1984 Printing), Cindy (Favorite Printing), Pat & Aaron, Chad & Emiko, Phil, Yuri, Lauren, David C., Steve & Olivia, Sara O’Sullivan, Creativity Explored, Gabrielle & Andy,  Eun-Ha & Karl, Alissa, Chris D., Dustin, Jason, Jill, Laura & Austin (Pinball), Rita, Kaori, Kristine, Claire, Helen, McSweeney’s, Andrew, Dave E., Vendela, Barb, Heidi, Angela, Jordan, Eli, Adam, Greg L., Laura, Chris Y., Brian, Giselle & Phurba.

We don’t know what the next ten years will hold, but we hope to keep sharing them with you. Thanks!