In the News: Delphine and Martha

Congrats to Designing Mom Erika of Delphine on having her invites featured in the latest Martha Stewart Weddings Magazine! 

Decorate: Alice in Wonderland Party

Talented Designing Mom Erika of Delphine and her work was recently featured on Wedding Chicks.  
Her beautiful stationery was designed for an Alice in Wonderland themed wedding put on by Couture Events.  From tick tock rehearsal invites to Welcome to Wonderland menus... I could easily see this theme being used for an all out whimsical baby shower or children's tea party! 

photos by Joie Lala

Download: Summer Reading List

Designing Mom Erika of Delphine Press has a wonderful download for all of us today! I hope all of your little ones are having a great summer catching up with their books.  I think this list will definitely come in handy for the fridge or as a bookmark.  Be sure to click here for the download!

Friday Fotos: Sunny Days

This Friday Foto comes from Designing Mom Erika of Delphine Press. What a beautiful walk in the marsh!
Hope all of you have a happy Friday and weekend.

Story: A Toast to Fancy Glasses

by Designing Mom Erika of Delphine

photo by Erika

We've been having a hard time getting our son (he's in K now) to drink something during breakfast. I think it's really important to hydrate before he heads off to school, so we started serving his morning juice in a "fancy" glass. It's just a cheap champagne glass from a discount store, so I don't stress out about it breaking. S loves drinking from it, which means much sweeter mornings all around.

I find it applies to grown ups, as well. My grandmother, Delphine, is really bad about drinking water in the morning before her workout (she does Yoga and Zoomba and Pilates!), but if I serve her sparkling water in a pretty glass with a slice of lemon in it she drinks it.

Here's S drinking fresh squeezed orange juice from our backyard while he peruses his favorite sticker book before school.

Our Holiday Decor: Glittery Ajax

by Designing Mom Erika

We went with an understated silver, glitter (if glitter can ever be understated), white and turquoise theme this year.

What's in My Sketchbook: Delphine

by Designing Mom Erika

The "Starlite" letterpress card is a part of our Delphine Modern Flora Collection.

From sketch (I keep a sketchbook filled with magazine clippings and sketches) to product (the card, as shot for press/promo).

The card is available on our website here!

Shop: Delphine Press

Big sale and new products at Delphine Press...click here to visit!

What's in My Bag: Erika's Day Bag

by Designing Mom Erika

I gave up on carrying a small purse years ago (even before I had S) because I always carry a sketch book and pencils and reading material with me wherever I go. I don't like to sit and do nothing, and neither does my son, hence the toys that are in my bag at all times.


Here are the contents of my Delphine tote bag:

1. Martha Stewart Weddings magazine and a Russell + Hazel composition note book

2. Pencil case from Paper Chase

3. Ticket stub from Objectified

4. Bright yellow cardigan from Old Navy

5. Granola bar

6. Kiehl's bag with mom essentials inside (wipes, mints, hand sanitizer, rubber band for my hair, lipstick, a mirror)

7. Favorite green mechanical pencil

8. A limited edition Delphine letterpressed business card holder

9. Gum

10. Match Box cars

11. A Monster truck

12. My business card

13. Favorite pink pen. I use it for editing

14. "Fruit" snacks for S

15. Orla Kiely wallet

16. iPhone

What's in My Bag: Designing Mom Kate

Today my bag was packed to go to the fountain for water-play…even though we ended up at the park instead! I love this colorful Fossil bag for summer because it goes with everything and has so many pockets that I can designate specific ones just for Oscar’s stuff. I only use my diaper bag when I’m gone for a long time or need more stuff….but this is my everyday purse that doubles as a diaper-bag “light”.

Here’s the gist (note that the contents are always changing!): Oscar stuff:
-Diaper(new Huggies natural--we're trying it out)
-Swim diaper
-Change of clothes in case he got too wet (I usually pack a one-piece for this occasion)
-Sippy cup
-Ziploc bag of wheat-free newtons and gluten-free animal crackers (he's allergic to wheat, eggs & peanuts)
-Seventh Generation wipes (for bum)
-Wet wipes (for hands)
-45 spf sunblock
-Noodle and boo eczema cream sample
-Sample of prescription eczema cream

Kate stuff:
-Wallet (the colorful melamine case with flowers)
-Little fabric bag for store loyalty cards and secret cash stash
-Orbit gum
-Angela Adams noteboook
-Dum Dum lollipop (from restaurant)
-Peppermint candy (from restaurant)
-Cell Phone (yes, it's old school)
-Chanel super duper won't come off lip gloss
-5 different lipsticks in various brands/shades
-Alba lip gloss
-Banana boat chapstick with SPF
-Mac lip liner
-A pen
-An assortment of change
-ALL OUT OF shopping list (used yesterday)

Our Projects: What's in My Bag

I am just loving this group project that Designing Mom Erika put together. She asked us: What's in Your Bag? Certainly, a life of balancing babies and creative projects warranted some interesting responses for it!

I'll be posting up this series in the coming weeks. I also want to turn the question out there to all of you readers as well: What's in Your Bag? Let's get nosy and pry into each other's bags...send us pics and lists to share!

By Designing Mom Erika

One of the greatest things about my job as a graphic designer and owner of Delphine is that these days I can do my work from just about anywhere (with wi-fi). So I'm constantly on the go. Sometimes I have meetings with my staff at a coffee shop or the back yard or even the beach! Here's what I always have with me when I'm working (besides my other tote bag):

My giant Orla Kiely stems tote bag is awesome because it's big enough to fit my 17 inch MacBook Pro, INSIDE it's Timbuk2 computer bag:

Here's what's inside today:

1. A FedEx mailer with files from a client

2. My trusty MacBook Pro. I'd be lost without it!
3. Pantone swatch book

4. Timbuk2 computer bag

5. Upload cord for my camera (camera not shown)

6. Half-eaten chocolate bar

7. Green Paper Company swatch book

8. Russell + Hazel sticky note pad

9. Quarters for beach parking

10. File folders for current projects

11. Stretchy metal thingy that attaches my pencil to the front of my sketchbook

12. Sketchbook (blank pages) where I keep all my sketches and business notes. I go through one every 6 weeks or so.

13. Press proof of my cousin's wedding program

14. Cute calculator from the Dollar Store

15. Wet Ones antibacterial wipe

16. Clipboard with my latest catalog and order forms. On good days it has orders attached to it!

Cardstore.com Giveaway!

If you don't know already, Designing Mom Erika of Delphine Press designs beautiful letterpress work. Her work is also featured at Cardstore.com and I am more than excited to start off the week with an awesome giveaway from them! If you haven't indulged yourself with some custom stationery, here's your chance.

Two winners will receive a set of thank you notes of your choosing personalized with your or your little one's name. To see Erika's full collection at Cardstore.com click here!

To enter, just pick one (or one from her collection at Cardstore.com) Erika's designs below and tell us why it's your favorite! The giveaway will run all week and is open to readers and Designing Moms alike. Happy Picking!

Photography Tips for the Little Ones

By Designing Mom Erika

Like most women, I bought a new camera when I knew I was having a baby, but needed some help. I interviewed my friend Jessica Davis for some tips on capturing great photos at home, and also talked to her about maternity photography.

Erika: Why shoot a maternity session?
Jessica: Maternity Sessions for most woman are best between 30-36 weeks. There are few times in a womans life when her body will go through such amazing changes and so quickly. It is a documentation of a new life from the very beginning. The connection that a mother has prior to meeting her child is so precious. I cant think of another time when a woman just glows with happiness and beauty.


E: When is the best time to photograph a new baby for a birth announcement?
Jess: Newborns are ideally photographed in the first ten days after birth. They are still bendable, less likely to move alot and the baby acne has not set in yet.


E:What is your best trick for photographing babies?
Jess: Mornings! Babies are usually at their best right after a nap when they have a snack. They wake up refreshed and full of smiles.



E: Do you have some tips on capturing your toddler's personality in a photograph?
Jess: Kids are smart. They know when they are being photographed and would prefer to moving/playing rather than sitting still. Make it a game for them. If your daughter likes to dress up take pictures of her in her princess outfits. If your son loves playing in the backyard with his trucks, ask to play with him and take pictures at the same time. The idea is to not dress them in an outfit that doesn’t represent their personalities or that they don’t like. It will come across in the photos. Maybe your daughter loves dresses but you really want her in jeans.....photograph her in what makes her happy, she will be more likely to cooperate and her own unique personality will show in the photos. That is more important than her outfit.


E: Can you tell us a little more about how to style a photo? What backgrounds work best? What should we wear?
Jess: There is nothing cuter than a naked baby. When your baby first sits up is a great time for professional photos around 8-10 months. They can't crawl/walk away and they are so giggly and chubby.Keep it simple with clothing, you don’t want to look back at your photos 10 years from now and wonder, “what was I thinking”? Pay attention to lighting, you want even lighting. It will be more flattering on the skin. Go outside under a tree for shade so the family isnt squinting in the bright sunlight. Generally 1 hour after sunrise or an hour before sunset you can go almost anywhere for photos.

My Favorite Thing: Ryan's Surfboard

by Designing Mom Erika

Within the first few weeks of moving to California my husband John, like just about every other transplant, learned to surf. He learned from his Marine Corps buddy, Ryan Beaupre, on this surfboard. I remember going to the beach to watch them at dawn as Ryan taught John how to stay on the board. I’ve always been a water baby and loved watching my husband (who grew up in Ohio) fall in love with the ocean, too. All the machismo of the Marine Corps flew out the window the first time he “banana peeled” off the end of the board, then got slammed in the face with a wave. I loved watching him and Ryan giggle like little kids as they “played” together in the Pacific.

The morning Ryan shipped off to Iraq he stood in our kitchen and asked me, out of the blue, “when are you going to have kids? You shouldn’t wait.” That was the last time I spoke to Ryan; he was killed a few weeks later in the first mission of the war. We had S less than a year later. Ryan’s parents gave us his surfboard and we hung it in S’s room. It’s my favorite thing in his room.

Friday Foto: Super Hero!

It's Friday so I'm wrapping up this week with more fun photos. These are from Designing Mom Erika and her super hero worthy son's awesome photo session by Jessica Davis Photography.
I laughed so hard hearing about her son E's natural knack (directing shots, requesting water and
breaks ) at photo shoots. I think a star is born!

Happy weekend everyone. And keep sending me photos...we love 'em!

Decorate: Little Lamb Baby Shower...Part 1

Looking for party ideas? You are all in for a treat as Designing Mom Erika shows us her absolutely gorgeous "Little Lamb" themed baby shower that she threw for her friend.

She had such great ideas I had to split it up as two posts...the first showing her sketches/ideas and the knockout invites she created. Check back tomorrow for the rest!



By Designing Mom Erika

I loved planning my friend Carrie's Little Lamb baby shower. Parties can be a lot of work, and by no means did I do it alone! I co-hosted the shower with 3 friends, and we all pitched in a little something (including baking skills, time, and a wicked Shower Shine recipe involving rum and pineapple juice!).

We chose the "little lamb" theme because we knew it, along with the spring green color scheme, is how Carrie decorated the baby's nursery. I was responsible for the overall look and feel of the party, so I started with my sketch book to gather images and ideas for the party. This made it a lot easier for my friends to picture what I had in mind. Even if you can't draw (like me), a sketch book is great for pasting in ideas and writing lists--it keeps everything together in one spot.

Balance: The Calendar is My Best Friend

I've been getting lots of emails lately asking for posts about balancing the crazy schedule of being both mom and a creative. Erika is giving us a little peek today into her daily schedules of preparing for a show and running her daily biz!
..........................................

by Designing Mom Erika

April is typically my busiest, craziest month of the year, as I prepare to exhibit at The National Stationery Show in May (stop by booth 3327 if you'll be there!). My days are practically scheduled to the minute, with design work, client graphic design projects, wedding invitation proofs, appointments with brides, conference calls with distributors and reps, running the daily "business" end of having a stationery line, preparing files for my licensing partners, adding customizable files to our website , keeping up with the Delphine-ephemera blog, and photographing new products as they roll off press. Not to mention many, many, many hours (and late nights) at the press, press-checking the new lines.

Especially at this time of year my work life spills over into the weekends. It is easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of work that has to be done. The way I deal with the insane amount of work is to make lists. A lot of them. I make a list of all the things that need to happen before going to the Stationery Show and set deadlines for each task (and, of course, delegate whenever possible). Then I go down the list and break each major task into steps. Take one simple thing, like mailing postcards to buyers. I work back from the show date and find the mailing date that they should go out. Then I schedule in a date to address the postcards and stamp them, a date to buy stamps, a date to order the postcards, and a date to design them.


Because it is scheduled on my calendar, I'm not freaking out in February about the postcards; I know it's scheduled for, say, April 20th, to address the postcards, and I don't stress about it before then. I live by the calendar. I use the same system to schedule in a little balance: I make sure to schedule in time alone with my son. I treat a playdate at the beach just like an appointment with a client. It goes on the calendar. By scheduling a specific time for a trip to the park, it doesn't get pushed off until "later" and it helps me make sure I'm spending enough time with him. I tell S what the plans are, and he's starting to learn time management himself this way. He often invites me outside to watch him play on the swingset. "You can bring your notebook, Mommy," he says. He's also learning about multi-tasking!

Our Booklist: The Big Book of Things that Go

Our Booklist: "The Big Book of Things That Go"

by Erika

S loves "The Big Book of Things That Go" so much that we've gone through approximately two rolls of tape fixing three copies of this book. I don't have any photos because a tragic monster truck accident pushed a glass of juice onto the last remaining copy. It's an oversized book with hundreds of photographs of real trucks, trains, cars, hot air balloons, motorcycles, planes, emergency vehicles, construction equipment ... basically anything that "goes." Each photo has a two or three sentence caption with details about the vehicle, which is why, at age two, S was able to explain the difference to me between a bulldozer, digger and excavator.

One of the best days of John's life is when S, at age 2, pointed to a picture of a large dump truck and said, "articulated dump truck." For ages 1-6. Younger kids like to look at the pictures, toddlers like to ask a lot of questions about the pictures, and my pre-schooler likes to make me feel dumb by quizzing me about the different attributes of the vehicles shown in the pictures.

Our Booklist: The Caboose Who Got Loose

I'm really excited about a new list started by Designing Mom Erika about favorite books for kids! Do you have a favorite book that your little one is addicted to and/or a nostalgic one from childhood? Let us know or send your own book review over to us!



From: Erika

"The Caboose Who Got Loose," written and illustrated by Bill Peet

When we had to evacuate from our home for the 2007 Southern California wildfires, "The Caboose Who Got Loose" was the one book I grabbed from S's room. I got the book for him when he was about 2 years old, and we've read it at least once per week since. It's on the long side for a bedtime story (48 pages), but S loves it so much we read it a lot anyway, and John has it pretty much memorized by now. It's a classic story (originally published in 1971) about Katy Caboose, a caboose who dreams of a simple, quiet life not stuck at the end of a long freight train, "to live in the trees where it's peaceful and quiet." The grass is always greener, right?

Written in rhyming couplets, it's fun and easy to read aloud. It was also one of the first books S read by himself, "in his brain," as he likes to say. The charming illustrations are expressive and full of detail. If your little one is into trains, this is a wonderful addition to your bookshelf.

above: S shows his favorite page, when the huge engine goes to the roundhouse for repair. After I shot the photo he said, "so can I get back to reading this now?"

Designing Moms: Meet Erika

Erika's company, Delphine, creates fabulous stationery and custom invitations and I was soooo happy to be able to meet her and her husband in person when they exhibited in San Francisco ( where I also got to pick up some of their woodland themed note pads and cards for the boutique!). Erika is so refreshingly sweet and talented, it is a real treat to have her be a part of Designing Moms!

Name: Erika

Nutshell: I live in Rancho Santa Fe, California (just north of San Diego) in a four-generation household with my husband, John, our son, S (he’s five), my grandmother and my parents (yes, we love living together; no we don’t fight. Are we crazy? Perhaps).

What I do: I’m a graphic designer and business owner. I design a letterpress stationery and custom invitation line, Delphine. I also design logos and corporate identities, design a line of photo cards for Cardstore.com, blog and am launching a new eco-friendly stationery line this spring.

What inspires me: My amazing, talented, wonderful, creative family inspires me daily. I’m also inspired by the natural world: the color of sand after it’s sluiced by a wave, the shape of a flower petal, the pattern of little birdie footprints in the garden. I love paper, pattern, the written word, all shades of green, the sound of the surf, traveling, Charleston, oyster roasts, Paris, crepes, café au lait, macaroons, weddings and the smell of the press room.

A day-in-my-life: In the morning I snuggle with my son while he watches cartoons, drink lots of coffee, blog, get S ready for preschool, drink more coffee, and pack S’s lunchbox. I swear nothing makes me feel more like a mom than packing a lunchbox. The rest of my day is spent running Delphine: designing, answering emails, juggling phone calls, preparing proofs, writing creative briefs, running to press checks, answering more emails, and drinking more coffee. Evenings the entire household eats together and we catch up on everyone’s news. Usually S holds court at dinner, regaling us with stories from the sandbox, technical details about trains, or questions about how how electricity works. I have a fabulous, crazy, busy, wonderful life!