We Shall Shortly, if we had our own coffee shop and the treats we’d serve up. Made with 100% reclaimed scrap paper.

Hello all! We’re still working away busily in the studio, but we’ve been (and will probably continue to be) pretty quiet about blogging ~ we’re cutting down as much as possible on the time we spend on the computer. 

In the meantime, we’re continuing to churn out orders over at our store, and the upcoming summer collection is taking shape. We’ll have more news about that soon! 

If you’d like to stay updated with the happenings over here at Five and a Half, sign up for our newsletter (scroll to the bottom) and we’ll let you know what we’re up to. Thanks!

I was fiddling around with some photoshop stuff (well, actually learning how to use it) and couldn’t resist matching the words (okay who doesn’t already own at least one version of this poster? We have a hand-drawn repro by Maira Kalman in the living room that I stare at every day) with these roosters we saw just hanging out on a lazy sunny afternoon (p.s. not in Brooklyn). 

Last weekend, a trip back in time to the Saugerties Lighthouse. A lovely Sunday of beautiful sights, new friends, and the most delicious buckwheat pancakes.

We saw this great fence when we were driving around upstate New York. Love it! Elsewhere: bookplates, Meet Your Printmaker, and I’m adding Alphabet City to my wishlist.

Here are the results: three very skinny exercise booklets, each filled with 25 blank pages of sugarcane paper. The pastel paper covers are printed with our original designs pairing vintage images with sage quotes from The Science of Culture (a stuffy book on etiquette from1923). Each set comes wrapped in a recycled kraft paper package. Available now in our store.

Working on these new designs yesterday afternoon was a really welcome break from the big three-(now four)-month-long project I’m still up to my shoulders in. Somewhere in the midst of this, we are also working on the spring/summer collection of our signature photo-cover journals. Please do continue to check back in during the coming months to see what new things we are adding to Five and a Half!

This morning I read an article in The New York Times about a hundred-and-one year old lady who started painting when she was sixty years old using a paint-by-numbers set her husband gave her. Coincidentally, a couple hours later when I was on the computer, I came across Something’s Hiding in Here’s new work, states, that uses old paint-by-numbers sets. And from some random googling because I was looking for a completely unrelated reference image, I came upon an old post at Drawn, about a paint-by-numbers charity auction at the Corey Helford Gallery (click on past shows, “Charity by Numbers”). Oooh. Very nice.

For those in New York, this Sunday is the opening of the Brooklyn Flea. We’d be there looking around at everything but we’ll be at a weekend getaway in an upstate New York lighthouse. Anyhow, this is not your typical flea market ~ with vendors including Greenjeans and a whole slew of designers  from Supermarket, I don’t really get what’s even flea-markety about it. So if you attend, don’t expect to be rummaging through the remains of some great-grandmother’s attic, but do expect to buy some really great craft and design pieces (most of them useful of course), and treat yourself to some cupcakes and other delicious baked goods.

Here are the event details: 10am to 5pm—rain or shine—starting April 6, 2008, at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Lafayette Ave. between Clermont and Vanderbilt Ave. It’s on every Sunday through the spring and summer, so if you’re around, stop by!

And for all you people near Oakland, Shawn wants to say he’d be at this print sale buying things if we weren’t on the other side of the country. Prints by The Small Stakes and Bloom Screen Printing, and talk about affordable art, each piece ranges between a whopping $5 to a wallet-friendly $25. It’s on this Friday night, April 4th, From 5:00 - 10:00. Bloom Screen Printing,2310 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA 94612.

Lots of things to see: the third issue of Design for Mankind’s e-zine Inspiration (filled with gorgeous studio shots), we picked up The Acme Novelty Date Book Volume One over the weekend and I couldn’t stop looking at it, and there are so many mouth-watering sketchbook excerpts over at Book by It’s Cover.