heather ross for walden surfboards

It's nice to be friends with Heather Ross. For one thing, she always knows where really good food can be found (and if you're lucky, she'll share with you). Also, she is a fantastically funny storyteller, which you already know if you are a reader of her blog. And she's super entertaining to travel with (I once saw her catch a frog with her bare hands to use as a prop on a photo shoot, true story!). But the best part of being friends with Heather is that sometimes she asks you to help her on really fun projects.

When Heather asked me to help her design some surfboards using her artwork for Walden Surfboards, I was thrilled. Looking through Heather's artwork, we knew the mermaids were an obvious choice. You can see the original sketches we made above, before we knew the actual dimensions and sizes of the boards which would be used for the final product. Below you can see how the surfboards turned out, and you can even watch a little video of the boards in action over on the Global Surf Industries site.

One nice little touch: We asked Walden if Heather could redraw their logo so it looked a little more cohesive with these designs and Heather came up with this cute turtle. I love the way it looks on the boards and how it still relates back to the original Walden logo.

The beach was a big part of my childhood in Southern California, and though I'm not a surfer myself, I've always been surrounded by that culture. My family and I left New York several years ago and moved back west, and it's been so nice to be close to the beach again. My children love the ocean, just like I did when I was a kid. They can spend all day making sandcastles and playing with the waves, visiting the tide pools or digging for shells. There are definitely times when I miss living in the city, but during the summertime in Southern California... there's no place I'd rather be.

more last-minute knitted gifts giveaway

If you're a fan of Purl Soho, or of it's owner, Joelle Hoverson, then you probably already know about Joelle's latest book: More Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. I first met Joelle when she was working at Martha Stewart as a stylist. A few years later I heard she was opening a yarn shop, called Purl, down on Sullivan Street in SoHo and I popped in to say hello. The store was tiny, but filled to the brim with the most beautiful yarn I had ever seen... it was like a little jewelbox of a store, all styled perfectly. One evening I remember walking past the storefront after closing. Joelle had started teaching classes in the evening and the store was literally packed with knitting students. There was this buzz, this feeling of excitement in the air. A man on the street next to me asked "What's going on? What is THIS?". And I knew that Joelle had started something special.

A few years later I wandered down Sullivan Street again. Joelle was sitting out front on that cute blue bench outside Purl and as I walked up she said "I was just thinking about you!". She was writing a new book about quilting and patchwork, and opening a second store up the street (a fabric store this time) and she needed some design help. I quickly volunteered. Joelle lived just a few blocks from my home in Brooklyn, and we would meet at night in my little office and work out the details of the book (which was later titled Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts) and design things for the new store (which was called Purl Patchwork). Joelle would hold my daughter Bee, who was just a baby then, while we picked out colors and played around with fonts.

I've been designing for Purl Soho ever since. And it's been my pleasure. When I moved to California three years ago, I was worried that Joelle (and her partners Page and Jen) might want a designer close by in New York.. but lucky for me, they've let me continue to work for them remotely. They are such lovely clients, full of amazing ideas and I'm proud of the things they've let me design like knitting patterns, and twill tape, and calendars, and new logos.

When Joelle told me she was starting a third book, I crossed my fingers she would let me design it.  More Last-Minute Knitted Gifts hit the stores in the fall, and here are a few behind-the-scenes shots from the shoot (which was way back in May of 2009!). The photographer for the shoot was the lovely Anna Williams, who also shot Joelle's other two books. Anna is an old friend, who photographs regularly for Martha Stewart Living, where Page, Joelle and I all used to work, so working on these shoots is a bit of a reunion.The projects in this book are beautiful, and most can be knit in a weekend.

Joelle has a lovely home a few hours outside the city and we shot the majority of the book there. She also rented the house next door so we would all have a bed to sleep in and some pretty locations to shoot. One morning I woke up early, the fog had rolled in and the house looked so beautiful.

When I flip through this book, I see my friends. I see Joelle's gorgeous color combinations and Jen's lightning fast knitting and Page's pretty styling and Anna's beautiful light. It reminds me how lucky I am to be a small part of the beautiful things these girls create.

The nice folks at STC: Craft | Melanie Falick Books (an imprint of Stewart, Tabori & Chang) sent me a few extra copies of More Last-Minute Knitted Gifts and I am happy to give one away. Leave a comment below and my little helpers and I will pick a winner Saturday morning, March 19th. Comments will close at 9 AM PST. (Sorry to my international readers, but U.S. residents only...)

And a note about giveaways: I try very hard to keep inchmark non-commercial (which is becoming a rarity these days in the blog world). Please note that inchmark does not offer giveaways for products, books, etc. except in specific cases where I was involved in the creation of the product (i.e. a book I have designed).

Update on 03.20.2011 by Brooke

And the winner is #36, Margaret! Shoot me an email with your address and I will pop your book in the mail! Happy knitting!

mikkel vang

I spent the last five days on a small island in the Bahamas working on a shoot with photographer Mikkel Vang. I've been a fan of Mikkel's work for some time now, but never had the pleasure of shooting with him during my time at Martha Stewart. He's one of those rare photographers who can shoot anything: interiors, food, lifestyle, people, landscapes. If you need a little burst of inspiration today, spend a few minutes on his website.

Photos from Mikkel's website - www.mikkelvang.com.

hello wedding

Last year I mentioned going on a photo shoot for a lovely wedding in Northern California. Nine months later, it is finally featured in the Spring 2010 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings. I was pleasantly suprised to see that it also landed on the cover!

The wedding was for Hello! Lucky stationery creative director Eunice Moyle, and it was ridiculously beautiful and a bit quirky and seriously fun. One of my favorite elements was the stationery, from the invitations themselves to the labels on the jelly jar favors, every piece was beautiful... and that pepper jelly, amazingly good on biscuits. Eunice also designed a set of playing cards with the motifs from the wedding, such a nice keepsake for each of the lucky guests. You can see more of the stationery suite here. (We had to wake up at 5 AM in order to get this shot of the stationery in the clover before the sun came up over the mountain... but I think it was worth it.)

Eunice and her sister Sabrina were so calm, great examples of grace under pressure. And I loved meeting their sweet father, who I chatted with between shots. He told me how he always read to the girls every night when they were little. "And not kid books either.. real books like Treasure Island." It was after speaking to him that I started reading more chapter books to my kids each night, instead of only picture books. Great advice!

Congrats to Eunice and Daniel..

how a logo is made

The past few weeks I've been working on a redesign for one of my very favorite clients, the lovely girls over at Purl Soho. If you haven't heard, they are moving their two sweet knitting and sewing shops in New York City into one HUGE store over on Broome Street.

Now that the two stores (Purl and Purl Patchwork) are combining, they needed a new name and a new logo. The new store will be known as Purl Soho.. and there is a great post up on the Purl Bee explaining how the new logo came to be. I had to break out my trusty tracing paper for this one (sketches can be seen above). It reminded me that though most of my design work is now done on the computer, sometimes you need to take a break from the keyboard and pull out your pencil and just draw.. and draw.. and draw.

and the winners are...

Using our homemade UNO card number generator once again, the kids just picked the two lucky winners.

#545 = Emily Proudfoot who said "Ever tasteful and lovely. Thanks for offering the giveaway!"

#381 = Urska Lenart who said "I love it. It would be lovely to look at through the whole year. Thank you."

Ladies, please email me your addresses and I will get your calendars in the mail as soon as possible. And for those of you who didn't win, you can still purchase a purlsoho calendar in time for the new year. The birds shown above are for the month of December.

purl calendar giveaway

One thing you might want to add to your Christmas list is Purlsoho.com's new calendar, full of projects from their blog, the Purl Bee. I am already loving the way it looks on my inspiration board. I've been designing this calendar for the past few months, and believe me when I say it was quite a feat to pick only twelve of our favorite projects. We ended up with a nice mix of sewing and patchwork, crochet and knitting projects.

Each month features a different project, with a lovely photo on the front and the materials you need for each project on the back (along with the link to the detailed project instructions on the Purl Bee.)

And the lovely ladies over at Purlsoho have given me two calendars to giveaway! Please leave a comment to enter. The kids and I will pick a winner Tuesday 12/15, so please enter by 12/14. That should give us plenty of time to ship them to the winners before the New Year. Happy 2010! Comments are now closed!

tess + adam

Tess and her lovely antique wedding dress have been showing up on a few of my favorite blogs lately. Tess lives in Seattle and asked me a few months ago to help design her wedding invitation (she was married a few weeks ago to a lucky young man named Adam).

To get a feel for what Tess was planning on doing for her wedding, my friend Beth (Tess' mother) came over to share some inspiration. The palette was cream and linen, with mossy greens and a touch of pale pink. Tess is a mycologist (lover of mushrooms and other fungi) so she wanted to incorporate mushrooms and other natural elements like moss and wood into the theme as well.

I first thought about incorporating faux bois into the invite, maybe with a nod to mushroom prints (which I adore). But I kept going back to that dress. Tess' dress is an antique gown she bought years and years ago at a vintage clothing store in New York. I love everything about it, especially the patterns in the lace.

I decided to use the overlapping circles from the front of her dress as the motif for the invitation. I love the symbolism of linked circles for a wedding invitation, linking a couple together, two families together. We letterpressed the invitations on Crane's thick Lettra paper in two colors, with gray for the type and a slight cream for the lace design. (Letterpress printing by Bjorn Press, who did a lovely job)

The inserts for the invitation also used designs I pulled from the lace on Tess' dress. The top card (below) uses the pattern from the lace at the neckline of the dress. The bottom card has a simple dotted circle, gathering in family and friends for the wedding.

The thank you cards (shown below) have a leaf design pulled from the lace on the back of the dress. The small cards (which were attached to favor boxes) have a simple scalloped design inspired by the dress' hem.

You can see more details of Tess' dress here, and details of Tess and Adam's beautiful wedding (with terrariums, ferns and a mushroom cake) here. (photos of Tess taken by photographer Rachel Thurston and used with her permission)

Congratulations Tess and Adam! Now go live a happy life!

tomorrow on Martha

Just a reminder that the lovely Heather Ross will be a guest on the Martha Stewart show tomorrow! Doesn't she look beautiful? And see Martha holding a copy of Weekend Sewing.. I'm pretty sure that's as famous as my legs will ever get!

Note: The episode aired on Tuesday, May 19th.. You can watch the video clip here. Just click "Watch Video." My favorite part is when Heather says "The cover is Brooke Hellewell, she had the best legs on the shoot so we made her climb the tree." (Just for the record, Heather has very nice legs, so that's a bunch of hogwash.) And then Martha says "Oh, I know Brooke!"

a shoot in vermont

I'm amazed at the responses to my little giveaway.. I wish I had 50 books to share! I don't know how we'll pick between them all. Comments will close Tuesday night at 8 PM PST, so you can still enter if you haven't had the chance yet.

I promised some pictures, so here is a sneak peek at our first Weekend Sewing photo shoot (1 of 4) located at the charming Blueberry Hill Inn in beautiful Goshen, Vermont.

That nice guy in the green shirt is John Gruen, photographer extraordinaire, balancing a white board on his very expensive camera. Heather Ross is in the doorway, getting ready to model an apron. Various other people making sure her apron is on straight and that Heather doesn't have any spinach in her teeth. Children (mine and others who will be modeling later) left to entertain themselves on the lawn.

Because little ones have a hard time entertaining themselves for long, we soon learned they could be entertained with all different kinds of camera equipment by their new best friend Alex, John's photo assistant. (thank you again, Alex!)

A typical set up.. the photographer is hard at work setting up the shot (napkins on a wooden table). The photo assistant is making sure the lighting is right (the big scrim shades the table from direct sunlight). Heather is ready to step in and swap out a tablecloth or move things around as necessary. The art director/designer is there to approve polaroids and to make sure the shot is going to work with the layout. (Bigger shoots need bigger crews, but a typical book shoot can get by with about 4-5 good people, especially if they already know each other and work well together).

My first trip to Vermont, and I can see why people love it so. The grounds surrounding Blueberry Hill are amazing.. one morning I woke up early with my kids and we walked the grounds around the inn for an hour or so. It was a gorgeous morning with the sun just rising and fields upon fields of grass and dandelions. Blue sky, happy kids blowing dandelions.. I can't think of a better way to start a day.

Update: Looks like Heather is planning a Weekend Sewing workshop, where you can see Blueberry Hill for yourself and sew with Heather all weekend.. more details here.