We haven’t done a playing with color post in a while, so it seemed appropriate to do one today in honor of St. Patrick’s Day and the color green. The inspirational photo above is a piece of vintage gift wrap from the early 1970s. It is a photo print of different upholstery trims and pom poms in a range of greens and blues. It is pure, over-the-top, fabulous! I love greens and I love this range of colors!

In playing around with these colors, the first thing I wanted to do was make my version of a photo print of real fabric. I just love this technique that was popular on cards and stationery in this era. I previously posted about some vintage greeting cards that used this design element HERE. So I came up with a simple burlap patchwork:

Next I wanted to see what these colors looked like in smaller quantities and with lots of white….totally different:

Now big and bold with a retro Marimekko feel:

Hmmmm….when I said I loved these colors, I guess I meant it. These patterns would work really well in my kitchen:

And of course, just for fun…..Happy St. Patrick’s day!

-Susie

It was definitely the pink, aqua, and black color combination that first attracted me to the box of this craft kit. I just love the use of limited color palettes in vintage illustrations and this one really does it perfectly. What I didn’t expect to find was a complete kit, never used, with all the goodies inside intact. Oh the treasures!

Inside this sturdy box are all the components of a “Do-it-yourself Textile Printing Kit”: textile inks, brushes, stencils and instruction booklets galore. The real treasure for me is in these printed materials. Not only are they a peek back in time, but they are beautiful examples of graphic design and typography. Don’t you love the pattern of apples, birds, butterflies and posies on the cover of the main booklet?

The page above lays out the options for decorating your fabric. A brief description of each method; stencil, screen printing, hand painting, hand blocking, and air brush,  is accompanied by a drawing that illustrates the technique. Additional instructional materials in the box give the crafter super detailed, step-by-step instructions for each of these methods. Try one! Try them all!

The main booklet has great black and white photos of sample projects. I really wish I could see these in color. I know that they were amazing. It’s sort of like Lucy’s dresses on I Love Lucy in that you have to use your imagination. You know that they are really beautiful and colorful, but you only can see them, in all their glory, in your head. The layout of the pages pairs a stark black and white photo with a facing page of text on a yellow background. Pops of red accent titles and sections throughout.

Here is a close up of a suggested color palette they call ” The Popular House and Garden Colors”. Instructions and formulas are given to mix up colors like Flame, Middy Blue and Phlox Pink. I love the way they printed these colors in the booklet with a mottled appearance and uneven edges to mimic hand mixed colors. Like someone whipped out a brush, just before you turned the page, and casually painted these swatches.

I return to this kit and its brochures and instructions again and again when looking for inspiration and it never lets me down. I see something new each time. The sad thing is, in all the years I’ve had this kit,  I’ve never taken the step to actually print on fabric. The pots of color in the kit are long dried out making them useless. Maybe it’s time for me to actually experiment with this idea. Hmmm….I think it’s time to put this on my to-do list!

-Susie

We can’t tell you how much we have been looking forward to this weekend. Why, you ask? The beginning of daylight savings time! There just never seems to be enough hours in the day to do everything we want to do and somehow with that extra hour of sunshine makes all the difference in the world for us. Here’s what’s on our extra daylight to-do list: gardening after work, eating dinner outside, riding our bikes to & from the studio a couple times a week and late afternoon/early evening hikes. What do you like to do with longer days?

Our anniversary celebration officially ended this week. Thank you so much for for all the well wishes and for reading about some of our memories of the past 17 years!

Have a happy weekend!

-Susie & Heidi

In the early days of Rock Scissor Paper, it was just me and Susie. We tackled all the tasks ourselves, even when we had no idea what we were doing.  Sales? Marketing? Production? Order fulfillment? Designing?  We did it all without any help.  We often would sit and dream out loud about how nice it would be to have an employee who could help with the to-do list that grew in tandem with our business.

I don’t really remember what precipitated our first “employee” Stephanie coming on board, but I do know that she solved a very specific problem for us.  The one task we always dragged our feet on was collection calls. Both Susie and I dreaded picking up the phone and calling people who owed us money.  I wish I could say it was a rarity, but the reality is, that in business, you end up having to do a lot of this.  We really liked most of the people that we sold our products to and it always felt awkward having to call and ask where a check was.

Enter Stephanie.  We call her our first employee, but she wasn’t real. We made her up.  When we had to make those calls, we would use the name Stephanie instead of our own.  “Stephanie in Accounts Receivable” to be exact.  Sounds professional, doesn’t it? We weren’t trying to sound like a bigger company than we were, just trying to find a solution for an awkward situation.

As we used her name more and more, she started to take on a life of her own. One day Susie put pen to paper and did a portrait of what we imagined Stephanie would look like.  Stephanie was in her late 30’s, a thin-lipped brunette with a severe haircut.  With the exception of dark red lipstick, she favored minimal makeup. She always wore collared, white, men’s shirts in an easy-care poly/cotton blend.  Stephanie was very matter-of-fact and not necessarily prone to small talk. Brown was her favorite color. She lived alone with her two cats and in her spare time liked reading mystery novels and collecting Precious Moments figurines.

We hung her portrait directly over the office phone so that we could channel the essence of Stephanie when we needed to. It was an oddball solution to the problem, but you know, it worked! If Stephanie left a message for someone, they inevitably would return the call asking for Stephanie by name and we would put the call on hold and slip into character.

Stephanie “worked” for us back in the days when we ran our business out of Susie’s home.  When we later moved into our studio, we packed Stephanie up and brought her with us.  She doesn’t handle accounts receivables for us anymore, but her portrait hangs on the wall near Susie’s desk.  It actually serves as a great reminder to think creatively about day-to-day problems.

The past year has been difficult for a lot of businesses and we haven’t been immune to it. Our mantra lately has been “Think like a start-up!” meaning, when trying to solve problems, think back to a time when we were just starting out and had less resources available to us.  How did we tackle problems then?  With ingenuity, creativity, a good dose of optimism and of course….with Stephanie!

-Heidi

Our anniversary celebration continues this week with a few more posts looking back into our past. What you are looking at in the picture above is a layout of artwork for our printer. If any of you out there took a Graphic Arts or Printing Shop class in high school prior to the digital revolution, you’ll recognize this type of art board. Shop class is exactly where I learned how to layout out a multi-color design to be printed. Nowadays, all of this is done in the computer, which almost seems like magic for someone who has done it this old-school, labor intensive way!

In the picture you can see the final Christmas card design of Santa on the moon. This design is printed in 3 colors of ink: Black, Red and Green. Each of part of the design that is in a different color is laid out on the art board as a separate layer on a clear plastic sheet. Each one of those layers has to line up perfectly in order for the final design to come out right. Here are the different layers.

BLACK first:

Then RED for Santa’s suit (here you can see the layer underneath through the clear plastic):

Then finally, the GREEN of the flag:

If you look very carefully, you’ll see liquid paper on this artwork where we’ve “cleaned up” our drawing. This particular card (from 1997!) was a combination of clipart (the Santa) and our own drawing. The whole thing was painstakingly created one long night at Kinko’s Copies where we drew, xeroxed, pasted, re-xeroxed and so on.

A funny story about these art boards. With this line of cards we made the jump from a small neighborhood print shop to a larger commercial printer. When we met with them for the first time and we whipped out these boards to show them what we wanted printed….their response was “Geez, we haven’t seen THOSE in years!” Being self taught, we had no idea how behind the times we were. Our salesperson had to go get someone in back, in their pre-press department, to come look at them to see if our layouts could be used as is. When the guy came out he was the oldest guy in the print shop with white hair and slumped shoulders. He was the only one still working in the shop that knew how to make printing plates from these! He chuckled and said that he thought it was appropriate that we had retro-style artwork that we wanted to print. Talk about immersing yourself in a style! He was totally right.

-Susie

It’s been a long, busy week! Thanks so much to all the customers who took advantage of our Anniversary Sale at Rock Scissor Paper!  We so appreciate it! It’s been fun wandering down memory lane this week and we still have a few more posts of old pictures and story to share with you.

We’re definitely looking forward to a day off this weekend. What do you have planned? Whatever it is make sure it’s happy!

-Susie & Heidi

As I mentioned before, in the beginning of our company, Heidi & I used a variety of clip art for our designs. Dover Publications had (and still does) a huge selection of pictorial archive books with beautiful and elaborately engraved illustrations from the 19th century.  We probably have over 50 of these books. All are VERY worn from going through them again and again, in search of the perfect image for a card. We would then pack up these books and trek over to a Kinko’s Copies and spend hours on the self serve machines, xeroxing images. Boy what we take for granted now! Nowadays, these books come with CD roms with all the images included. You just pop them into your computer and you are ready to go. We had to make a copy of the image, enlarge it to twice its size, “clean up” the image (using liquid paper!) of all the blips and blobs associated with a copy, and then reduce the image to the size we needed for the design. We are talking hours….

Several years into Rock Scissor Paper, we discovered a book called Mostly Happy: Clip art of the 30’s, 40’s and 50′s. This book changed the look and design direction of RSP forever. The designs of cards and journals on this page were all created using that book.

The books pictured above were called our collage journals. Basically we culled related images and pasted them up together as a collage and then had the art printed on colored paper that we used to make the covers. I look at these now, and I still really like them. Hmmm…maybe we should do a re-release as a limited edition product? That could be fun!

We took these pictures in my front courtyard with a film loaded camera. They were meant to be promotional pictures to include on sales sheets and catalogs, but we weren’t really happy with the way they came out. Boy, have my photography skills improved in 15+ years since these were taken! Remember when we had to bring film to be developed before we could see what the pictures looked like?

-Susie

In celebration of our anniversary, we are continuing down memory lane. Above is a picture of our very first street fair (Heidi is in the picture hiding behind a journal.) Up to to just a couple of weeks before this picture was taken, we were exclusively doing custom invitation designs for clients (or at least trying too!) A friend of ours who makes jewelry invited us to share a booth at the Los Feliz Street Fair. We said, “Sure, why not!” Then the reality sunk in that we didn’t actually have any product to sell! Oops! Better get to work!

So for 2 weeks we scrambled to create cards, journals, notepads, letter writing paper and scrapbooks to sell at the fair. We were at Kinko’s almost everyday printing up product. We also bought some funky wire and glass candle holders from a closeout place to complement our display. Now in looking at this picture, I have to say I am proud of what a nice display we did the first time out. We’ve got all different levels to our merchandising: things propped up, things in baskets, a makeshift card rack. We even made a sign (that we colored in by hand) with our logo at the time. We used that sun logo for the first 3-4 years of our business. Our little brother, Nick, still considers it to be the “real” RSP logo and we recently had to make some t-shirts for him with that sun!

The fair was successful enough that we covered our costs, made a little money and got some great feedback on our designs. It was a really exciting thing for us….face-to-face contact with our customers! At the end of the day we had a clipboard filled with customer addresses (this was pre-email) for our mailing list and we were ready to do it again real soon.  We still cherish meeting our customers in person and it’s the reason why we still participate in events like Renegade Craft Fair and Unique LA whenever we can.

-Susie

This week Heidi & I are celebrating a big anniversary…Rock Scissor Paper is 17 years old! Wow, where did the time go? Over the next week or so, We’ll be sharing some fun pictures from the beginnings of our business and some of our first products. Eeek! It’s kind of hard to look at some of these! But I have to remember that we were just starting out, and we had no idea what the vision of our company was or what it would become. We started with lots of handmade collage cards, hand-bound albums and notepads.

Basically for the first 5-6 years of our business, we did not create any of our own illustrations. Though we did draw, we didn’t feel confident enough to incorporate our own artwork into the designs of our products. We relied heavily on copyright free images from clipart books like those by Dover. While we love these types of illustrations, it became very apparent that in order for us to have an identity as a company and to have a recognizable brand, we needed to use original artwork. We were also really limited in what we could do with these existing images.

What really helped in making this change was the arrival of our very first computer, a Macintosh Performa from Sears (with a 180MB hard drive and 2 MB of ram!!!!). Our step-mom, Debi, got it for us as a gift to help with our fledgling business. We had little idea how to use it, but we plugged away at figuring it out each day. By the time we retired our baby, years later, we had learned how to use every single inch of it. A big difference from today, where most people have a computer that they (seriously) could make and edit a movie on, but only use 2% of it!

Tomorrow, we’ll show you some pictures from our very first street fair in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. We were only a few months old as a company and this was our first face-to-face with the shopping public. The highlight of the day was when a relatively unknown, teenage Leonardo DiCaprio (fresh off This Boy’s Life / Gilbert Grape films) came to shop our booth on his Rollerblades!

-Susie

Happy Just Because Day!

Yes, today is the very first celebration of our made-up holiday. Heidi & I each got a surprise in the mail yesterday from one of our friends, a vintage “hello” card! Now that made our day! So don’t forget to send a couple of cards today for no particular reason, except to make someone smile.

The star of our portrait today is the very first toy of this type we bought, years and years ago. He was a couple of dollars at a very sad and rundown antique mall. This little guy sparked our VERY large collection of vintage Kamar and Dakin Dream Pets toys. He is also the inspiration behind the many doxie illustrations that grace our designs. It’s funny to think about what little things can spark your imagination and become your muse, isn’t it?

We’ve gotten quite a few emails asking us to share the recipes from our Valentine’s Day craft party. We’ll put those together over the weekend and post them for you next week.

Have a Happy Weekend!

-Susie & Heidi