Here is a small round up of some 2010 holiday cards I did for myself, and others.
My personal holiday cards, with photo of Dan and me taken last year by my friend and photog Lisa Rigby.
In the same card with the image of us is also an image of our feline children, seen below. We have a new kitten named Bingley. He. is. awesome. I can’t wait to share more photos of him in future posts. I would have gotten to it much sooner but I have taken thousands of photos of him, ALL of which I want to share. It is impossible to curate photos of a kitten. Quite impossible.
Last year, I knitted Bunny and Veebs little scarves for their holiday cards. This year I pulled those back out and knitted a third scarf for Bingley, in green. He doesn’t have pom-poms because he ripped them out with his ferocious bare kitten teeth! He is so, so naughty. But look how cute they all look! Bingley is caroling his little heart out.
Holiday cards for Sarah Parrott. I wrote “Joy,” “Peace” and “Love” which she incorporated into beautiful letterpressed cards. On the back (or front) of the card is a portrait I took at her wedding. See more of her cards here.
{above photo by Sarah}
Sarah made cards for her sister too. I wrote the text, and Sarah drew the cakes!
{above photo by Sarah}
Here are some behind-the-scenes!
A couple of scans of the calligraphy below. The whole process takes me more time than I would like, honestly. There’s always some element of a word I like better than another version of the same word, like the tail in this “S” looks better than the one in that “S”, but I like the “e” in that one better than this one…I get so incredibly nit-picky and so I will write the same word over and over until it’s “perfect.” Of course, it never is!
Outtakes from cats’ photoshoot. Believe it or not, getting two rickity old cats and one crazy kitten to sit for a portrait, together, was a lot easier! Nevermind that at any given time someone was trying to walk offstage, or refused to look at the camera, or was making a funny face.
It takes a lot of discipline, practice and determination to script such beautiful penmanship.
Makes me want to grab cards from Sarah’s shop now.
Warms my heart when I read this blog post. Wishing you and all at home, a happy and healthy 2011! xoxo
New cat! Our house also acquired a new kitten this year, though there’s no way we’d get her to sit next to our current cat–they’re, um, not fans of each other.
I’m so glad to read this post–I’ve been wondering about the new header for a few days now.
As always, love the calligraphy and the photography. Thanks for sharing!!
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Love this whole post!! I loved your holiday cards, I still have it up. I love seeing the behind the scenes of the calligraphy too. I am so happy you were able to do all of the lettering for our cards. They both came out so beautiful. I cannot imagine what it is like to get cats to sit at once, so hilarious! On a very random note, Rich lived on Euclid Ave when he went to Syracuse (address in your first photo)! He stole the street sign and its actually hanging in our house, shhh… ;)
Amazing stuff as ever, all the best to you, Dan and the furry ones for 2011.