Paper Tales

Sale Starts This Saturday!

Join us this Saturday, October 1 & Sunday, October 2 for a BIG sale! We will celebrate the beginning of fall in San Diego...there will be pumpkin bread too!!!Our back table is FULL of sale papers, stamps and much more. It's very organized too!!!

More Washi Tape

Yay! The American Crafts Amy Tangerine washi tape is here!

More Hambly washi tape is in stock as well.

Mary Engelbreit "Home Companion" Magazine...

Please go to Mary's blog and read this!So many of us LOVED her magazine and still miss it! If they publish again we would be the happiest ever!

October Afternoon

The newest collection "Sidewalks" has arrived!

So Many Boxes...

...and only a few photos because we've been so busy unpacking! Savvy Stamps, Memory Box stamps, papers & dies, Lawn Fawn, Tim Holtz embossing folders & dies, 7gypsies newest shadow boxes and more!A brand new stamp company we love...Paper Smooches!New magazines! Top shelf: Scrapbook Trends, Cards & Create: Holidays. Bottom shelf: Somerset Home, Memories & Workbook. Mingle is a brand new Stampington publication with creative ideas for unique gatherings...it looks fabulous!OMG! All the hype and we have it! Limited edition Distress Ink! They come three to a pack.More Halloween fun from Pretty Little Studio.Holiday papers and embellishments from Anna Griffin.Glitz is here! It's shabby chic and beautiful.Webster's Pages ribbon.Webster's Pages papers.A cute little visitor...sooooooo sweet!

Stationery's New Followers

Why the Tweeting Crowd Sends a Lot of Letters; Small-Batch Card Makers Log On, Cash In

By Katherine Rosman (Wall Street Journal-Online article)

Judy Clement Wall has 1,665 Twitter followers, but when she really wants to connect with one of them, she takes out a piece of stationery and picks up her pen.

She wasn't much of a letter writer before she began to spend time on blogs and social networks like Twitter. But as some of her virtual friends became real ones, a letter, she says, "solidifies the friendship. It makes the person real and 3D in a way that they can't be online."

Social-media fans are embracing paper. While United States Postal Service sees a decline in mailed letters overall, tech-savvy paper-lovers—in frequent contact via blogs, Facebook and Twitter—are giving rise to a host of small stationery makers.

Among them is Paperwheel Press, run by Elizabeth Bailey Weil, 29. She produces stationery by hand on a 1,600-pound 1923-model letterpress machine that sits in her garage in Portola Valley, Calif. She is also an 80-plus-hours-a-week executive at Twitter Inc. She pens welcome notes on her hand-made stationery to all new Twitter employees. By her account, she's done about 600.

Paper has a particular appeal for those who spend hours at a time in front of a screen. Much of the recent small-stationery resurgence has taken place in letterpress printing, a method that uses raised type to make a deep impression in thick paper, creating a substantial, textured object. "You can pet it," says Ms. Weil.

Selecting a special card printed on fine paper, writing in ink, and dropping a stamped envelope into a mailbox—not to mention the boundary-crossing step of obtaining a home address—designate a friendship as significant.

"There aren't many people whose handwriting I recognize," says Paige Worthy, 28, a Chicago-based writer who for the past year and a half has corresponded by snail mail with someone she met online. Their friendship gained a paper component when she surprised him with a card to congratulate him on a new job.

Blogger Hannah Brencher of North Haven, Conn., says that she was "so addicted" to constant contact with her online community that a daily 45-minute subway commute last fall left her feeling disconnected and lonely. She began to hand-write notes on the train and then posted a message on her blog that anyone who would like a hand-written "love letter" should send her their mailing address. Ms. Brencher, 23, has written nearly 400 letters so far. "I go to the stationery store every week," she says.

Small stationers—often with a digital background themselves—create pithy messages that capture the sensibility of the online community. "The most popular papermakers are doing pieces that are humorous and very clever," says Emily Bidwell, a merchandising specialist who has worked for Etsy, the digital marketplace for crafts, since 2006. "We see that sort of thing tweeted and emailed and passed around a lot."

Facebook References

 Kiss and Punch, a small stationer in southern California, offers a letterpress card that resembles a Facebook screen and says, "Congratulations on your changed relationship status!<3"

To satisfy demand from people who want to take up the craft, San Francisco Center for the Book is now offering 40 beginner letterpress workshops. Boxcar Press, a Syracuse, N.Y.-based company that makes the photopolymer plates that are pressed into paper, now has 80 full-time employees, up from 12 employees in 2007.

"Nine out of 10 customers are young women who fell in love with letterpress when they saw it on Etsy, a blog or a social-media site," says Cathy Smith, Boxcar's customer-account manager.

'Lead Tweets'

 The Ladies of Letterpress, a group of women devoted to the old-fashioned printing method, came together in 2008 on Ning, a Web service that allows users to create custom social networks. Its rolls have grown to nearly 1,200 this year from 500 in 2009. Earlier this month, the group hosted an Asheville, N.C., conference dedicated to the craft. A panel called "Lead Tweets" focused on using Twitter to reach paper-lovers. "These virtual networks have been very valuable to printers," says Kseniya Thomas, the event's co-organizer.

At Etsy, handmade paper products are a staple, with more than 66,000 items listed in its stationery subcategory. Stationery is a relatively affordable indulgence, says Ms. Bidwell, the merchandising specialist. People are willing to spend four dollars for a handmade card, she says, adding: "These cards are often treated as an art object themselves."

Paper manufacturers are hoping to gain from the digital and stationery overlap as well. Mohawk Fine Papers Inc., a manufacturer with a paper mill in Cohoes, N.Y., saw much of its corporate business decline in recent years. So executives began to look for markets where "paper still mattered," says Laura Shore, a company spokeswoman. "We were blown away by what we found in terms of small businesses focused on social stationery," she says.

To join the online stationery world, Ms. Shore and her team created "Felt & Wire," a Web magazine and retail site serving what it calls "the paper-obsessed."

For three days in May, "#stationeryshow" and "#nss"—hashtags, which are used to help facilitate searches on Twitter—could be seen all over the social-media landscape. The source: attendees of the National Stationery Show in New York City, who had been encouraged to punctuate their tweets by the event's organizers. "The mass embrace of Twitter by our retailers really took us by surprise at first," says Patti Stracher, the show's manager.

It was when visiting the National Stationery Show this May that the broad overlap between the digital and paper worlds dawned upon Ms. Weil, the Twitter executive. She recognized many of the stationers she met there from their Twitter avatars. "I think there are a lot of us who live frantic, digital lives and long to make things with our hands," says Ms. Weil.

Twitter Stationery

Ms. Weil learned to operate a letterpress in 2006, while working as a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures. She bought an old letterpress machine for $2,500. An early Twitter adopter, she loved the simplicity of the bird logo and created letterpress stationery that said, "a tweet from the desk of" with a Twitter bird.

Ms. Weil was hired by Twitter in spring 2009 to oversee mergers and acquisitions. She began creating more Twitter-centric stationery and crafts such as Twitter onesies for colleagues' babies and cookie cutters with the logo. She worked with her Pantone color palette (which she uses to mix ink colors) to make icing in Twitter blue.

When she closed her first acquisition for the company, she sent a note to the head of the acquired company on her hand-made Twitter stationery that read, "Looking forward to you joining the flock." Later, Ms. Weil made letterpress invitations for his wedding.

Meanwhile, Twitter was growing from a start-up to a major player, with about 400 employees by late 2010. When meeting with her boss, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, to receive her performance review in December, Ms. Weil proposed a new position for herself: head of culture.

The idea was to make a rapidly expanding company feel small, she and the company say. As part of her job, she creates branded goods to bolster employee morale. One product she has made on her letterpress: cards that say "You're awesome" for managers to hand out.

At home recently, she decided to see if she could use her manual machine to press a QR code—a type of square barcode designed to be read by smartphones—into fine paper. When her iPhone properly read the barcode, she started jumping up and down in her studio. "I was thinking, 'This is history!'" she says.

Looks Like Halloween

So many fun Halloween goodies are out and more arriving all the time!Our friend Dawne made this cute spool card holder!Darling figurines.Lots of new ribbons in fall and Halloween colors.Tim Holtz embellishments and a great 12x12 paper pad (not shown).An all-time favorite from Crafty Secrets.More fun ideas with spools, straws and Jenni Bowlin buttons. The cute candy corn colored bakers twine is from Doodlebug.More Halloween fun!

More Updates!

The class schedule is FINALLY up to date! Lots of great classes this fall!New from Penny Black.Clear Halloween stamps from Penny Black.Penny Black clear winter and Christmas stamps.My Mind's Eye "Found Christmas" collection and three fun papers for the holidays from Bazzill.Crate Paper's three new collections: Farmhouse, Random and Peppermint.We are soooo excited to carry stamps from 100 Proof Press! Especially thrilled to have the NEW Danita stamps!The newest from Studio Calico. The wood pieces are great! We also love the 6x6 paper pads!Brand new (for us!) and very fun...from Reminise.New Prima flowers are here.More new papers.All kraft Halloween......and MORE kraft! back with more Halloween peeks later!

A Bit More...

New collections from My Mind's Eye. Lots of 6x6 paper pads too.LOVE the MME Halloween collection!More twine! Now we have twine from The Twinery, Divine Twine and our friend Katie. You can never have too much bakers twine!Doodlebug's is the cutest for Halloween. Tiny, multi-colored and CUTE!We love these beads...perfect for so many crafts.So much fun!Retro Christmas and holiday from Reminisce.Look at the coordinating papers!Pink Paislee has three new collections. We are especially loving Vintage Vogue.These are some of the embellishments for Vintage Vogue and Nantucket.New products for us. Everything from travel journals to tags to notebooks and more! I'll be back tomorrow to finish up!

Really Trying to Catch up!

I'll try and get caught up with the latest arrivals by Labor Day. (We will be closed for Labor Day!)Stamping Bella "Kettos" are back in stock again!All the newest magazines are here. The Handmade Sewing is especially good. Even if you don't sew...many of the projects involve fabric and no actual sewing.The CHA Summer Prima is here...and has been for a week or so...sorry!Lots of German Dresden! There are also long strips of the Dresden trim.An update on our sweet Bichon, Mintie. After finding an amazing vet, we finally found out what is wrong with her. She has severe rheumatoid arthritis. Unfortunately there is not much we can do other than use the newly prescribed medicine and have her wear leg braces. She is feeling much better and can get around better. We are still sad (she's only 8 years old) but at least we are making her as comfortable and happy as possible.

Back with more posts later!