winter solstice note card
plant-dyed handmade paper
Individually letterpress printed
thoughtfully made In california
This design features an original poem by farmette founder Loren Profit Smith that reads: "reflecting on the rest and quiet of the darker seasons, the roots reaching deep where no one can see while up here above ground it looks like nothing but loss, the hope of the almost imperceptibly small increases of light that grow into the full warmth of the summer sun winter solstice".
Duck egg blue handmade paper with black letterpress.
Handmade paper card with four full deckled edges. Front is letterpress printed. Approximately 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches.
Comes with an acru A2 envelope, and a small card matte printed with photos and a little information about our process.
We create our paper goods with great care and love in our studio in Palo Cedro, California! Loren writes and creates each design, often using sketching and handwriting, and then pairs it with the perfect paper color. Tim, Colin and Xela transform natural fibers into beautiful, plant-dyed, deckle-edged sheets. Lydia, Elevia, Christy and Jessica print them one-at-a-time on our antique presses and package them up for you! Scroll down for more details about our artisan making process.
Emily and Lydia will carefully pack up your order and ship it via the method you choose at check out. Our shipping timeline is one to three business days, and almost all orders will ship within one business day!
Please email us at shipping@farmette.co if you need your order to arrive by a certain date, and we will do everything we can to accommodate.
Hand Crafted with love
Farmette paper starts with natural cotton fibers, which are upcycled from the garment industry, and abaca fibers, from a plant in the banana family.
These materials are weighed and soaked, and then processed for four to five hours into pulp with a simple machine called a Hollander beater, which macerates the fibers so that they will knit together when shaken in water.
Once the beater is emptied, we use plant powders and occasionally minerals in careful ratios to dye our pulp in our natural palette. Most dyes are left for a 12-hour period to set.
Sustainably created
Next, the pulp is added to a vat of water. The papermaker skillfully pulls a screen stretched over a frame, with another frame on top - called a mould and deckle - through the pulpy water and shakes the slurry as the water drains out through the screen, leaving the shapes of the paper behind.
Excess water is sponged out, and the wet sheets of paper are transferred onto fabrics sandwiched between acrylic sheets. Stacks of these sandwiches are then moved onto a hydraulic press, where remaining water is slowly squeezed out and the fibers are further knit together to create a strong paper surface.
We Use Antique Letterpresses
These fabric-paper sandwiches are then removed from the press and hung to dry. Once they are dry, paper sheets are peeled off the fabrics by hand, and folded by hand into cards if necessary.
At this point, the paper is moved to our print room, where our press people print our designs on antique lettepresses and hot foil presses.
One By One...
Our designs, many with hand sketching or lettering that has been digitized, have been made into photopolymer plates or copper dies, which must be expertly aligned on the presses. One at a time, a piece of paper is precisely placed, and the press is activated by a foot pedal or hand lever to imprint the design into the paper.
The prints are then inspected for quality and placed with their envelopes or backers into a sleeve for safe-keeping. They’re ready to be shipped to our beloved customers all over the world!
