Julie Meredith
Bold graphics come in a tiny package from this Pittsburgh printer
By Grace Dobush
Published: September 18th, 2006 | 11:46pm
Julie Meredith should be really stressed out.
The full-time master's student looks like a DIY poster girl, dressed in a black tank top and a skirt she made herself, as she screen prints the square, girl-centric cards she sells as etui. She makes the beauties by hand at Artists Image Resource, a decade-old communal art space devoted to printmaking on Pittsburgh's gritty North Side. On top of her studies in counseling psychology and the etui commerce, she helps organize Pittsburgh's annual Handmade Arcade.
But it's laid-back in the shop, where if something goes wrong, the artists just say, "That's screen printing," and move on. That's evident when Meredith, on a roll, runs out of paper and accidentally prints on the base under the screen. "And that happens at least once a night," she says good-humoredly.
Meredith, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Maggie Gyllenhaal, is pulling prints of a blue sky on part post-consumer card-stock. Her deceptively simple designs use white space and shadows to turn the few colors she uses into playful prints.
Meredith, 31, got started in screen printing because of AIR and the people there, like Mike Budai, a master concert-poster-maker who taught her color registration. Tonight, she's working alongside her friend Allison Glancey, who is stoked because she just got a gig doing a Melvins poster. They bring their own supplies to AIR, even though most everything needed to print is provided, because, like in any communal space, things tend to walk away. Meredith and Glancey write threatening messages on their squeegees to deter theft. One of Meredith's says "oh hell no!!!" in Sharpie.
She landed in Pittsburgh because her husband, Dan, loved it here in college and wanted to stay. Before that, she spent time in Chicago and New York, where she earned her undergraduate degree in film. She grew up in North Carolina, but she blossomed in Pittsburgh, she says, and is now a champion of the former steel town. A middle-of-the-road salary can make for good living here, without the rigid social structures of larger, hipper cities. Meredith likes how unassuming the city is. "People don't have anything to prove," she says.
Two other longtime partners in crime are her cats, Fergus and Audrey, who put up with her cross-country moves and who have moonlighted on her cards. The cats mostly stay away from the guillotine card cutter at home, and doing her printing at AIR keeps them out of the ink.
Meredith uses her high-tech skills from her years as a Web designer to enhance the low-tech medium of screen printing. Designs made in Adobe Illustrator are printed onto transparencies, which she burns onto emulsion-coated screens. Being a designer for other people can make you forget to create for yourself, she says. "The pure act of running the squeegees is really relaxing."
In the year and a half she's been printing, Meredith's created about 35 designs. The cards are printed in editions of about 50, but that's more limited by her time than a desire for exclusivity. She's reprinted about a half dozen designs, and tonight she's doing a favorite - a girl climbing on a jungle gym. The original run got cut short last summer when she broke her left hand in a bike accident. But she still printed one-handed.
She chose etui as a moniker because she likes small things, she says. She found etui in the dictionary - it's a small French word for a small, ornamental case - and it stuck. And etui's size is just how she wants it, she says. "I'm wary of letting anything take up too much time in my life." She does only two craft shows a year - Pittsburgh's Handmade Arcade (which she is also an organizer of), coming up November 11, and Renegade Brooklyn - and she consigns cards at just a handful of stores across the country. But sometimes the blogosphere has something up its sleeve - Daily Candy linked to etui back in January. Meredith didn't know it until she logged into her e-mail - on her first day at grad school, no less - and found 40 messages. "I spent two days packing orders," she says.
Lately, she's been inspired by Texas license plates. "Strange, but I think they've been influencing my recent fascination with cowgirls," she says. And she loves retro looks, like vintage advertisements where one color's slightly out of registration, an aesthetic she embraces in her work. "I'm not a copier," she says. "I'm not a color copier, and that's what makes it good."
Issue #35
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