After a restorative and restful January, February came along in a flurry of frenetic energy with lots of orders and a trade show to exhibit at amidst wild winds and power cuts, to find that we have suddenly arrived in March!
March is the month of the vernal equinox, new beginnings, march hares, the Ides of March (beware of those!), and for wonderful women everywhere Mothering Sunday and International Women's Day. For me the month is characterised by the colour yellow. Bright and fresh it heralds the start of spring and is one of the colours that features in our CuriOsity collection - Amelia Yellow.
"Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others." Amelia Earhart
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]]>Giving presents during the festive season has become such a synonymous part of Christmas, and as December rolls around again we’re busy buying, wrapping and giving presents and gifts. But why do we give gifts and what do presents mean?
Gift giving is as old as time itself. It’s an ancient tradition that stretches way, way back to our ancestors and forefathers, to the origin of our species even. By our nature we Human Beings are sociable creatures and the act of giving expresses so many things on so many levels. It’s a way to celebrate life, love and friendship, to express gratitude, to broker peace and is a thoughtful and affectionate tradition.
My dad’s birthday was in the run-up to the festive period, and with all the busy Christmas preparations that accompany December sometimes it was easy to overlook it. One year I was dashing around the shops and realised it was his birthday the next day, so thinking on my feet, and being in the shop that I was in, I put together a little box of delights – potted shrimps, cheese, chutney and smoked kippers – and delivered them the next day along with some of the leek pie I had made the day before. He was genuinely touched by my rather random and eclectic gift, he adored kippers, which he would often share with my daughter, and he graciously accepted the scruffy half a pie that I presented him with.
The act of giving can be so much more than what is being given. It’s the thoughtfulness, giving people things that they enjoy and will get enjoyment from, and that have meaning to them no matter how small (or scruffy). In that small moment when the gift is transferred from the giver to the receiver, when both parties are fully absorbed, is that why it’s called a present?
Many thoughtful gift ideas can be found in the Osity shop, from sketch pads and pencils and notebooks for mindful musings and personalised notecards for dedicated writers.
]]>"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it." Ferris Bueller.
Autumn is well and truly here! We took a bit of a battering last weekend with wild wind and rain, but this week has been much more crisp and serene. Autumn is one of my favourite seasons. I especially love listening on really quiet days and noticing the different coloured leaves flitter down from their tree branches. I love the dramatic, tangible change from summer into autumn (autumn is such a massive show off, it's so "look at me"!). It's a time for storing and preserving. I love the very many collectable things it yields - seed heads and pods, spiky conker cases, nuts and berries amongst other things, and I love watching the wildlife going about gathering these things (there's a whole lotta love going on here!).
This autumn season I've been making a point of doing my own bit of collecting. Not physical objects, but recording what I see and hear and how it makes me feel in one of my CuriOsity notebooks. I was lucky enough to see a beautiful grey wagtail the other day. I had never seen one before and I wrote down how its striking yellow and grey markings really stood out, that it had a sleek little body, how its grey tail bobbed happily up and down, and how the excitement of seeing something new for the first time really made me feel - I even added a quick little drawing of it!
I've come to love these little mindful moments so much, and I find a lot of peace in making these personal notes, observations and doodles. I feel like they deserve a special place in which to reside. My CuriOsity notebook has been made so thoughtfully, with such love and care out of sustainable materials, and feels so beautiful in my hands that I know my precious thought collections will have longevity, and will endure inside their pages for me to reflect back on for many years to come.
What will you be filling your notebook with this autumn?
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“The place I am hoping to get to is so marvellous that if I described it to you now you would go crazy with excitement.”Mr Fox, p38, Fantastic Mr Fox.
I’d like to introduce you to my good friend, the one, the only, fantastic Mr Fox!
My Mr Fox is a little relief printing plate of a beautiful fox illustration and has been part of my life since I was about eight years old. Given to me by my dad and carefully kept in my treasure box to be gazed upon, lovingly stroked and shown only to people I considered worthy. He was my very own curiosity in both senses of the word. A rare object which I had discovered.
Adventure, discovery, experiments and exploration played a big part in my life growing up. Together with my sisters we would adventure around the countryside making dens, climbing trees, discovering new worlds. But one of the best places to make discoveries was in the workshop at the bottom of the garden. As Mr Fox says in the quote, the place really was so marvellous (to me anyway), and I vividly remember the day when me and my sister discovered what we thought was a drawer full of purest gold! We really did go crazy with excitement, and were positively buzzing until our dad told us it was a special metallic powder (called bronzing powder) and was a traditional method of making inks look shiny and metallic – this was after we had covered our hands and faces with it and were told to wash it off immediately – oh dear!
It was on one these exploratory adventures that I discovered my Mr Fox, mysteriously encased in a folded piece of card alongside Father Christmas who appeared to be his companion while in storage. I remember being thrilled to bits with my discovery and when I showed my dad what I had found he said that I could keep them both. They were carefully placed in my treasure box, but it was Mr Fox that had really captured my imagination. He stayed there in the box for many, many years and it wasn’t until I grew up and began operating the printing presses myself that I began to think of him. Printing him for the first time alongside my dad was an absolute delight and I’m so pleased that he has become the foundation for Osity’s next stationery collection, CuriOsity.
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What does being mindful mean for you? For me it’s being present in a particular moment. It’s rained a lot recently which made me think back to the times when I was a child where I would sit on my bedroom windowsill and trace the raindrops down the window with my finger, or pit two raindrops against each other and see which one would win. I liked the way the glass felt beneath my fingers and that it was miserable and grey outside, but inside I was warm and cosy. I was totally immersed in this, and for me this is what having a mindful moment is. Away from all the hustle bustle, taking a quiet moment to just be.
When I moved up into the grown up world chasing and racing raindrops didn’t seem to be a widely accepted past time and I forgot that I used to do this and how it made me feel. These days mindfulness has been “a thing” for a little while now, and it wasn’t until I moved into a house of my own with windowsills big enough to sit on again that I fully appreciated the term mindfulness – fully present in that moment, enjoying a thoughtful sensory experience.
When I began to design products for Osity it was really important to me that they should function as confidants for mindful moments that you can be fully immersed in, whether it be capturing thoughts in your notebook, sketching or lettering, paper crafting or writing a thoughtful greeting to a friend. Not only are the designs beautiful and eye catching, the products themselves are also tactile and textural so that the experience continues on from being drawn in by your eye to holding the products in your hand, feeling the impression of the printed design or the way the paper feels under your fingers and the how the pencils sit in your hand.
Osity products have been thoughtfully and mindfully made in the rural midlands of England for you to love, enjoy and to be present with you in your mindful moments.
]]>I like a good play on words, and when I chose the name Osity for my brand it was more to do with a saying that my dad used for me when I was a child. "You're a funny Osity" is a colloquial northern saying for someone being a bit daft or silly but in an amusing way, and it was what he would say when I was engaged in some particularly daft but amusing endeavour as a youngster. This is the general ethos behind Osity - preserving that bright and bouncy childlike enthusiasm for making, creating, giving and discovering.
I also liked the way I could use the suffix of "osity" to inform how the different collections of stationery could be presented, LuminOsity being the first. But when l looked into the actual meaning of the suffix "osity" I was really pleasantly surprised to find that it meant "the quality of being". So luminosity quite literally means the quality of being luminous.
I really like this idea of "the quality of being" having an association with a stationery brand which makes products to mark occasions in our lives - a birthday, Christmas, moving home, a gift, a handwritten note just to say "hey, how are you?" - all marking our existence and that we care about each other. Doesn't it just make you feel all warm and fluffy!
]]>February brings with it not only chilly weather but also the quite frankly bonkers behaviour of Saint Valentine’s Day when sending sweets or anonymous romantic greetings to someone we think is hot is deemed to be an acceptable thing to do by some people!
But who is St Valentine and where did this custom come from? As it turns out there isn’t a straightforward answer as to what lies at Valentine’s heart. It seems that there may have been not only one but two St Valentines who both happened to have been early Christian martyrs and both lost their heads on the same date of 14th February (not in the same year might I add!). All sounds a bit grim when compared to the cute cupids and sugary sentiments of romantic love that we associate with Valentine’s Day today. But if you delve a bit deeper into the myths, legends and folk traditions, a heritage associated with such disparate things as bee keeping and epilepsy emerges – quite a surprise when you thought you were dealing with a fluffy teddy bear and heart shaped chocolates.
Heritage also lies at Osity’s heart. The printer’s workshop that inspires Osity’s designs belonged to my dad, an old school printer who at age 15 (back in 1959) began learning a craft that hadn’t changed for several hundred years. Letterpress printing was just how it was done back then. It has been such a privilege to have been taught these traditional skills that have been passed down through so many generations. What started out as the only means of conveying words on a page to a wide audience has been superseded by faster methods of printing, but this doesn’t mean that that the craft is dead or on its way out. These skills have been and are being passed on to new generations who are reinventing it for our modern times.
]]>January has arrived skulking on the heels of the twinkling lights and warm colours of Christmas. Cloaked in its drab greyness, January is hardly the best herald of optimism and hope that often accompanies bringing in a new year. The third Monday of every January is so called Blue Monday and has been calculated to be the most depressing day of the year by somebody somewhere. But blue is the colour of calmness and serenity - think of the blues of a summer sky or a sharp frosty morning, or dare I say it a swimming pool! Think of these blues and your mood is uplifted, and so the association with sadness or unhappiness seems unfounded. Now place that blue next to another colour, something positive like a Luminous Yellow, and now you're really talking summer skies and holiday vibes. Hot pink has warmth and vibrancy and promises fun and carefree times, and if you give the aforementioned grey a bit of a subtle shimmer and sparkle we call it silver!
Later on this month I will be making use of one of Osity's Swimming Pool Blue Pocketbooks and a Hot Pink Recycled Pallet Pencil to take part in the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch. For one hour between the 29th and 31st January i will be counting how many different bird species visit my garden. Taking part in the Big Garden Birdwatch helps increase understanding of the challenges faced by wildlife, and living and working in the wilds of rural Herefordshire this is important to me.
So this January I won't let myself feel the drabness, I will instead surround myself with LuminOsity's uplifting colours and do a little bit to help nature.
]]>Follow this "How To" guide to make festive paper star decorations using our LuminOsity patterned papers.
For each star decoration we used two squares of patterned paper 150mm x 150mm. Concertina fold each sheet of paper and then fold in two in the middle.
Cut a piece of twine and tie the two pieces of folded paper together (the twine will be the hanger for the decoration so make sure you leave it long enough). Now cut the ends of the decoration to make the points of the star.
Taking your glue stick or mouse tape runner, stick the flat edges together and your paper star decoration will be revealed!
Finally tie the twine — your decoration is now ready to hang!
Happy making!
]]>Who can remember back to the not too dim and distant past the thrill and excitement of getting a hand written letter or card in the post? Little paper keepsakes that an email or text message just can't replicate. I remember keeping up an active correspondence with my grandma when I was a child. This usually featured a copy of the latest Bunty magazine and a letter from grandma to me, and I would then write to her in return to tell her about my latest favourite my little pony which was big news back in those days! I still have some of those letters which are a real touchstone to the past.
With the festive season slowly wending its way towards us and the end of one very peculiar year in sight, what better way to give your loved ones that warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia and excitement by sending some beautifully crafted and hand written FestiveOsity Christmas cards - keepsakes for the future. Or maybe you're after a special gift for a special friend who you would like to keep up a regular hand written correspondence with like I use to with my grandma. Our LuminOsity personalised notecards presented in a beautiful gift box may be just the ticket. Happy writing and season's greetings to you all, my fellow FestiveOsities.
]]>LuminOsity started with pattern. Patterns that came from endless fiddling with metal type and ornamental borders for letterpress printing. I love the way I can literally build patterns in this way. I really admire renowned pattern makers and designers like Enid Marx and Elizabeth Friedlander, and I was a massive Lego fan when I was a child, so putting these two inspirations together was the perfect match for me. I worked with my dad on my early pattern making ventures. He suggested I should proof all my pattern making experiments in black ink to get a feel for them in order to choose the ones that would work best. Then came the colour! I love colour just as much as pattern making, and the brighter the better. I happened to find an old tin of luminous yellow ink at the back of the ink cupboard one day, and this was the start of LuminOsity. It has grown into a collection of beautiful yet functional products with graphic shapes, patterns and bouncing bold bright colour and typography to cheer up the darkest of days.
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