This week we are continuing our visits with some of our favorite creatives...our friend Megan from Brown Parcel Press in nearby devereux, Georgia shares a glimpse into her world...enjoy!
In Georgia, the months of February and March are shape shifters. Some years they are cold and wet, some years they are warm and dry, but most years they are both, and most of the time they are both within the same week. Depending on your mood this pattern can be playful or discouraging. The key to floating through these unpredictable patterns is flexibility and adaptability. I happen to love this time of year because it feels like a mirror of my home and work life.
I run a small letterpress and design shop out of my home studio in rural Georgia with my mom, Gaëlle. I am also a mom to two little girls, a 4 year old and a 9 month old. With the exception of three mornings a week, when my oldest goes to a preschool in a town close by, I am with my girls 24/7. This means my business is run in the cracks and crevices of the day (and of course with the help of my husband, grandparents and a fair share of night and weekend work too). This also means, each day and week is a bit unpredictable depending on who has a cold, whose teething, or which donkey got out of his fencing. Brown Parcel Press has been my love and passion for nearly a decade, and when I had children I learned how to balance one love and passion with another love and passion. This balancing act also means that I have learned how to accept that the pace at which my business grows is a relatively slow one, but as long as my family is happy and my business is moving forward creatively and financially I am happy to keep juggling these roles day in and day out. Slow and steady is the name of my game.
My printing partner / mom lives in Atlanta most of the time, but one week out of the month she comes to live and work with us. This has been the key to me not feeling overwhelmed, creatively frustrated, or unproductive. I design, ship orders, photograph products, and return emails during the weeks when she’s not here. When she arrives for a production week we try to hit the ground running. She and I have a pretty organized printing schedule, and we each take turns between spending time with the girls and printing new designs. It’s certainly not traditional and there is a lot of start and stop, but my girls get to be a part of what we’re creating, we get to eat all of our meals together, and somehow in the end it all works and we meet our deadlines. These pictures are from one of our production weeks together. This season we are taking a step back from our old work and putting a whole new line of stationery together. The line will feature a few designs from past calendars that we want to see in a new context, but there is a lot of new work we are releasing as well. Pushing ourselves to really focus on the cohesiveness of the line as a whole has been more challenging than I thought, but it’s so exciting. This work feels more personal as we’re really trying to bring our own vision of simple beauty to life on paper.
