Category Archives: Etsy Find

Norman’s Printery

Norman'sPrinteryLooking for black and white gift wrap and found these at Norman’s Printery, a family owned printshop in northern New Jersey. They specialize in bespoke printing, as well as their our own line of printed goods.

“Norman’s Printery is named after Norman Cordes, the founder of our parent company Cordes Printing. Though now retired, Norman had a passion for challenging projects and especially Letterpress printing. Norm’s passion lives on through Norman’s Printery.”

Website, Facebook and Etsy.

Images:  Courtesy of Norman’s Printery.

Peg & Awl

Peg-&-Awl“We are Walter and Margaux Kent, husband and wife. We have a boy called Søren and a boy called Silas.

“We live and work in Philadelphia, Penna.

Our work is made from olde things. Treasures found and recovered from misfortune and neglect, relics of the unusual, the confused and the macabre, cut and pulled and built into wearable curiosities, and useable, long lasting keepsakes. We used to make them for ourselves and now we make them for everyone.”

Peg and Awl began without a plan, a fortunate pairing of two minds, different but in sync. Both Walter and I have a fervor for history, though we each unearth our passions in different ways.”

Website, Facebook and Etsy.

Images: Courtesy of Peg and Awl.

Tugboat Printshop

TugboatPrintshopHusband and wife team of Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth are the artists behind Tugboat Printshop. In their Pittsburg, PA studio they create intricate woodcut prints in limited editions.  They talk about their all-manual, labor intensive art process in an interview on the website, Silverlake Voice:

“Working with our hands gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates, we think, a superior end result.  We value the tradition of the craft and take part in its legacy. Neither of us is very satisfied to be working on a computer screen, and so we choose not to.”

“The bulk of our time working on prints is spent drawing and carving. We trade woodblocks back and forth, first sketching our ideas out in pencil, then defining them in pen for carving. We use sharp handtools (knives, chisels) to carve blocks in low relief. If we are making a multi block print, we will ink the key (first block drawn & carved, usually with the most detail in the print) and print to paper then back to blocks creating a ghost ‘transfer’ to work from as we draw new info on color blocks. When all blocks are carved in full, they are hand-rolled with brayers (using oil based inks) and printed to paper through the press.”

You can follow Tugboat Printshop on Facebook and Instagram. Their prints can be purchased on Etsy.

Images: Courtesy of Tugboat Printshop.

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