We’ve been fans of the Nest for awhile — they’re a great nonprofit who gives micro-credit loans to women artists in developing countries, and they’re funded by products sold on their web site. And we love to donate our letterpress printing and design to causes we believe in. So we were thrilled to design and print (pro bono) these lovely letterpress cards, to help the Nest with their donation campaign (the design is based on one of our new letterpress greeting cards).
The Nest very sweetly sent us these cool travel mugs – one for every person in our print shop. The red color makes up so happy while sipping our herbal tea (or, okay, we sip coffee in them too).
Read about another pro bono letterpress printing project that we donated to the Amazon Conservation Fund. And learn more about the Nest and the good that they do here.
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. 
If you’re still looking for unique holiday gifts that help save the world, go right this minute to Nest (www.buildanest.com). Nest is a nonprofit who gives micro-credit loans to women artists in developing countries, and they’re funded by products sold on their web site. We were excited to learn about Nest for a lot of reasons (inspiration! cool gifts! women helping women!), but also because developing countries are often where drastic environmental mis-uses are occurring, simply because there are not enough economic opportunities other than clear-cutting, etc. On Nest, we’re selling a selection of Smock letterpress note cards, letterpress thank you cards, letterpress gift tags, and 100% post-consumer recycled gift wrap. A percentage of every sale goes to fund the hard and good work that Nest is doing. Nest was recently picked by Oprah as a “Gift that Gives.” Thanks to our new Smock wedding dealer, Debra at Luxe Expressions, for turning us onto this cool organization!
We were thrilled to hear that our favorite stationery store in Dallas, Paper & Chocolate, was chosen for Style Me Pretty’s Little Black Book, one of the best wedding resources out there — congratulations! Paper + Chocolate was one of the first stores to pick up Smock’s wedding album when we launched this May — not to mention it’s the best idea for a store. The thought of really good chocolate + really beautiful stationery always gets our hearts racing. We were super excited to see our Rhon wedding invitation on Paper + Chocolate’s Little Black Book page….
We don’t see a whole lot of sun in the fall and winter here in Syracuse — usually the sky is covered with various shades of gray (but pretty grays!). Though sometimes this time of year, at the end of the day, we’re treated to really fabulous shows of color and light. 