If you have landed here from a sticker on someone's water bottle, or a card someone mailed you, welcome. This is the Journal, and this first post is a short tour of what we make and where all of it starts.
It all starts as a painting
Every design in this shop begins the same way: Tracie sits down with paper and a brush and paints the thing by hand. No exceptions. A bear, a whale, a ridgeline going soft in the fog. Once the original is finished, it gets scanned and carefully turned into the things you see on these pages.
The originals stay one of a kind, and some of them we finish and frame ourselves so they can go straight onto a wall.
The paintings also become fine art prints on archival paper. Those come already matted and sealed in a clear sleeve, sized for a standard frame, so you can drop one into something you already own without a trip to the framer.
The cards
The greeting cards are where most of the artwork ends up. They are 5x7, folded, blank inside, and they ship with a coordinating envelope in a clear sleeve. Blank inside is a deliberate choice. We would rather hand you the picture and let you write the part that matters.
If you want a place to start, Keep Close to What Makes You Feel Alive pairs a black bear with an evergreen wreath. The Black Mountain Alphabet is our love letter to this town, A to Z. Not All Who Wander Are Lost is a good one to send someone off to college or out on the trail. And when there are no good words at all, Misty Mountains is quiet enough to carry the weight.
A handful of the cards carry their words on the front instead of leaving everything to you, hand-lettered right into the painting. Those live together in the Heartfelt Collection, for the occasions that ask for something gentler.
The stickers
The stickers are the same paintings, die cut and printed on weatherproof vinyl, made for water bottles, laptops, tumblers and truck windows.
The Black Mountain, NC round is layered Blue Ridge at sunrise. The Asheville Bigfoot exists because we could not resist, and it turns out neither can most people. Cultivate Wonder is for the people with too many plants, and we say that with love.
The rest of the studio
Not everything we make is paper. Over in Studio Goods you will find aromatherapy roll-ons blended by hand with rose quartz and dried flowers, and a soy and coconut wax candle poured into an amber jar and scented like the woods around us.
One of those candles is not really ours. We set it aside and give away what it earns, and we wrote about why we do that and where the money goes a while back.
Where we work
We live and work in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Everything here is painted, packed and shipped from home, at the foot of the same mountains that keep showing up in the artwork. There is no storefront to visit these days, but the mail runs both ways, and we are easy to reach if you have a question about a piece.
More posts coming: how a painting becomes a sticker, why we kept the name Cloud Cottage, and the story of the garden business that came before all of this. Thanks for being here.