We’re kicking off our Instagrams of the Week on the blog today and this one was taken, well, today! We just finished our Valentine’s Day advent where we will get to open a fun gift from each other every day leading up to the Big Red and this is one of Joel’s gifts in action. He’s a LEGO man to the max so this one didn’t disappoint. Also pictured above is a branch he’s been working on wrapping in yarn to decorate our place. Fun! Happy Saturday, everyone!
Can you do pancakes every Friday without eventually coming to crêpes? We didn’t think so, either, so we decided to take the plunge and make them for our second Flapjack Friday.
And who doesn’t love crêpes? They’re one of our favorite things to eat while traveling to continental Europe, though we’ve had some amazing ones in the States as well. Thankfully—though today was actually the first time we’ve made them at home—today’s sweet and savory crêpes, with a batter adapted from The Cook’s Book: Concise Edition, were no exception. The word “crêpe” ultimately comes from the same Latin word from which we get our adjective “crisp,” and if you melt a little butter the size of a quarter between frying up each crêpe, you’ll get that delicious balance between crisp fried edges and soft eggy middle.
INGREDIENTS
(Makes 4–5)
Savory filling:
1/2 sweet onion, sliced thinly
10–12 cherry or grape tomatoes
1 T butter
pinch of salt
aged cheddar cheese (grated or sliced)
Crêpes:
1/2 c flour
pinch of salt
pinch of sugar
1 egg
1/2 c milk
1 tsp. oil or melted butter
DIRECTIONS
1. If you’re going for our savory filling, melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat. Turn down the heat to medium-low and sauté the onions for 10 minutes. Add the cherry tomatoes and let slowly cook, nudging occasionally, while you make the crêpe batter. The idea is to let everything soften without browning. (Save the cheese for when the crêpes are done.)
2. To make the crêpe batter, simply mix everything together in one bowl, adding in the order listed. Let rest in the fridge for at least 20 minutes.
3. Melt a small amount (about the size of a quarter) in a separate nonstick pan on medium and, once melted, add a little less than 1/4 cup of batter. Wait for about 30 seconds and then spread out the batter gently to thin out the crêpe. (For proper crêpe-making technique which we won’t go into here, check it out on Youtube!)
4. After about a minute, check the underside with a spatula. If you’re seeing small browned spots, flip.
5. After flipping, add some tomato & onion mixture and some cheese. Let sit for a minute in the pan.
6. Remove to your plate, fold, and eat!
Alternative to the savory crêpe presented here, there’s always the classic Nutella version: once you’ve removed your crêpe from the pan, smear a heap of Nutella on it, fold, and scarf. It’s definitely cheaper than a trip to Europe, and you won’t have to have your ID on you to enjoy.
Today’s photo blog post comes from one of our trips last year to see Joel’s parents in Malibu. Just a short drive from their home on Pepperdine’s campus is Zuma Beach, one of the many public beaches on Southern California’s coastline, and it’s a favorite place for sunsets… and these photos attest to why.
We had our plates full for all of January 2012, so it’s almost like the year just started for us. What better time than now to do a wrap-up post for 2011?
And let us tell you, it was difficult to wrap up the year into a 4×4 square of images, there were so many changes 2011 brought for our 2nd year as a studio! In January 2011 we started off with a handful of personal clients, barely scraping by, and by December we had our arms full with a bunch of professional clients and designing/illustrating/art directing an entire coffee table book for a big Dallas nonprofit. We feel so richly blessed beyond anything we ever could have imagined for the year, but that just means that we’re chomping at the bit for 2012.
In the meantime, as we herald in the next eleven months, here’s a recap of highlights from the last twelve (with links to original blog posts):
1. Double Disneyland trips
Let it be said: going to Disneyland once in a lifetime is enough to consider oneself a lucky dog. But going to Disneyland twice in the same year is unheard of. It’s honestly one of the only things that makes having Joel’s parents on the opposite coast bearable.
2. Japan prints
Participating in a very small way in the relief efforts for the tsunami in Japan was the first time we’ve used our art for charity, and it was an unbelievably positive experience in the midst of such terrible tragedy—we’ve been given so much, and giving back just a little was really special. (Posted here, with a follow-up here, and another follow-up here.)
3. Finally going full-time
After having cobbled together a living since getting our BFAs in 2009 with a combination of Etsy and part-time jobs at coffee shops, a coffee roaster, a bookshop, Home Depot, a natural food store and a bakery, we finally both went full-time at This Paper Ship in April. The last 2 years were admittedly not easy, trying to grow our business and manage our work while sharing time with other jobs, but it was completely worth it—and we haven’t looked back since.
4. Joining Aeolidia
After working with them to build our site, Aeolidia providentially asked us to join their illustration team right when we decided to go full-time with the studio. They’ve given us some of the coolest branding jobs we’ve done to date, and have provided some much-needed work at just the right times throughout the year when even the moths in our wallet were starting to starve. (Posted here.)
5. Our first magazine illustration
Spot illustrations in magazines are a bread-and-butter type of job for illustrators, and we finally got our first one this year when Cincinnati Magazine contacted us for a full-page illustration in their summer wedding issue. We were thrilled to finally cross that milestone. (Posted here.)
6. Our new old letterpress
We’re suckers for old stuff, so the farther we delved into illustration, design, printing, and paper craft, the more apparent it became that we had to get a letterpress because that’s where it all started. Golda, as we named her, arrived at our doorstep in the summer, all snazzy and done up courtesy of Tony Zanni et al. at Dock2 Letterpress. We were unfortunately unable to get her cranking in 2011 due to being buried in work, but we plan on carving out 30% of our business in 2012 for letterpressed goods, so it’ll be a good year for Golda. (Posted here.)
7. Move to the Raleigh-Durham area
After 2 years of growing This Paper Ship in Greensboro, we realized that the Raleigh-Durham area was where the majority of our business contacts and local clients were, so we decided to weigh anchor and scout out a new place to call home. We, our cats, and our chicken are completely blessed with our new house and studio in the woods outside of the small town of Hillsborough, NC, and have been since welcomed by all manners of local people, businesses, and wildlife alike. (Which we’re fine with, as long as the foxes, coyotes, and hawks leave the chicken alone.)
8. Our woods
This deserves its own post. Our place is small, but it has a wall of South-facing windows in both our house and our studio, which means we get to daydream all day and look at the 4 wooded acres around our place. It’s a welcome change to our full inbox and piles of tax paperwork, provided that we remember to go outside when we’re stressed.
9. Featured in HOW
We peed our pants about 30 times in a row when our interview in HOW arrived in our mailbox, especially when we saw our work spread all over, well, a full spread. That says it all. (Posted here.)
10. 3-year wedding anniversary and trip to Hogwarts
Is there a better way to celebrate three years of marriage by driving down to Orlando and walking around Universal Studios’ Wizarding World of Harry Potter? We couldn’t think of anything, either. (Posted here.)
11. Amazing books, food, coffee, tea, and cats
If you follow us on Instagram, you’ll get a better picture of how obsessed we are with these five. When you’re a married couple who spends all day drawing or in front of the computer, you’ll need something to stay sane. We find that reading, with a big cup of coffee or tea, and a cat on our laps, floats our boat.
12. GUTS
We had the pleasure of attending the annual GUTS charity pumpkin carving contest in Charlotte, put on by Hawse Design. We were also lucky enough to have our busty grandma pumpkin sculpture (affectionately nicknamed “Gran’ma Merry Melonweather” by an anonymous GUTS participant) win an honorable mention!
13. Design*Sponge book signing
Shortly after GUTS, we also had the pleasure of being the photographers for the Durham stop of the Design*Sponge book tour. We geeked out a little when we met Grace Bonney (pictured in our collage above), the author of the book and the founder of Design*Sponge, but she didn’t seem to be too fazed by it. We also had the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with our super-famous local Durham business neighbors, Spoonflower, and are totally going to take them up on their offer of a tour sometime this year.
14. First studio talk at Pepperdine University
During one of our family trips out to the West Coast, we got the opportunity to share a little of what we’ve learned in 2 years at Pepperdine University. We had a blast and are looking forward to our next speaking engagement! (Posted here.)
15. The Rock & Shop Market and the goods debuted there
Michelle Smith and the rest of the R&S crew put on a really good craft market in Durham every year, and this year was no exception. This year was the best showing we’ve had (not to mention, we only had to drive 25 minutes this time instead of an hour), and it was the debut for the beginnings of several of the new lines of products we’re going to be expanding on this year.
16. The book job
Happy, Happy Love (process blogged here), currently at the printers and soon to show up on Amazon, is the first single job we’ve been able to live off of for several months. It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever undertaken, but it’s perfect for the beginning of 2012, because we’ve got our sights set high.
Here’s to a great 3rd year! Thanks, everyone, for supporting us!
There are only few things we ask of a good, standard lunch: a delicious, balanced sandwich on fresh bread; a little greens on the side; and preferably something fizzy to drink (because bread gives Joel the hiccups).
Enter Neal’s Deli in downtown Carrboro, which we recently visited for the first time. First off, getting there was a blast, since we’re able to make the 1o-minute drive south through the beautiful rural parts of Hillsborough. And then your classic deli-fare-with-a-twist, which blew our requirements out of the water: a German frank on a pretzel roll with melted cheddar and fried apples, a grilled pimento cheese sandwich on rustic white bread, a delicious cold kale salad, Boylan’s seltzer water and Blenheim ginger ale. Seasonal, local ingredients; well-balanced; overall, delicious.
Have we mentioned that we love living here?
We can’t underline enough how much we love doing illustrative branding jobs for funky small businesses. Today we’re posting a really cool one we did for an Aeolidia web client, Cephalopod Yarns, a super-hip yarn company based out of Baltimore. Let us state for the record that we’ll always jump at the chance to draw octopi, squids, and all other sea creatures with multiple appendages, especially ones using some of their appendages to knit and/or attack submarines.
So check out their website and order up some yarn! And thanks, everyone at Cephalopod Yarns, for being such great clients—best of luck to you! (We’ll pass your web link on to Joel’s mom, who is a knitting fiend…)
Happy Friday! Today we’re beginning Flapjack Fridays again, an old favorite blog installment we did a couple of times while living in an old farmhouse a few years ago but which fell by the wayside. At the end of every week we’ll be exploring the glorious world of pancakes, crepes, blinis, blintzes, latkes, and the like, and posting our adventures complete with recipes for you to try.
Today’s episode of Flapjack Fridays comes to us from Germany, where Pfannkuchen (pancake) batter is poured into a hot skillet, baked in an oven (or Ofen, we should we say), often with apples having been added to the skillet before pouring in the batter. The air trapped in the eggy batter expands rapidly in the hot oven, leaving you with a big, fluffy, puffy pancake.
Here’s the recipe we cobbled together from various sources:
INGREDIENTS
Wet:
3 eggs
2 tsp. sugar
3/4 c milk
1/2 tsp. vanilla
Dry:
3/4 c flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. allspice
Additional:
2 Tbsp. butter
1 pear, sliced thinly into pieces the size of a quarter
DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 425 F.
2. Whisk together wet ingredients.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together dry ingredients. Combine with wet ingredients until just mixed.
4. Melt 2 Tbsp. buter in medium in 9-inch skillet. When melted, add pear slices (optional) and batter.
5. Bake in oven for 16–18 mins, until center of pancake is cooked. (The toothpick test works for this: stick a toothpick in the middle, and if it comes out clean, it’s done.) The pancake will deflate a little while it rests, and that’s OK.
Serving suggestions: sprinkle powdered sugar on top. Guten Appetit!
One of our favorite places to go when we’re visiting Ashley’s grandma in Parkersburg at Christmas is the legendary JR’s Donut Castle. Well, specifically, Joel and the rest of the husbands—and now some of the young male cousins—are the ones to insist on making late night JR’s runs while the women have a girls’ night. (But now the guys have started to take them back to the girls for breakfast the next day.)
We’re not sure how we all discovered JR’s, but Ashley’s Scottish brother-in-law was the one to spearhead the annual tradition when he discovered that one of their regular specials was the yum-yum, a Scottish glazed and twisted donut that practically melts upon being eaten. Another classic at JR’s is the pepperoni roll, arguably West Virginia’s greatest culinary treat: a white yeast roll with pepperoni baked into the middle, popular since the beginning of the 20th century due to Italian immigrants and its portability in coal mines.
Joel often finds himself wishing he could have JR’s more often—but it’s not too much of a stretch to understand that being 350 miles away is probably for the best. At least there’s always the song that plays on the main page of their website when he’s feeling particularly down…
Other than Instagram, our new favorite social media platform, we’ve been unusually quiet so far this year, but we now intend to officially let the cat out of the bag as to what’s been keeping us holed up in our studio for the last couple of months!
We got shoulder-tapped earlier last year by Marriage Today, a marriage enrichment nonprofit based out of the Dallas area, to art direct a new marriage book. It’s called Happy, Happy Love: Tips & Techniques to Refresh Your Marriage and Restore The Romance and it’s essentially an expanded collection of tips and tricks for married couples beyond the newlywed phase to encourage romance in their marriage. it’s written for couples to be able to skim as they please or go through all 52 groupings once a week for a year.
Not only did we accept the role of art directors, but we also got hired to lay out the book and produce original illustrations and photography. (Or you could say we hired ourselves—it gets a little murky when you never outsource for imagery!) We’ve produced several books in the past, but nothing of this magnitude and with this degree of moving parts, so it’s been a learning curve for us to produce so much original work and lay out the book. But like we said in our previous blog post, we followed a piece of our own advice and got in over our heads, and we’re now closing in what has become a really good piece of work that we hope will open the door to more books.
We’ve gotten 99% of the content finished and now have some work to do cleaning up the file before going to print this Friday. (Especially the type, of which we’re almost positive at least one designer saw some errors like orphans in the images posted above.) We’ll be posting once the book gets published!
In the meantime, we feel compelled to indulge in some tea, dinner, and an 80′s movie while we do some evening work…
We know full well that it’s not a normal thing to eat Thanksgiving dinner overlooking Malibu and the Pacific Ocean. Though Joel grew up in Maryland, when we were in college his parents moved to teach and work at Pepperdine University, so we usually make a point of trekking out that way to visit them once a year.
This year, This Paper Ship got a little bit of California action as well, when we were invited to speak to graphic design and journalism classes about what we do. Though we’ve interviewed before about our studio (including HOW, Mutual of Omaha’s “Aha Moment” project, and our alma mater Shepherd University’s alumni magazine), we’ve never been invited to come speak to a class. Frankly, it was a little bizarre—we’ve been doing This Paper Ship since we were students, on the fly, by the seat of our pants, and with little planning, so to give advice to students was funny in that it all sounds so cohesive when, in reality, it rarely feels that way. Seeing it all condensed in outline form was reassuring, though, because it reminded us all over again that we’re living our dream. Thanks, Pepperdine, Dana, and students, for hosting us—we had a blast.
Above is the final slide from our presentation, the one we’re the most proud of: the advice that we have to give, learned the hard way through several years of making our way in the world, by which we conduct our business and grow as artists, and by which we’ll continue to work for the rest of our careers.
From the top:
1. Find out what you love.
We would have said “do what you love,” but what if you don’t know what you like, or you like too much to decide? The solution is to say “yes” to everything until you’re ready to say “no.” And when you find what you love, and you can build a career out of doing it, you’re pretty much set.
2. Show up your heroes.
See somebody doing something that you find yourself saying, “I wish I had thought of that”? Do what they’re doing, but do it better. We have so many heroes, contemporary and historical, whose work is so good it makes us feel terrible. But we’re determined to show them up, and we’ve learned a lot so far in the process.
3. Nulla dies sine linea.
Latin for “not a day without a line.” That is, the other way to be better in your craft is to do it daily, or at least regularly. Pound away at it constantly. You’ll get more comfortable with the process, which will help you improve.
4. Get in over your head.
A third key to progress is constantly getting yourself into challenges you’ve never faced before. If no one is giving you work, make it for yourself in a personal project; if you’ve never shown work publicly, display it on a blog. You’ll have to fight to rise to the challenge, and then you’ll find yourself needing new, and more difficult, challenges.
5. One day at a time.
This applies to the days when you have too much work and feel overwhelmed, or are trying to build up your self-initiated projects in the middle of working a crappy part-time job, or when you’re not progressing fast enough and are getting discouraged. Just take things one day at a time and keep chipping away.
6. Be happy!
Easier said than done? Sometimes. But keep trying to do things that make you happy, and you’ll find that everything you’re involved in becomes that much more sustainable. Plus, when you make yourself happy, you’re a lot less likely to be a jerk, which means that you’ll be more fun to work with and will have one more tool in your toolbox (read: good customer service) that will help you succeed.
