Power & Light's Moveable Type Project: Please support.

Check out this cool video, and then follow this link here to help Kyle make this awesome project a reality. She's raised more than half of what she needs in the first 24 hours of her fundraising, but as of this blog post she has another $4ooo to go. Every little bit helps, and there are various cool letterpress gifts you can get as a reward for pledging a small amount of money. She's raised more than half of what she needs in the last 24 hours, but as of this moment has another $4ooo to go. If you like the idea but can't pledge, please share her fundraising page (and awesome video) to other folks who

Another bullshit holiday Hallmark made up so that Blue Barnhouse could make money.

How we got the nooky in the one-eight-double-zeros.

Today is that day that some of us celebrate the day that the Patron Saint of Lovers was martyred for our dirty little sins. And that Saint's Day was fabricated by Roman Catholics to replace another day which fertile pagans decided was a great day to jizz all over everything that moved. And today some of us fertile pagans are gonna raid their cash register of Valentine sales and blow their money on food, alcohol, and bowling, because they are in the business of making money off of love.

That's right all you love-starved fools, it's because of jerks like you that the greeting card became a cashcow for jerks like me. It all started in 1847, when Esther Howland of Massachussets took the popular British tradition of sending a handmade note to your loved one and made a successful business of it, i.e. selling handmade Valentines. Her wild success at the venture was the "harbinger of the future commercialization of the holidays in the United States." Today more than a billion Valentines are sent worldwide every year, though probably about 10 of them are handmade.


I'm just kidding. I know lots of folks who make a decent living off of handmade Valentines, and the one's I love most have Valentine attitude. This one is from BBH alumnus Kyle Durrie of Power and Light.


And this one comes from BBH employee Emily Wismer's own press, Lady Pilot Letterpress.

What does this all mean to me? Well... truthfully, I am sucker for Valentines day, and have been making handmade greetings for Valentine's Day LONG before I got anywhere near being in the business of letterpress and greeting cards. I don't think its a bullshit holiday, though it is a great day to hate on if you are angry at "the man," or have been burned too many times, or if you are love-sick and alone. It's also a day for someone to get brave and put themselves out there into romantic possibilities with a card, it's a day to let someone know how hot they are, or how they give you a boner, or make you wet, or smile, or shit your pants, or whatever. It is a day that you can put a little extra romance into what is hopefully already a romantic relationship, and a day for lazy men who don't know romance if it bent them over in the showers to say hey yeah I can do that once a year. Wait, today's Sunday? Sports are on TV, and my ass is permanently stuck in an easy chair. Nevermind.

It's a day that has changed meaning in so many ways over the centuries that it can be just about anything we want it to be, so I say we give this day back to the fertile pagans who started it and cover everything in something white besides snow.

GO KYLE!!!

Did I put this image on the blog already? I don't care. It makes me have insane fits of jealousy. STOP THAT SHIT KYLE!!!

So I'll make this super quick, cuz I also have to blog about Kyle's boyfriend today, but Kyle, former BBH apprentice/employee who went on to start Power and Light Press, recently landed an interview w/ a cool craft oriented site called Meet Your Maker.

She is also sharing a table with us at Renegade Craft Fair Chicago this weekend, for the second time in a row, and I totally would be bummed about not being there myself were she not headed to Asheville next.

Renegade Craft Fair/Brooklyn Love

Renegade! (and also: "A bird is about to shit on my face!)

After 5 dreary and rainy weekdays, the sun finally came out over New York City, and we got a much needed taste of perfect early summer weather. An estimated 75,000+ people crawled out of their hovels in throngs and descended on McCarren Park this weekend for the Brooklyn edition of the Renegade Craft Fair, in order to peruse the handmade wares of more than 300 artists (and also maybe play some handball, do some beatbox dancing, run laps, have bbqs, and take their parrots for bike rides.)


A quick and dirty way to display: rubber bands keep the piles from mixing and blowing away- and makes for a quick and painless setup/takedown

BBH has done a handful of streetfairs, and after dabbling in a few cities outside of the Asheville area, we've found that keeping it local is the only way to make it profitable. However when Kyle of Power & Light Press asked if I'd be interested in prolonging my NYC business trip by two weeks to share a tent with her at Renegade, I decided it would be worth the trip. I was interested how well we would fair in the hippest sector of New York City.

As it turns out, Brooklyn is hot for BBH. Our tent was never empty, people would read a few of our funniest greetings posted at the front of the tent and decided they wanted to read every last one of what we had in stock. The table stayed crowded around all sides pretty much the entire show.


The ugliest business sign in all of Renegade land. Proof positive that presentation don't mean shit.

Renegade is the equivalent to an outdoor Etsy, showcasing a diversity of handmade arts, and being a juried event, there was an abundance of exciting and unique artistry to blow your cash on. I found alot of artists worth mentioning, so let's get to it. I'll list their company name, their own description of their work (when possible), and the products that got my attention.

Fuzzy-Ink
Fuzzy Ink is dedicated to the loving production of mustache clad apparel. Armed with a unique sense of style and an under-appreciated sense of humor, we work frantically to bring the freshest designs to the unkempt mustache kingdom. Each shirt, from the custom stamped tag to the artwork, is designed and hand printed in our underground lair. Additionally, we are committed to making and selling only clothing that we would proudly sport ourselves.


I had to get this shirt for myself.


Hee hee. Identity Crisis.

Folded Pigs
I like the idea of surprising your dinner guest as they chow down on their delicious meal with a plate full cockroaches. You can check out Folded Pigs etsy site here.

For the dinner guests you love to hate. Bon Appetit!

Seattle Show Posters
Their name says everything you need to know except that their posters are screenprinted. I love their work.




Ryan Berkley Illustration
I spent more money in this booth than any other. Here's Ryan Berkley's etsy profile:

I'm a comics inspired gentleman surrounded by toys and Chewbacca masks. I like drawing sharks and animals and creatures and mustaches and superheroes. Sometimes I combine all of them - sometimes they are on their own - it really depends on my mood.

And here are the prints I bought for my home.





Final Approach
we are a young couple from east tennessee with a passion for design and an eye for the unconventional. we stand by our products and insure the highest quality of work. we specialize in custom painted vintage suitcases and are tinkering in found item home decor.

It appears they've taken their etsy shop down while they deal with renegade, but check back. They have alot of nice product:




Seibei
At first, SEIBEI was just an expensive hobby. I’d always enjoyed drawing stupid cartoons to make my friends laugh and making presents for people, and t-shirts seemed like the best medium to do both of those things on a larger scale. I want people to lighten up, and take it easy. I want to make the world a safer and more enjoyable place for everything I’ve ever been called growing up – weirdos, spazzes, dumbasses, and everyone else.


Word?

Basho
Basho Apparel is a small design studio in based in Yellow Springs, OH. Paul Baker, artist and owner, hand prints each and every shirt.

These are friends of my friend John Davis who has been calling Yellow Springs home base for the last few years. Basho's etsy shop is also down this week (dag everyone! Renegade was only a weekend long!) but if you like the shirts featured in the above link, be sure to visit sometime soon.




Tugboat Print Shop
Tugboat is a collective of printers from Pittsburgh who make amazing woodblock prints.



A woodblock on display in the Tugboat tent. This particular artist has an impressive menagerie of animal prints.

THANK YOU BROOKLYN!
Brooklyn gave BBH some mad love, and we are flattered. It was by far the funnest event I've attended to promote the business, and something we hope will become a part of our regular curiculum. We've already signed up for the Chicago event coming this September. See you there!


We ended the day sitting on the banks of the East River and watched Manhattan descend into twilight.

2009 National Stationery Show Pt 2: Repping the Alumnus

BBH alumnus Kyle Durrie takes aim at a baby zebra.

In January I had secretly flown former BBH apprentice and employee Kyle Durrie from Portland to NYC to play a practical joke on BBH shop manager Sarah McDonald at the Winter NYIGF. It was a reunion of sorts, as we had done the last ever Toronto Gift Show together as a trio, and had a smoking good time.


Brandon, Kyle, and Sarah at Niagra Falls on the Canadian Side

The results at the NYIGF were similar, as this photo set of a night with Spitfire Girl will demonstrate. The long evening of debauchery ended very abrubtly. Kristin (the Spitfire Girl) and Sarah were doing cartwheels in the hotel hallway while screaming with hysterical laughter. They came back to the room with a very large and empty Star Wars toy box that had mysteriously appeared. Sarah put the box on her head. Kristin took a swing at Sarah's boxed head and sent her flying into the headboard. Seconds later there was a knock on the door and an armed security guard informed us that there were dozens of calls about the noise and the next call they got would result in us being kicked out of the New Yorker. Kristin's fiance Jason escorted Kristin out as if this was something he was used to.


The following morning I found a destroyed ironing board on the floor. "What the hell happened to the ironing board?" I asked. Photos later revealed that I had destroyed it while trying to demontrate how a proposed photo of Kyle being ironed should look.



This card by Kyle's young letterpress outfit makes me insanely jealous.

During Kyle's visit to the Winter NYIGF she frequented "The Arm" to work on her own line of letterpress greeting cards-- when the show was over, and we were chilling at my mother's crib, she showed Sarah and I what she was working on. Kyle had designed several cards for BBH and they are all favorites of mine-- when I saw her most recent work my jaw dropped to the floor. Clearly she was on the road to her own success.

A couple of BBH products by Kyle Durrie



She and I schemed about things over the following months, and this is what we came up with: She would work the booth at the upcoming Stationery Show for free in exchange for booth real estate to hock her wares, I would take a sales rep percentage of her sales, but would take payment in trade for her cards to sell at Blue Barnhouse. Win win win win win.



I'm pretty excited to have her along at the show, especially because I ain't paying her jack!

In all seriousness I'm really proud how far she's come along, we taught her pretty much every aspect of the BBH business model and my hopes are she'll have an easier time rising to the big leagues than we did. The name of her press is Power and Light, located in Portland, Oregon. You can check out some of her work on her etsy store. The store is currently scarce of product but I know she's working her tail off at the moment, and we should see an impressive line of products in her store in the coming weeks. You can also check out her blog here.