About Us
Inklings & Imprints
The stamp art sold by Inklings & Imprints is created by Maggie Stanley and Loden Mohler. Our focus is on deep etched red rubber stamps that can be used on "traditional" rubber stamping surfaces (such as paper), and also with velvets, clays (including mud, polymer and precious metal clays for jewelry), and thicker paints.
The business may also expand in the future to include other products based on our artwork. We shall see...
History: Maggie and Maggie Bags
I am an artist/craftsperson/seamstress/designer. I have been sewing since the 6th grade. Oh dear. I started creating Maggie Bags and other items for sale in 1997. Some people call me Maggie Bags, but really, Maggie Bags are the bags. I tend to answer to Miss Maggie instead.
I started sewing in Home Economics in middle school, making clothing, quilts, pillows, drapes, curtains, and other things I am sure I am forgetting. In 1997 I happened to live near a store in Floyd, Virginia that had an ample supply of tapestry, silk and velvet remnants. I had no reason to own any of these fabrics, but still found myself frequenting this store for hours at a time and acquiring fabrics by the carload in spite of myself. In order to avoid being crowded out of my home, I started sewing the materials into tote bags, duffel bags, purses, evening bags, backpacks, etc., which I sold through a handful of shops in Floyd, Blacksburg, and Roanoke. I moved back up to New England in the fall of 1998 and started vending at craft shows and festivals throughout New England, as well as selling wholesale through some boutiques around the state.
See the "Past Work" section, below, for some examples of the work I did.
I expanded my product line to include one-of-a-kind robes, jackets, pillows and other decorative objects, some made from velvet which I hand-embossed with rubber stamp images. The embossed velvet items I created quickly became fast-sellers and I routinely sold as many of the items as I could make. I accepted custom orders and created some large shawls and even a floor-length embossed velvet evening coat for a Beacon Hill socialite.
During this period I was continuously on the lookout for rubber stamps to use for velvet embossing and realized that there was a gap in the rubber stamp market, which is mainly made up of small, finely detailed images that work well on paper. When I could not find the images or styles I had in mind for velvet, I started hand-carving my own designs into stamps. (Although I carved only a handful of stamps in total, I designed other images, including the leaping fish, water and bubble designs that were later included in the first rubber stamp set we had manufactured.) I looked into stamp manufacturing services, toying with the idea of creating a small line of stamps. I held onto that idea for years.
Being the only person involved in my business, I could not maintain the pace of sewing and doing shows full time and did not feel that hiring others was the right thing for me to do. I had a separate full time job and operated my business on a smaller scale for a few years, keeping a web presence and accepting custom orders.
History: Past Work
Although I don't have many images of past Maggie Bags, here is a small collection of photos of some of the fiber work I did. Images of embossed velvet work can be found in our Gallery section - look to the links at left.
- Bags - Totes, purses and shoulder "bucket" bags made from tapestry, brocades, silks, velvets, etc.. I do not currently have photos of the backpacks, duffels, work totes or pet bags I used to make.
- Jackets and Kimono - A page with some images of jackets and a kimono I made.
- A Wedding Dress for Caeli - The process of making a wedding dress for one of my childhood friends. Click on the photo for details and photos about the process.
History: Loden and Inkandescence
I met Loden while I was a student at Cornell in Ithaca, NY in 1992. He was and is an amazing artist. Shortly after I met him, he showed me pages and pages of incredible original artwork with Celtic and Pacific Northwest Native American themes. I had just recently begun to spend a good deal of time doing art. We spent hours creating art - together and separately - and often discussed finding ways to work in tandem. He is someone who can note the small beauties and order, pointing out the mathematical patterns in the “wild” and creating lovely works of art out of unexpected materials.
I relocated back to the Ithaca area in 2005. I had started to think about a rubber stamp business more earnestly and talked to Loden about it. He had many designs that I thought would look fantastic on velvet. I scanned my fish images and his Celtic knotwork triangle images into the computer, used a basic image editor to “clean them up”, and submitted them to the engravers to be made into our first joint stamp set.
The name of the business was changed to reflect the switch of the focus from bags and other fiber goods. (Although the website and items were tagged with the name "Maggie Bags", the actual name of the business had been "Adrasteia".) The business then operated under the name "Inkandescence" for a time. Most of the sales were made over Etsy.com. As time went on and I was preparing to move content from the Maggie Bags website over to Inkandescence.net, we started getting feedback that "Inkandescence" was proving difficult for people to spell and remember. Although a name change wasn't a desired thing, it seemed better to make a quick decision and do it before any paid advertising, etc., was undertaken. So here we are: Inklings and Imprints. Phew - that should be it for a while!