Our friends at  The Inviting Place helped the Vawter family create these chic custom holiday photo cards using different elements from our design library. A black and white family photograph on the front of the card was accented by red foil stamped design motifs from our Merci Holiday card, while the reverse side of the card pairs a letterpress printed border with a second digitally printed photograph. Our vintage Santa Claus print was used to create a festive envelope liner to finish off the cards.

foil color: red shine | letterpress ink color: pewter | digital ink color: CMYK process | fonts: Nublia +Woodland | paper: 1-ply white bamboo | size: S-6 | envelope liner: vintage Santa Claus print | customization #31400 | The Inviting Place

For those of you still finishing up last minute shopping, we wanted to take a moment to share some of our favorite gift giving ideas this holiday season. I polled the Smock team for their suggestions for great presents and honestly wish I could be the recipient of all of these incredible gifts! These ideas are sure to please.

Smock’s creative director and designer, Amy Graham Stigler, is in love with upcycled mittens made from old sweaters. (You can visit Simple Up for easy to follow patterns for making your own hat and mittens.)

Smock co-owner Debbie Urbanski recommends Cannellini heirloom beans – these beans are so delicious you’ll never go back to grocery store beans again. In fact, they are so popular, Rancho Gordo was sold out of them for nearly a year!

My personal favorite gift to give this holiday season is a great hand-poured soy candle (or two) from Linnea’s Lights. Not only are the fragrances amazing, but the packaging is simply divine.

Our client coordinator, Lindsy, is a big fan of this pretty embroidered clutch from Free People. It’s a lovely gift for any lady in your life like a sister or a special girlfriend.

Beth Ann, one of our in-house graphic designers, is gifting this great recipe basket from Longaberger this year. This handcrafted basket is the perfect gift for the cooking or baking enthusiast in your life.

This idea is quite near and dear to our hearts – our office manager, Carrie, took old salvaged books and created cool boxes by hollowing them out and lining them in scraps of our eco gift wrap. She’s filling each with fun little goodies for her family and friends.

With Christmas and New Year’s Eve just around the corner, we wanted to share a few more of the lovely custom letterpress holiday cards and invitations we’ve been printing this season. The first is a custom letterpress holiday invitation, a piece we printed for our friends at Paper & Chocolate in Dallas. It is printed in festive red ink with red edge painting paired with an envelope lined in our iznik pattern in grass ink.

This letterpress holiday card, brought to us by Cotton Idea Studio in Newport Beach, California,  features space to attach a photo and is printed in a unique holiday color combination of pool and spring inks. The card was then edge painted in pool.

These custom hang tags are the perfect holiday gift tags, printed for Buchanan Ink in Nashville. It is letterpress printed in spring ink then hole drilled and grommeted for the making of fabulous holiday packaging.

When thinking up fun ways to use our eco gift wrap this holiday season, we dug deep into our craft drawers at home to find cute bows, ribbon and tulle. We used the wrap to stuff gift bags, crafted it into ribbon and curly bows and played with the double-sided patterns to create pretty stacks of presents all tied up with cute embellishments. At Smock, we’re the type of folks who adore a pretty package anytime of the year, but it’s especially fun at the holidays to gussy up packages for giving to loved ones. All of our gift wraps feature double-sided patterns printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper and come in over-sized sheets that are 24″ x 36″ – each roll comes with two sheets.

Smock’s Market wrap topped with a big yellow bow.

Smock’s pretty pink Plume wrap and Chiffon wrap tied up in a cute stack with iridescent ribbon.

Smock’s Liony blue and green gift wrap paired with salvaged fabric ribbon we had lying around from an old craft project.

Smock’s Julep gift wrap with a tuft of bright blue tulle on top.

This package is all wrapped up in pretty recycled kraft paper and features Smock’s Liony gift wrap as both ribbon and curly bow.

For those gifts better off rolled, we used our Savoy gift wrap to form a pretty patterned tube and then finished it off with white tulle.

No time to wrap? Here we used our Savoy and Ceylon gift wraps as stuffing for gift bags.

Smock’s Tissot gift wrap tied up with pretty purple and lavender ribbons in a basket weave pattern.

Our philosophy at Smock is that gifts don’t have to be lavish to be extraordinary. Even the simplest of gifts can leave a lasting impression when you get creative with great gift wrap and the perfect little letterpress card or gift tag. Still on the hunt for great gift ideas? We’ll be rounding up a few of our favorites next week for those of you who – like us – still have a long list of gifts to buy. Don’t miss it!

With the holiday season in full swing, we can’t help but picture cute little packages tied up with bows and paired with the cutest of letterpress gift tags. And all of that talk about pretty holiday packages got us thinking about creative ways to put our double-sided eco gift wrap, printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper, to work this holiday season. We’ve been busy coming up with ideas and crafting up great holiday gift wrapping ideas so make sure to check back next week when we’ll be sharing lots of ideas on how to make your packages unique and beautiful. In the meantime, have a happy weekend and we’ll be back next week with tons of holiday inspiration!

With the holidays soon to be upon us, we’ve been feeling the holiday cheer here at Smock for a while now as we print lots of pretty custom letterpress holiday cards. We’re pretty firm believers that nothing says “happy holidays!” quite like beautiful letterpress cards. We think you’ll agree!

This letterpress holiday card, designed to accommodate a holiday photo, is a customization of our Cindrel letterpress wedding invitation printed for the folks of By Invitation Only in Little Rock, Arkansas. It is printed in red ink and blind deboss, featuring corner rounding and custom hand calligraphy accents.

Another customization of one of our letterpress wedding invitations, this holiday card is our Vettore design printed in red ink.  The envelope liner is our seneca pattern, printed in pewter ink and the design again features that special extra touch of beautiful hand calligraphy. This customization was brought to us by Ecru Modern Stationer in Portland, Oregon.

Another letterpress card designed to include a photo, this darling letterpress holiday card is a custom creation from our friends at Cotton Idea Studio in Newport Beach, California, featuring red ink and a cute little border pulled from a design in our Everyday letterpress collection.

We adore this unique letterpress card, which serves double duty as both a charming holiday greeting and a moving announcement. Such a fabulous idea! Brought to us by Kelley at Houston Invitation Service, it’s printed in red ink on our citron green bamboo paper from our new Social Occasions album.

As the holidays draw near, the team here at Smock is feeling our holiday spirit grow by the day. How are you saying “happy holidays” this holiday season? We’d love to know what you do to make the season merry and bright!

With the holidays swiftly approaching, we were recently contacted by two of our fabulous Smock retailers about contributing some Smock goodies for holiday events being hosted at their stores. Naturally, we couldn’t resist getting in on the holiday action. At Smock, we believe in giving back at the holidays and throughout the year so we were excited for the opportunity to help our stores out this holiday season.

We sent these little bundles, featuring a few of our letterpress holiday cards and letterpress gift tags, to our friends at Salutations in North Carolina where they were hosting a holiday open house at each of their stores in Charlotte and Chapel Hill. Guests to the event had to bring non-perishable food items to donate to the local food pantry in order to gain admittance to the event. We’re delighted to have been a part of such a fabulous event!

We also happily sent some of our double-sided 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap and letterpress gift tags to Broadway Paper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Broadway Paper’s holiday open house is being held this Saturday, November 14th – you can visit their website and the Broadway Paper blog for more details if you’re in Wisconsin and would like to attend.

What are you doing to get in the holiday spirit? We’d love to hear about the fabulous events you’re hosting or attending this holiday season!

The Amazon Conversation Association is one amazing environmental nonprofit that we support through 1% for the Planet (we donate 1% of sales to the ACA and the Pesticide Action Network) — but we are also so excited to support the Amazon Conservation Association by printing pro bono these letterpress cards for them this year. Letterpressed on bamboo paper of course….the sweet illustration is by Susan Cousineau, a Los Amigos Researcher in 2008.

VINTAGE GLASS ORNAMENTS.  You can never have enough.  Well, I suppose you can, but we break at least a half a dozen a year so we keep a  ‘cushion.’  I place them in bowls and vases and on mantels & trees. My kids love to view their reflection in them (like mini gazing balls) and my husband loves to shout ‘don’t drop!’ when they are doing so. Alas, they don’t always listen so the broom is always close at hand.

We’re still feeling the (letterpress) holiday spirit here at Smock…thanks in part to all the great custom holiday cards we’ve had on our presses lately. This was an elegant, cool & fun holiday design that we printed recently, based on our Nevis wedding invitation . What a creative customization….red and black letterpress inks, red edge painting (wow! it really stands out against the black), the seneca stripes pattern in black for a backing, and the sottern envelope liner in black. The mix of patterns & the accents of red create such a good energy. This custom holiday card came to us from Events in Houston.