August Notes: on the press and in the garden
In the studio
August is one of my favorite months in the studio, as we’re working on our 2027 calendar. We’re nearly finished, just deciding on colors for a couple of the last months to print. Should the month with the quilted slippers print in icy blue or dusty rose? Or, should June print in the dusty rose instead of grass green? To be determined…
August is also busy with custom note card orders. I think summer is always a nice time to catch up on sending letters and reconnecting with friends before fall arrives and things get busier. We love seeing the colors and images people select to create really personal stationery. Above are a few we’ve recently printed and love.
On the presses
We’ve been printing a bit of everything this month: wedding invitations and wedding-day stationery, personal note cards, business cards, baby announcements and more.
A favorite ink color this year—for us, and particularly for our wedding clients—has been this pretty grass green. It’s crisp and summery, with just a touch of white mixed in to soften it. And one of our favorite things is when we get to print a party hat on a wedding response card, like the one above.
In a garden
Earlier this month, I had the absolute delight of visiting Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex UK, the home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and a gathering place for the Bloomsbury Group. I can’t begin to describe how charming and inspiring I found it, so I’m not going to try. But one detail that I loved—and makes sense to share here—has to do with its cottage garden and letter writing.
Much of what we know about the garden at Charleston comes from letters. In 1916, Virginia Woolf encouraged her sister Vanessa Bell to move there, describing “a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely.” And she did. Bell and Duncan Grant gradually transformed it into the wonderfully informal garden of flowers, vegetables, paths and sculpture that became an extension of their creative life.
Vanessa Bell’s own letters recorded wonderfully specific details—the roses outside her bedroom window, the scent of pinks on a summer evening—while Virginia Woolf later described her sister emerging from “a great variegated quilt of asters and artichokes.” Years later, these written observations became part of the historical record used to understand and restore Charleston’s garden.
It’s a lovely reminder that an ordinary letter can preserve the details of a life and place long after it was written.
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