We’re off to Fort Worth, Texas this week to host a Holiday Trunk Show with our BFFs at Byrd + Bleecker! Stop on in, create a work of art, order your letterpress holiday cards, or just say hello. We’d love to meet you!

The holiday season is quickly approaching, so to get your sleigh bells ringing, we’re offering free letterpress envelope printing on all custom holiday orders placed from now through December 14! Visit your local Smock dealer today to order your letterpress or foil stamped holiday cards. Need more motivation? Check out some of our newest holiday designs below for inspiration!

Design information, clockwise from top: Smock holiday customization #21 {gold shine foil + sand letterpress ink + white bamboo paper + plaza calligraphy font} | Smock holiday customization #11 {apricot + cherry letterpress inks + white bamboo paper } | Smock holiday customization #3 {red shine foil + white bamboo paper + plaza calligraphy font} | Smock holiday customization #20 {cherry ink + white bamboo paper}

Over the summer, greeting cards and letterpress invitations from Smock were featured in some outstanding publications, and it’s time to thank the wonderful editors for their recognition! First up, Traditional Home — which featured three Smock cards in their “Hot Stuff” feature in the May 2012 issue: Botanical Thanks, Cayman and Eaton were selected for the piece.

Inside Weddings magazine featured a beautiful letterpress customization of our Ossa invitation design in their Summer 2012 issue (see the wedding here!).

Stationery Trends Magazine included several pieces from Smock in their summer issue — a preppy customization of our Dawson design, our Crochet keepsake boxes and our new Palmes design were all selected for the latest issue.

Smart Retailer magazine included our Persimmon jotter notepads in the “Write On!” feature of their May/June 2012 issue.

Gifts and Decorative Accessories included our “Thanks a Bunch” folded offset note cards for the stationery feature in their May 2012 issue.

Smock has been spotted around the web, too — many thanks to Discover Paper, Oh So Beautiful Paper, Young House Love, Papercrave, Dearest Nature, Married in Milwaukee, In Tandem Fair Trade Weddings, Syracuse First, Poppytalk via Babble, and The Stationery Place for mentioning Smock on your lovely sites!

We’re so excited to introduce our newest card in the “Change the World” letterpress card series, where we donate 100% of profits to a critical environmental issue. The second card in our series is called Fracking, and will benefit Earthworks. The cards also come with an anti-fracking tattoo!

Here’s the problem:  In the U.S., we’re drilling around 2,000 new oil and gas wells per month. 90% of these new wells use a process called “hydraulic fracturing”, also known as fracking. To get the natural gas out of the ground, fracking requires 3-15 million gallons of water plus a lot of chemicals. Rarely do we know what these chemicals are; the oil and gas industry is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Superfund law. A large percentage of this chemical laced water remains in the crevices of the earth, soaking into the ground, and threatening our clean water supply.

Is there a realistic solution? Fracking is scary, but it’s only part of the problem – change needs to happen. Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project is working to reform the entire oil and gas industry. Earthworks believes that corporations should be allowed to extract and process mineral fuels only if they can do so without harming human health or contaminating the air, water, and soil, with an eye on impacts at all levels: local, regional, and global. This means achieving the following goals:

1. No water pollution: protect public health, the environment, and the climate from toxic, hazardous, and carcinogenic chemicals used in the extraction of fossil fuel energy resources;
2. Low emissions: protect public health, the environment, and the climate from pollutants emitted during the drilling and ongoing production of energy resources;
3. No-Go Zones: protect sacred areas, fragile ecosystems, neighborhoods, drinking watersheds and densely populated areas targeted for energy development;
4. Landowner or Community Consent: continue to develop and then implement laws and policies ensuring that landowners have essential co-equal rights to negotiate with, and to say ‘no’ to, energy development.

Take action now:

• Contact your legislators and ask them to protect our clean air and clean water from fracking by supporting the FRAC Act. The FRAC Act would close the “Halliburton loophole” in the Safe Drinking Water Act that allows drillers to inject hazardous materials — unchecked — directly into underground drinking water supplies.
• Get informed: learn more at Earthworks.
• Make a contribution: help Earthworks continue the good fight by making a donation. If you follow this link, you can get your very own “Gas and Water Don’t Mix” temporary tattoos (created & designed by Smock!) when you make a contribution to Earthworks (while supplies last). 
• Join the conversation on our tumblr blog: In collaboration with Earthworks, we’ve created a tumblr blog called Gas and Water Don’t Mix (gas-and-water-dont-mix.tumblr.com), a place where those who care about fracking can build a communal voice around the issue. Concerned citizens can go on and add a photo of themselves in a place they love, and include a few sentences about why they are freaked out by fracking. We’re encouraging everyone to don the Gas and Water Don’t Mix temporary tattoo in solidarity of the issue on the blog.

We’ve been hard at work here at Smock dreaming up beautiful new letterpress stationery goods for our biggest release of the year, and we can’t wait for you to see everything that’s new! We’ve got lots of notebooks (including classy new spiral notebooks!), calendars, new man-friendly stationery, double-sided gift wrap, fabulous keepsake boxes, shiny foil stamped occasion cards, handy notepads, and lots, lots more. Hurry over & see all the gorgeous new stuff today!

We’re all for making an invitation suite all your own – and truly having fun when choosing customizations that reflect your personality.  Our pewter and yolk inks shine in this cutting-edge letterpress Palmer suite – and we just can’t get enough of the fun embellishments seen throughout this set.  We love that our plymouth die cut shape is carried through on the reply card, website card and accommodation cards.  This peppy and colorful suite makes it difficult to shake the good vibes we’re feeling.  We’re in the midst of the summer wedding season – and are excited to showcase a set with its own sense of style.  Not to mention this invitation includes even more glam with a folio printed on both the interior and exterior – in very ultramodern patterns.  The letterpress belly band in our ness pattern makes the perfect touch with a beautiful textured look.  We’d like to give a HUGE thank you to our friend Enisha at The Dandelion Patch in Vienna, Virignia for sending us this imaginative customization!

inks: pewter + yolk | fonts: percy + louise | paper: 1-ply white | printing: letterpress | die cut: plymouth | folio exterior: hoveton pattern in yolk | folio interior: pearl pattern in silver | edge paint: yolk | liner: the ness pattern in silver | letterpress belly band |invite size: s7

It’s easy to get swept away in these beautiful and delicate letterpress save the dates.  These beauties were submitted to us by our great friend, Nancy at Epitome Papers in Edina, Minnesota.  We think you’ll agree that these save the dates are current and look absolutely fabulous printed in three ink colors.  The oversized textured starfish is the perfect motif for a seaside wedding in Key Largo, Florida.  These save the dates are whimsical in their own right – while still being playful and chic.  The seahorse pattern envelope liner really makes a bold statement of what guests can expect as far as wedding atmosphere.  We can just close our eyes and feel the warmth of the golden sunshine and the white sandy beaches!

inks: spring + slate + inkless blind deboss | font: smock harrison | paper: 2-ply white bamboo | printing: letterpress | edge painting in spring | back patterning: gala in spring |liner: the seahorse pattern in slate | invite size: S8SQ

It’s time again for us to extend our endless thanks to the wonderful editors and bloggers out there for featuring Smock in their fantastic publications this spring! Smock’s double-sided gift wrap, letterpress wedding invitations, jotters and more have been spotted in some amazing places lately.

First up, Brides magazine featured letterpress wedding invitations from our custom line in their April and May issues — a pretty customization of our Hekla invitation was featured alongside some of our signature envelope liners (based on our gift wrap!) and feature fun chevron stripes in a pretty purple hue. In May, our Tallmossen invitations were featured (also seen with signature envelope liners!) in a gorgeous round-up of wedding elements with Mediterranean charm.

Next up, an absolutely adorable DIY from the June issue of Woman’s Day magazine. Woman’s Day did a “Berry Pretty!” project with our Pollen, Sorbet, and Pearl double-sided gift wrap –aren’t those containers fantastic?!

Stationery Trends magazine did an extensive (and fabulous) feature of our creative director Amy Graham Stigler, showcasing her for their “Designer Profile” in the 2012 winter edition.

Celebrate magazine did an amazing round-up of nautical party-picks in their May/June issue, so we were thrilled to see our cheery Breakers gift wrap featured in such fun company!

Victoria Magazine also featured a fun assortment of vibrant, floral inspired stationery and included our Fete and Veranda jotters along with our Picadilly notebook.

We’d also love to extend a huge “thanks” to the following websites and blogs that have featured Smock over the past few months: Real Simple, Oh So Beautiful Paper (times 2!), Once Wed, Papercrave, Style Me Pretty, Green Wedding Shoes, Eco-beautiful Weddings, Young House Love, Discover Paper, EcoChicDesign, The Stationery Place, Curating Style, Simply Modern Weddings, Wedding Row Charlotte and the Washingtonian!

It’s official: foil stamping has arrived at Smock! Today we’re sharing a special sneak peek of the letterpress invitations we printed for the 2012 National Stationery Show, and we think you’ll love the new additions we’re bringing to the line. We’re adding two gorgeous new fonts to our collection of exclusive Smock calligraphy fonts, and these invitations feature both of those new fonts! Plaza is an elegant, formal script based on Sarah Hanna‘s calligraphy, and Stella (based on a Kelle McCarter hand) has a more playful, whimsical feel. The invitations are just a hint at what’s new: besides foil stamping and new calligraphy fonts, we’re also introducing four inspired new wedding suites, 12 dazzling colors for foil stamping, 100% recycled coasters, and lots of cool new products for our Everyday line (including 6 new styles of double-sided gift wrap, new notebook styles, more man-friendly stationery, and much, much more!).  A special thanks to master calligrapher Debi Zeinert from The Blooming Quill for addressing the invitation envelopes – aren’t they gorgeous!? Foil stamping will be available at Smock dealers in early June, so stay tuned!

Our Sutton design looks prominent printed in mint and navy inks and we think you’ll find it easy to agree!  Our good friend, Jessica at Salutations in Charlotte, North Carolina submitted this letterpress suite to us for printing.  The repeating Sutton motif looks almost floral as the invitation background pattern – adding to the ornate feel.  On the exterior of the pocketfold – we have offset printed our sinclair pattern in navy – and on the folio interior the classic feel is seen within our sherbrooke pattern also in navy.  Blues and greens can be incredibly versatile ink colors when it comes to wedding invitations.  Navy ink is a superb choice for a sunset ceremony whereas mint can match back to the fauna at the wedding venue.

inks: mint + navy | fonts: stock + smock spencerian | paper: 2-ply ivory | printing: letterpress| folio exterior: sinclair pattern in navy | folio interior: sherbrooke pattern in navy| invite size: 5.125 x 7.75