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!

In celebration of the holidays and the earth, here at Smock we are officially renaming this Friday Green Friday. On Friday, November 27th, for one day only, we’ll be donating 50% of all proceeds of sales on smockpaper.com to the Amazon Conservation Association! As one of our Smock eco partners, the Amazon Conservation Association works to conserve the vitality of the Amazon – an ecosystem that is vital to keeping the planet alive and well. The Amazon is one of the world’s most important carbon banks and is home to 20% of the planet’s animal and planet species; it plays an integral part in helping slow global warming; and it’s an area threatened by deforestation.

What does that mean for you? You can nab up all of your favorite Smock goodies from our Everyday collection and in turn, we’ll do our part to help out the earth. With the holidays swiftly approaching, now is your opportunity to stock up on our festive double-sided gift wrap printed on 100% post consumer recycled paper and adorable letterpress gift tags, letterpress holiday cards and more, all sustainably printed on our bamboo paper. Help us help the planet this holiday season!

Working with incredible retailers across the country and internationally is, hands down, the best part about what we do at Smock. They keep us inspired and energized and looking forward to creating imaginative, sustainably printed letterpress for customers worldwide. One store in particular that continues to amaze us is Urbanic Paper Boutique and their fabulous blog Parcel Post, where owner Audrey Woollen routinely feature a glimpse into life at Urbanic and the great paper products they carry. We’re always delighted when Smock products pop up in their weekly Friday at the Shop feature and have found ourselves continually loving the great photos they’ve taken of our 100% post consumer recycled gift wrap.

All of our gift wraps are double-sided, printed with bright festive patterns that coordinate with many of our letterpress greeting cards and letterpress gift tags. Later this week, we’ll be featuring Urbanic in our Smock Store Spotlight feature so be sure to stop back for all the behind the scenes details of one of our favorite paper shops!

{Photos by Urbanic for Parcel Post.}

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!

When Smock’s Master Calligraphy, Debi Zeinert of The Blooming Quill, welcomed a new granddaughter this summer, we were positively thrilled for her and her family. It was a true honor and a pleasure for us to print these beautiful custom letterpress baby announcements to welcome baby Natalia into the world. Perfect for welcoming a little baby girl, this customization was based on our pink Lamby greeting card and features lovely hand calligraphy on the inside from Debi herself. The baby lamb motif featured on this card is available through our new Social Occasions album, released earlier this year, so you can mix and match motifs, colors, patterns, and fonts to create the perfect baby announcement or social stationery to celebrate any occasion. This letterpress baby announcement was such a joy to print – we look forward to printing many more!

When we print letterpress dinner menus, we can’t help but marvel over the great food we know guests are going to deilght in enjoying – cinnamon and port wine poached anjou pear? Sounds declicious! Brought to us by Aileen’s Invitations in Miami, this letterpress menu is our Kurai design printed in rich raspberry ink. The vertical orientation, in combination with the border around the edges, makes this customization quite different from the original design. This customization is the definition of sophisticated elegance.

A big thank you to our lovely friends at Aileen’s Invitations for allowing us the pleasure of printing these great letterpress menus!

Earlier this month, Smock was excited for the opportunity to contribute some of our fun letterpress greeting cards to goody bags handed out to guests at the recent Rubie Green event at Calypso Home in New York City. Rubie Green, a line of incredibly stylish organic upholstery textiles and bedding, was created by Michelle Adams who is the former editor of Domino magazine so it was a thrill for us to contribute to an event that was both fabulously chic, but also wonderfully eco-minded. This was such a great opportunity to introduce Smock to some new friends!

First of all, it has to be noted that the Calypso store provided a beautiful backdrop for this event…

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Niki Kantor Rubin, proprietress of Papery & Cakery in Boca Raton, Florida brings a unique background to her unique business, a stationery and patisserie boutique. With an educational background in history and a law degree from George Washington University, Niki began her career clerking for a criminal judge. From the beginning, her law practice failed to be completely satisfying and she had never shaken her lifelong passion for design, art and creating. Then a few years ago she starting planning her wedding to her “camp sweetheart” – they met while both working as counselors at a summer camp nearly a decade ago – and realized how much she loved planning all of the stationery and paper details that they incorporated in their celebration. Along the way, she met the owner of the stationery store that is now Papery & Cakery – one thing led to another and when Niki was offered the opportunity to buy the store she did so. And she never looked back.

These days, Niki loves working with clients to create the stationery of their dreams. Unlike her days in law practice, she’s now inspired by what she does and feels lucky to help people celebrate the special occasions in their lives. Niki shares, “I’m inspired by everything around me. Florida weather is truly amazing. We live near the ocean and walk our golden retriever [and Papery & Cakery mascot], Ray, to the beach almost daily.  I try to carry environmentally friendly vendors, like Smock for all of my clients. I’m a magazine junkie, and get butterflies when Martha Stewart arrives in the mail. There is so much to see on the web, I try to keep up with the blogging world, and keep my blog contemporary and chic.”

We’ve mentioned it before, but in addition to all things paper and letterpress, here at Smock we have a pretty deeply rooted love for yummy treats, too. The Papery & Cakery blog is one of our favorite reads because it celebrates two of our favorite things – stationery and delicious sweets. Each week, Niki’s sister Ali, who was a pastry student when Niki launched Papery & Cakery and is now a freelance baker in New York City, shares her inspired recipes in her Cakery Friday feature. Last week, she showcased her recipe for festive pumpkin spice marshmallows, which Ali and Niki were sweet enough to share here on the Smock blog…

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