Studio in Spring
Late spring updates about vampires, crushes, new projects, and who knows what else
Hello! This is the very-infrequent newsletter from Studio Kirkland.
Who?
We are Matt & Erika; Studio Kirkland is our little house brand that covers the different creative projects our family tackles. You probably signed up for this because you also follow Dracula Daily; and if you don’t recall this or if you want to get off the merry-go-round, there’s an unsubscribe link at the very bottom of this email.
Today we’ve got news about a 🐇 new project, an update on the 🪙 penny press, and of course some 🧛♂️ Dracula stuff.
Local Crush
Local Crush is our traveling penny press - see here for the background story. We just moved the press to its tenth location! This has been really fun to see it around town, and the locals have definitely responded. So far we’ve raised over a thousand bucks for charities in our community, and turned even more useless pennies into durable souvenirs.
This month we’re at Waxman Candles, a downtown staple that’s been serving up wicks and wax since 1970. You can track the press at localcrush.club or on our instagram.
Follow the White Rabbit
Have you ever had an experience that you just… couldn’t explain? Today our newsletter is sponsored by Lagomorph Industries, a team of seasoned investigators ready to help. They’re standing by to take your call.
No seriously. Call them.
(This by the way is a family project led by Trudy, who wrote the story options.)
We just keep making stuff
Erika here. On any given day, you can find someone in our house noodling around on a creative project, so I thought I‘d share a sampling of some recent projects:
Felix needed a new pair of kicks (teens and their constantly growing feet, sheesh) but wasn‘t content with the basic off-the-shelf colors, so we cooked up a plan to customize them. He mocked up a few color combos and I raided my leather paint stash and got to work. Here‘s the final result and I think they turned out great:
Trudy burst excitedly through the front door last week, her arms loaded down with flowers (weeds) she picked on her way home. No more than 15 mins passed, when she waltzed out of the studio with a flower crown on their head. Obviously I made her pose for a few photos:
I upgraded a vintage army parka liner I‘d purchased online from one of my favorite instagram boutiques, Lessen Space. (They have a brick and mortar shop in Joshua Tree that I‘m dying to visit in person, should I ever find myself in that neck of the woods.) The parka had already been custom dyed when I got it, but some of the stitching had come undone and it didn‘t have any closures, due to it being designed to button into an outer garment. I fixed the stitching, added some toggle buttons, made sleeve cuffs, and tacked down a single lapel to further enhance the asymmetry. I‘m both pleased with myself for seeing a project through to the end (our house is a graveyard of half-completed projects) and about how my jacket turned out!
Matt, the glorious weirdo that he is, has a side project dissecting stuffed animals to see the robots that are hiding within. This results in a lot of random plush animal heads lying about. So here‘s his most recent Halloween costume. Terrifying, if you ask me.
And of course it’s Dracula Season
The story in Bram Stoker’s Dracula starts on May 3. That means if you’ve signed up for Dracula Daily, then you’ve already gotten three emails with the story so far. Dracula season runs from now thru November, and it’s not too late to join in this year. If you sign up now you can catch up pretty easily!
Thanks
That’s it - we’ll email again at infrequent intervals when we’ve got more project news.
- Studio Kirkland