Thank you to everyone who came out to the meetup last Wednesday at Brooklyn General Store! It was great to meet many UPPERCASE subscribers in person and put some faces to people I enjoy following on Instagram. Thank you to Catherine Clark for hosting this lovely event.
Here's the store earlier in the day, before a few dozen people showed up! To see pictures from the event, please scroll over on Instagram.
There are only a handful of UPPERCASE stockists in the city. One of them is The Ink Pad, a unique shop specializing in rubber stamps, scrapbooking and paper arts. Located on 37th Seventh Avenue at the corner of 13th Street, the shop has been in Greenwich Village for over 18 years.
There's UPPERCASE openly displayed in The Ink Pad window.
UPPERCASE and other magazines for the creatively inclined.
There's an extraordinary variety of rubber stamps!
We even found a rubber stamp of our dog Percy, a Cardigan Corgi.
Anna Chiang is the owner of the store—she commutes an hour and a half each day to The Ink Pad. Now that's dedication! Patrice, in the middle, created some of the stamped card designs on display throughout The Ink Pad.
Thank you, Anna, for carrying UPPERCASE in your shop! If you're not in NYC, you can shop The Ink Pad online, too.
update: please RSVP here
I'm looking forward to spending time in Catherine Clark's beautiful shop, Brooklyn General. This is the perfect venue for a little UPPERCASE gathering. Please drop by and join us for a browse (yarn, fabric, tools, books and creative supplies!) and refreshments. If you have something you'd like to show me for consideration for the magazine, bring it along and we'll have an informal show and tell. We'll have the Feed Sacks book, the new issue and I'll bring a few goodies in my suitcase...
From their website:
"Brooklyn General Store resides tucked away on a sweet block West of the Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill neighbourhoods. At the north end of Red Hook, this commercial block on Union Street used to be a thriving shopping block for all types of foods and goods. Brooklyn General’s home within the Old Frank’s Department Store is a throw back to that era, with its preserved floor to ceiling shelves, rolling ladders and classic old wooden floors. The vintage interior is not reproduced, just uncovered, cleaned and painted. If the original shelving isn’t enough to hold all the goods, vintage rolling shoe racks, stacks of old blueberry boxes, vintage pie safes, vintage hardware displays and shelving built from reclaimed wood house the rest."
The Brooklyn General instagram is nice to follow!
In celebration of the AIGA National Design Center’s centennial year, an exhibition curated by Monotype called “Century: 100 Years of Type in Design” is on display at the AIGA in New York City until June 18.
The exhibition, designed by Pentagram partner Abbott Miller celebrates typeface diversity and the role that texts and fonts have played throughout the past century.
"Monotype made the entirety of its libraries available to Miller for the project,” notes the Pentagram website. "The idea of multiplicity is highlighted in an environment that communicates the endless diversity of typographic form: the walls and floor are covered in a pattern of 1,058 different periods, drawing from 630 typefaces. Displayed in the gallery window, Miller’s identity for the exhibition is a letter “C” rendered in segments of different Monotype fonts."
For location and hours of the exhibit, please refer to the AIGA’s website.
I had a wonderful time last week being a judge for the Society of Illustrators. The best part of the experience was being able to look through their permanent collection. The video above captures some of the fun!
Judges for this year's "uncommissioned" category:
George Bates, Illustrator
Julia Breckenreid, Illustrator
John Cuneo, Illustrator
Aya Kakeda, Illustrator
Alex Spiro, Creative Director, Nobrow
John Martz, Illustrator
Francesca Messina, Senior Group Art Director, McGraw-Hill Construction
Janine Vangool, Publisher, Editor, Designer, UPPERCASE Magazine
Thank you to Jillian Tamaki, Anelle Miller, Kate Feirtag and Eric Fowler.
Whether grey or colourful, there's lots to see on the streets.
Treasured Notions features crafts inspired by the vintage beads, buttons, ribbons and trim from Tinsel Trading.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I was on a mission to find a particular store that I had heard a lot about... Tinsel Trading Company. Alas, when I got to the address, there was a simple letter-sized sheet of paper in the window saying they had moved. I couldn't go this far and not go the entire distance, so I hopped back on the subway to 828 Lexington Ave. (I guess Google Maps didn't get the notice!)
I have to admit that the small put pretty shop bedazzled with lovely Wendy Addison glass-glittered letters and letterpress labels wasn't what I was expecting. When I told the clerk I was from Canada, shared a copy of the magazine and asked to take pictures for the blog, she opened up that they had been forced to quickly move locations when the previous building was sold. It sounds like they had very little time to find a new location and thus had to downsize their retail space considerably.
You can get a sense of the previous store (and the amazing, but likely heart-wrenching moving sale) from their Facebook page. They still had some vintage ribbons and embroidered patches and things for sale—and the massive inventory of vintage stock is in their warehouse—but I was imagining the beauty of seeing all of that vintage stock on old displays in a grand New York style. From the fondness and sadness in the clerks voice, it was clear that it is missed by all.
My purchases: a spool of yellow trim, a package of assorted vintage trim from the Tinsel Trading archives, some vintage thread and French General's book Treasured Notions featuring supplies from Tinsel Trading Company. (Published by Chronicle Books.)
It was still an awesome store to visit and I hope that Tinsel Trading will have continued success. Here's a video about the French General book as well as an older video that shows what their previous location was like...
The store I was looking for had moved, but it was fun to window shop near the 34 Street subway stop. Store after store of beads, bling and outlandishly sequined gowns.
One of the events of the Nearly Impossible conference was the "Expert Lab" in which you could book 15 minutes with an advisor. It was held at the Etsy headquarter's Lab/event space.
This card catalogue was full of creative tools and materials.
Hmmm... I think UPPERCASE magazine and books should be on these shelves.
A t-shirt screenprinting area.
Etsy Lab coats.
The space was loud and buzzing with conversation.
I don't know why, but I love photographing scissors.
Hoodies provided to conference goers by Amplifier.
Scoutbooks provided these little notebooks.
Per Aspera Ad Astra = Through hardships to the stars
Maybe next time I'm in the city, I'll visit the Etsy headquarters, a few floors above the Lab.
Purl Soho has been a stockist and advertiser since nearly the beginning of UPPERCASE. So wonderful to finally experience all of this in person! A rainbow of amazing textures in a gorgeous store. (They were out of stock of UPPERCASE during my visit... we'll have to take care of that pronto!)
Last night in Times Square
It is easy to lose track of the days when you're away from the routine of home! Here's a type tuesday scene.
Stella Dallas Living in Williamsburg is a great mash of vintage blankets, tablecloths and doilies. Fun to look at, that's for sure. Maybe someday when I have a chic cabin by the lake I'll outfit it in miscellaneous vintage quilts and tablecloths...
The NYC Marathon was on today, thwarting our paths but providing an interesting view of New Yorkers. Finley was not a fan of all the noisy bands and load noises.
Finley pauses to notice things like broken flower pots, rocks, rough patches on the sidewalk—and hearts.
Williamsburg texture
Artists and Fleas offered a variety of tshirts, vintage clothing, jewellery but we just did a quick walk through; too crowded for us.
Went to the Williamsburg location Brooklyn Flea to have a look-see.
The overall colour of the flea was "tweed".
A view of Manhattan from the flea market.
Letters lying around, but nothing really grabbed my attention or wallet.
This guy.
Colours of Brooklyn.
Finley is used to standing in front of walls for mommy!
Here's a great way to start off our trip to New York City (we leave early Saturday morning)... with a webcam virtual thumbs up from Swiss Miss herself, Tina Roth Eisenberg. We feature Tina's coworking space Studiomates in the current issue and I'm so happy that I'll actually get to see it person next week and meet one of my creative entrepreneur heroines!
The countdown to my New York trip is on: the whole family is leaving this Saturday for a week-long experience. I'll be a judge at the Society of Illustrators and will be attending the Nearly Impossible conference. It's going to be a whirlwind, but if there's anything that you think is a must-see activity, event or destination, I welcome your suggestions in the comments on via Twitter.
A still from the movie, Bill Cunningham at home on the streets.
To get in the New York state of mind, this weekend I thoroughly enjoyed watching the documentary Bill Cunningham New York . It chronicles the 80-year-old-and-then-some Bill, an intrepid street fashion photographer. It is an amusing and touching portrait of a man who has literally dedicated his life to his creative pursuit.
For most of his career, Bill lived a monk-like existance in an artist studio above Carnegie Hall. Surrounded by filing cabinets and stacks of books and magazines, he slept on a simple cot and didn't have a kitchen. During the filming of the movie (released 2011), Bill and the other residence were faced with finding new accommodations. There is another documentary dedicated to these artists and their stories: Lost Bohemia.
The film also introduced me to classic celebrity photographer Editta Sherman—she just celebrated her 101st birthday.
Bill photographer Editta in 1976 for a fashion book entitled Facades, a celebration of 200 years of fashion and architecture in NYC.
Light fixtures on display from Stéphane Hubert Design.
Stephane and Jaime
Stéphane Hubert and Jaime Panoff are the intriguing married couple that make up Stéphane Hubert Design, a company specializing in custom made furniture and lighting sourced from primarily reclaimed sources. What amazed me while talking with them, was not just that the majority of materials they use are reclaimed (and a lot from New York), but that they were able to tell those visiting their booth where a lot of that specific product's wood was taken from. Past and present examples include wood taken from a New York City water tank, antique pine beams taken from 1800s townhouses, wood from the 1890s taken from the General Electric Factory in New Jersey, wood from the Coney Island Boardwalk, etc.
Stéphane, originally from France, but calling the United States his home for the past five years, uses the sourced wood to create custom lamps, kitchen utensils, trays and furniture while Jaime uses her PR and Marketing background to help with creative direction. Through Stéphane Hubert Design, their individual aesthetic values come together, Jaime's more modern and clean and Stephane's more focused on their foundation of natural materials.
This particular item's wood was sourced from the General Electric Factory in New Jersey.
Thus concludes Yvonne's coverage of Unique NYC. Thank you to Yvonne for her fine photographs and to Marat for helping to promote UPPERCASE at the event this past weekend.
Cover by Christy Batta
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UPPERCASE is a quarterly print magazine inspired by craft, design and illustration. A playful exploration of creativity, an affinity for vintage ephemera, and a love of handmade are some elements common in each issue. The magazine boasts high-quality paper and printing, a unique design aesthetic and incredible attention to detail.
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