Last week, we took off for the emerald coast of Florida for 7 days of rest and relaxation with our best friends and their baby. Though the weather teased us a bit (it wouldn’t be a vacation with Carter and I without a tropical storm lurking) but after one rainy day, it was sunny skies the rest of the time. Carillon Beach is near and dear to my heart (we were married there) but each time I go back I fall more and more in love with it. It’s quiet, peaceful and beautiful, with irresistible sunsets and soft white sand. It’s close to fun beach towns with great restaurants but far enough away that it seems like it’s an amazing secret that no one else knows about. It feels like you have the beach to yourself sometimes. (and sometimes you really do!)

My best friend, Carrie, who lives way-to-far away in Houston, had a baby last year, and I loved getting to spend time with them every day. We even had a grandma on hand to steal a few nights out as adults. It was just the right temperature – warm but comfortable evenings. Good times with really good friends!

My favorite restaurant on 30-A, George’s in Alys Beach

I love my iphone and instagram, because it has made me photograph things more, where normally I wouldn’t have taken many (or any) pictures. These are a few of my favorite insta-photos from the week.

Top: just arriving in Carillon (we look pretty darn good for spending 12 hours in the car), sunset drinks in Seaside, our view at dinner – Caliza in Alys Beach)
Center: Our first sunny-ish day on the beach, the gorgeous Carillon dune walkovers, my cute date
Bottom: the cutest little beach bum you ever did see, our spot on the beach, our house ‘American Idyll’ (all the houses have cute names)

Carter and I have had a crazy May and June, selling our condo, buying a house, doing a little work to the house, packing, and a family wedding thrown in there for just the max amount of busy. Oh, and I run my own business. Stress! This trip, though booked months ago was the perfect time to get us rested up for the big move. Can’t wait to share some photos of the new casa!

A few weeks ago, a photo shoot that I was a part of was featured on Style Me Pretty! We did the shoot at the Pavilion at the Four Seasons Resort and I loved how it all came together.

I started with my Catalina design and created menus and signs to coordinate.

I think the menu was my favorite.

You can see so much more at Style Me Pretty!

I enjoyed collaborating with these awesome DFW vendors:
Hair & Makeup: Lindey Duckworth
Linens: La Tavola
Planning: Urban Magnolia
Florals: Kate Foley Designs
Photography: Helmut Walker Photography
Cake: Sugar Bee Sweets
Rentals: Ducky Bob’s

Row 1: a heart made of our polaroids in the Minted booth, entering Paper Party 2013, Kimberly and I brunching in SOHO
Row 2: NY art print that I got to take home, Minted T Shirt (designed by Jill Means), Mintie and NSS standout, Meg Gleason of Moglea
Row 3: NSS loot, Hope, Jen and Natasha manning the Minted booth, my Twine wedding invitation samples spotted in the booth.

I get asked a lot why I attend. Do I exhibit? Will I in the future?
The short answer is no and probably not. I go to meet with Minted and network with fellow designers. It’s a pleasurable business trip, if you will. Wholesale isn’t part of my current business plan, but growing my work with Minted is, so spending days talking with their CEO, community managers, and merchandising group was invaluable and of course talking paper with all my design friends is icing on the cake. I might have even snuck in a few hours at the show, but I laugh that it certainly wasn’t as much of a focus this year.

That’s the short summary. Let’s get to the details… those not interested in specifics, you are welcome to go on your merry way. I am about to give a play-by-play. You’ve been warned.

The only way to explain this trip is that it is a complete whirlwind. It flew by. I arrived on Sunday, getting in mid afternoon at exactly the same time (without planning) as my official NSS roomie, Kimberly FitzSimons. We shared a cab to the hotel, freshened up and headed to The Jane for an unofficial Minted happy hour organized by Jackie of Sincerely Jackie. It was the perfect way to start out our trip. New faces, familiar faces. It was so fun. Facebook groups have allowed us to communicate consistently, so it was really like seeing old friends instead of meeting in person for the first time. I can’t say enough how nice these women are.

Back:(L-R) Hailey Myziuk of Snow & Ivy,  Anita Brown of That Girl Press, Kristen Smith, Kimberly FitzSimons, Carolyn MacClaren, Melanie Severin, Lori Wemple, Chelsey Brennan of Chelsey Emery
Middle:(L-R) Carrie O’Neal, Pasty Henspetter, Jill Means, Me, Amy Ehman of Design Lotus, Nam Bourassa of Gakemi Art & Design, Kristie Kern, Dawn Jasper
Front:(L-R) Jen Wick of J.Wick Design, Hannah Graff of HannahCloud Design, Jackie Mangiolino of Sincerely Jackie

Me and my roomie, Kimberly

We ended the night with dinner for 20 at Dos Caminos.  I ate dinner at 10pm almost every night. New York is really the city that never sleeps!

The next day, after some meetings with Minted, we hit the show. We browsed the design booths admiring all the beautiful work. It is truly inspiring, but kind of overwhelming. There is so much! Last year, I tried to see every. single. booth. and ended up exhausted. So this year, we took it easy and headed back to the hotel for a bit to do a little work and rest our feet for the big Minted party that night.

(L to R) Kimberly, Me, Jen Wick, Kristen Smith, and Carrie O’Neal

The Minted party was at KTCHN and it was a great venue. Minted really threw a wonderful event and at the end, I even scored an art print in a drawing! I never win anything – but I guess I can’t say that anymore! I chose Emily Potts’ Type Study New York (seen in instagram photos above). It was my little souvenir of the week and I can’t wait to hang it in my office.

Me and Jill Means at the Minted Party

(L to R) Susan Asbill, Jackie and Me

On Tuesday, we had pretty free morning, so instead of going straight to the show, Kimberly and I slept in and then headed to Soho. We ate a great brunch and shopped a little before heading to the show for the afternoon.

Once at the show, we hit up a lot of the supply side, which includes suppliers for pretty much all things stationery: printers, packaging, binders, paper. Lots of samples to take home – even trying to keep my stash small, I still struggled fitting it all into my suitcase.

Tuesday night was our last event, the Paper Party, hosted by Oh So Beautiful Paper. It was a big event with a ton of amazing sponsors (Minted included).

Back: (L to R) Eric Comstock of ERAY, Yolanda Chendak, Hope from Minted, Cambria Evans of J.Bartyn Design
Front: (L to R) Jackie, Me, Kimberly, Jen

On our way to the Paper Party, we passed by a packed restaurant, called Anejo Tequileria, and decided to head back to it for a little late night dinner. It was a beautiful evening and we sat outside and enjoyed an amazing last meal in the city…. and here, I thought I would be suffering from Mexican food withdrawal!

And that’s all! What a week. Already looking forward to next year!

Rebranding is just one of the things I worried about for the new name change. I loved my Palm Papers branding but didn’t want to just swap in a new name and move on – I wanted it to be a little different, while still reflecting the clean style of my designs.

Enter Angi of Angelique Ink, and this logo became the bright spot during some pretty down days. I love it and every time I looked at it, I get a little more excited. She is amazingly talented and patient and worked with me down to the letter. There’s just something about calligraphy – obsessed!

I thought about spinning it into a really positive thing, and brushing over the truth, like this is what I wanted to do, but that would be hard to do if I were telling you in person. In person, I might tear up or full out cry, because this is something that I am sad about, so I think I’ll share as I might if we were talking over coffee – but you are spared the tears and tissues. Sorry to those who have not been so lucky.

In the next few weeks, I will be changing my business name.

Let me explain a bit. In January, my husband and trusty COO/CEO/doer of all the work that I ask him to do, began the process of trademarking Palm Papers. I always felt like it was something I needed to do, especially now that it’s my full time salary. We hired a lawyer and got the process started and pretty much immediately hit an extremely huge roadblock. Turns out, there already existed a trademarked business that was in legal trademark world, EXACTLY me. No huge web presence or social media presence, no way for me to have found them on my own, but trademarked in the 80s. Not only could I not trademark my name, but now I knew that this business existed that could one day discover me and send a cease and desist in 2 months? 5 years? Never? It scared me and I didn’t know what to do. After seeking advice from some generous lawyer friends, endless discussions with my husband and a tiny shred of hope that I could hold on to my business name, we decided to reach out to the business and see if we could coexist, which obviously was a failed effort, which makes sense – why was I trademarking myself to begin with… I would have said no as well. I don’t have any ill will towards them at all, just the situation that I ended up in.

I have gone through so many emotions with this news – the biggest one is sadness for the loss of my business name. The other is dread. All the work that it takes to change my name makes my head spin. But I am working on getting over it, and have had a lot of encouragement that in the end, my business name is not my business. I am my business and my designs are my business and that part is not going to change. No one cares what name I am designing under. If you’ve worked with me or follow me on instagram/twitter/facebook, I hope I never alluded to the fact I was a big business. It’s just me. Responding to emails, designing proofs, answering questions, packing up orders – all me. Working one on one with my clients is a huge part of what I sell and I know that in the end, that’s the part that matters and a business name is just a name. So, I think the only natural thing to do is to design under my own name.  In the near future, I will be changing to Lauren Chism Fine Papers. You might already notice the changes on Minted and partially on MyPublisher, but my website, email and facebook page will all be changing over the next few weeks.

I still go through the whole – ‘I wish I had never tried to trademark my business’ – or ‘I wish I had found this out when I chose Palm Papers – why didn’t I trademark it immediately’, but I don’t think there’s any way it could have happened. I named my business before I had any dream of doing it full time… spending $2k to trademark it wasn’t really possible and while it seems like it could be, ignorance is not bliss when you receive a cease-and-desist letter. This way, I have time. Time to make changes, time to figure out the details and slowly transition to the new name.

I have been in quite a rut on the blog lately due to all this and I am ready to come out of it and start sharing stuff again. I already feel like a weight has been lifted as I type this and I think sharing with people just might be the first step to putting all this behind me.  I am hopeful that it will be what is best for me somehow – even though I can’t quite see the benefit as I am working through the details and pains of making the change. Right now, it just sucks!

So there you have it. Honesty. Can someone get me a tissue?

I’ve been not-so-patiently waiting to share these birth announcements that I did for my friend Carrie and her sweet little baby boy, Parker. Even though they don’t have the choice, our husbands are buddies (thank goodness) and share a particular fishing obsession, so I thought that theme was perfect for this future fisherman.

I mixed digital and letterpress printing (by Czar Press) for the first time with these announcements and really loved how they turned out. You can see some more photos and a funny story about the one track mind of my hubby over on OSBP.

Side note: don’t you love the photo props?! They are courtesy of my husband’s tackle box – who knew they would ever be used this way!

First of the new year, is Boca!

The Boca invitation, from the Regal Collection, features simple type with a lovely soft background. Though subtle, the damask background is extremely elegant and chic. Boca was flat printed, but much like my other invitations, was designed to work with letterpress as well.

When it came to inspiration, I again found myself with endless options. Black and white is just so darn elegant and some damask patterns just never go out of style!

Row 1: Christina Szczupak via Ruffled,  Adam Nyholt, Photographer via Style Me Pretty, Leo Patrone Photography via Style Me Pretty
Row 2: Craig & Eva Sanders via Style Me Pretty, Paloma’s Nest via Martha Stewart, via Style Me Pretty, Jose Villa

There are a lot of new babies in my life (none of which are mine – you didn’t miss anything), but that means I am designing a lot of birth announcements! I was certainly in the zone, so having this challenge happening at the same time allowed me to kill two birds with one stone. Below are my submissions: Little Man, Modern Dahlia, Chic Baby, Bowtie, Bows and Arrows, and Baby Bow.