Today, March 8 is International Womens’ Day. What better way to honor the day than to celebrate our co-founder Primm ffrench, our mom and grandma. She would have turned 95 on March 9, 2024 - Let's celebrate her birth, can-do outlook and the self reliant, woman who inspired us and so many others to be more like her.
We're spreading Primm's gifts around by offering 25% off the products in our shop that she designed - read to the bottom for details.
Primm taught high-school art for over 40 years throughout her career and helped hundreds of students find worth in their dreams of becoming creative professionals, (myself included). She actually filled out my college application - truth!
Primm was born in Richmond Virginia in 1929 to James Albert Turner and Doris Jane Bryant Turner. Her dad was born in the rural Virginia hills of Wythe County. Primm’s mom was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, was college educated, an accomplished concert pianist and she taught piano from her livingroom.
Due to her dad’s career, selling sheetrock, the newest, coolest building material of the time, to the building industry; the family moved a lot. Primm attended a different school every year growing up.
Because of all her moving around and her academic aptitude, Primm managed to graduate high school at the tender age of 16.
She went right on to The University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA where she became life-long friends with her three roommates, Betsy, Connie, and Nora.
FUN FACT:
Betsy, Connie, Nora and Primm stayed in close touch throughout their long lives gathering annually for weeklong rendezvous after retirement. With their husbands in tow, they partied it up, cooked together and laughed their asses off reminiscing about days gone by. Those southern accents would come into full bloom aided by the company and cocktails.
Stories were shared about that first job, how the ‘lunchroom’ was actually the bench-lined halls where she could not sit because the law said that if she, as a white person, sat on a bench, all the black people on that shared bench, had to stand.
She brought in a chair to keep the comfort.
At Christmas-time we bake the most DELICIOUS Gingerbread Cookies from a recipe given to Primm aka Miss Turner, from one of her students at that first teaching job,… a boy named Dickie Vass. I think the recipe makes 10 dozen!
After her experience teaching in the segregated south, Primm embarked on a summer program in Florence Italy to further her Art History education and see the world. She made the journey on a freighter that took ten days to cross the Atlantic.
It was in Florence where she met her future husband, John ffrench and a whole slew artists who turned out to be additions to her collection of life-long friends. She learned to speak Italian and returned to Florence for longer stints in the following years. Her community of friends there lived at a place called Villa Fabbricotti. Each room was home to an artist from diverse backgrounds around the world. My dad took me there when I was traveling on business with him in 1995. It was remarkably similar to what he had in his memory… Lovely, airy, balconies on an open courtyard, quiet, when we were there in the middle of the day, but signs of continued art making were evident.
Wild stories of adventures in Florence, other parts of Italy and travels around Europe filled our childhood. Primm's foxy race-car-driving boyfriend, hitch hiiking to Switzerland with her girlfriend, and diving into mosaic-making, developing her notable painting style, collaborating with her housemates and the recognition that comes with commitment to ones art...
She showed us the way by experience, traveling solo without fear, stories of the lovely people she met on the way and how the collection of 'aunts' and 'uncles' we were brought up knowing, fit into her history, and became part of ours.
Somewhere along the line, Primm’s parents retired to Stockbridge MA to take advantage of the culturally rich environs of The Berkshires. Doris’ attention was focused on Tanglewood, the summer home of The Boston Symphony Orchestra where she spent summers ushering and taking in the gloriousness of setting and music she loved so.
Primm joined her parents in Stockbridge and was hired to teach high school art at Williams High School right in town. She taught there for two years, 1961-1963 before marrying John in the summer of 1963, and settling in Ireland where he led a notable design team at Arklow Pottery in Co. Wicklow.
My sisters, Felicitas and Sofia, and I were all born in Ireland. Primm maintained her connection to Stockbridge and her Berkshire community with a regular column about her life in Ireland as a newly-wed, new mom, and then mom of three, in The Berkshire Eagle.
In 1968, she jumped at the job offer she got from the new Berkshire Hills Regional School District to run the 6-school art department. Her with the only concession being that the district hire her husband, to teach in the Art Department, as part of the deal. John ffrench, Irish ceramist and lead designer at Arklow Pottery, was a welcome addition to the soon to be Monument Mountain Regional High School art department.
Primm and John spent the rest of their working lives teaching in that district. My sisters and I all had them for teachers when we took art in high school.
If you haven't figured it out by now, Primm was John's 'boss'. I remember people asking me as a kid about that and wondering why. She was humble, organized and articulate, focused on providing excellent art education and showing, by example, that women are limitless and have what it takes to do anything they want.
Primm headed up the Art Dept, designing curriculum, teaching classes, going to meetings, and supporting all of her students, adding many of them to that growing list of lifelong friends. She expertly hand-cut all the stencils used to make our calendars before we switched to our current photo emulsion process. She ran the business aspect of The Dolphin Studio with her Dome Book full of all the numbers that all balanced perfectly. She designed and mailed our pre-internet marketing mailers, and shipped orders all while parenting 3 daughters born in three years. She encouraged her kids' creative endeavors and supported her husband's commitment to his art-making while relinguishing, without resentment, her own art practice for lack of time. Often thought to be 'quiet' or 'shy', she was not. She was married to a gregarious man who loved people, told stories, garnered the attention in a room. Primm's eyes twinkled with mischief and good humor that on occasion was matched with a hearty, full-belly laugh and an unmatched warmth.
The Dolphin Studio would certainly not be here today without the groundwork laid by Primm. I wouldn't have EVER gotten that college application done! Things in Stockbridge Massachusetts and in the lives of so many artists would just be a whole lot different without Primm's steadfast creative encouragement. So today, we honor, and give huge thanks for the long legacy to Primm Turner ffrench. We miss you and will toast the day to all the gifts you have left for us.
We're spreading Primm's gifts around by offering 25% off the products in our shop that she designed - through midnight March 10, 2024.
To get your 25% off enter PRIMMS DAY at checkout - Don't miss out! The sale ends at midnight Sunday March 10, 2024
The Dolphin Studio Calendar's March 2024 calendar image was designed by me, Crispina ffrench, on the left in the photo above, taken by our friend Jane Feldman.
(Pre-order your 2025 calendar here.)
My sister Sofia Hughes (on the right) and I run The Dolphin Studio, our family-run silkscreen printing company founded by our parents John and Primm ffrench in 1970. Our company truly is a family business. The Dolphin Studio calendar, our signature product, is a collection of thirteen 12”x24” prints (12 months and a cover/envelope). Each page is designed and printed by family members with three generations represented..
Sofia and I, and each of our kids design a month, we include a design for our sister Felicitas and one for my son Ben. Vintage prints, designed by John and Primm are added to the mix and help carry forward the ffrench family tradition. We absolutely LOVE that our family tradition is shared by the most awesome global community of customers and has become a tradition for so many families.
Back in July 2023, Violet, my youngest at age 16, decided that she wanted to take a break from designing a month for our 2024 edition. I jumped at the chance to add an image as I love designing calendar months.
Here’s hoping that Violet is willing to share her gifts in the form of artwork in the 2025 edition… I’m not holding my breath, but we are in negotiations (and I am not kidding).
My March 2024 image is a pet portrait of Sadie Thee GoldenDoodle (kinda like Megan Thee Stallion) who joined our fam when Lucy and Violet were toddlers. She accompanied me on morning runs, demanded that I get my ass out the door when it was hard to get motivated, and was quite a looker, half sheep and half polar bear stuffy. She adored us all but I was her human and I miss her. Right around the time that Violet asked to ‘please be excused’ from her calendar design duties, this cute picture popped up in ‘My Memories’ and inspired me to make it a calendar design, an ode to my sweet Sadie who passed into the next realm to join Ben and the ancestors in October 2021.
Hope you like it.
Sofia, my sister, and partner in The Dolphin Studio (and crime) designed our February image. If you are new around here, we are second generation ffrench family members running The Dolphin Studio. (That is me on the left and Sofia on the right in the image above)
Sofia followed in our parents’ public school teaching footsteps. She is a kindergarten teacher with 27 years of experience under her belt. She is creative and funny and we have been the closest of sisters since the beginning of time.
Sofia’s happy place is at the beach, specifically in Eastham on Cape Cod.. that long arm shaped peninsula on the Massachusetts coast. Our family has shared a cottage there since we were small so we get to spend time at the beach each year, wallowing around in
the salty sunshine.
The anchor and hearts image Sofia created for February 2024 was inspired by the Cape Cod vibe with a whimsical nod to sailors, pirates, tattoos, love and longing. Her fun aesthetic and color choice speaks to countless hours soaking up sunshine on warm sandy beaches paired with evening strolls taking in the sights of Provincetown and all its colorful, over-the-top, creative expression.
Now, if you know the two of us, Sofia and me, you will agree that Sofie is the more scheduled, organized and logical one, while my entrepreneurial spirit is full of dreamy ideas and limitless possibilities….
We balance each other well.
I’m sharing all of that with you because, as our childhood friend, Jonathan Trumbull, noticed, we made a mistake on our first print run of February this year!
See Jonathon’s birthday is on February 18th and well, that first run did not have an 18!!
OMG!
Over here at The Dolphin Studio we have a process that we thought was pretty bulletproof. See, each design is handled by several people before it gets to the point of pushing ink through the screen, making prints on paper.
At The Dolphin Studio each person who handles a print/image looks at what they are making, checking for quality and errors….
AND
Somehow, with all of our checks and balances the errant February print slipped through and out the door in several hundred calendars before we knew of our mistake.
We had printed 1500 February calendar pages before we became aware of the missing 18.
Stop the PRESSES!
Ha!
We did just that, we stopped.
We stopped collating.
We stopped shipping.
We stopped packing, boxing and prepping.
We pulled the big beautiful stack of fresh February prints from our collating line and we recreated the image.
Sofia re-drew the artwork,
Johnny re-created color separations and re-printed transparencies.
Kerry re-shot screens.
Lily, removed Februarys from collated 2024 calendars and prepped shipments.
I stayed calm and thought about how handmade mistakes add a level of human connection, vulnerability, and beauty to our daily lives
Sofia had a heart attack (not really) but if you know her, you know that she is sensitive and feels terribly when something she has done creates havoc for anyone around her.
We were super pleasantly surprised when we shared these February shenanigans with a few friends and loyal customers. They WANTED one of the first run Februarys. They saw, what we thought of as an error, as a sought after collector’s item.
Ha! We certainly do LOVE our customers!!
This is what we did.
We made lemonade!
Sofia had the brilliant idea to use the February misprints to make what has turned into, our annual calendar-customer Valentine’s Day card.
We overprinted the errant Februarys with sparkly gold lace. (The lace image was created with an actual piece of handmade lace from my husband’s grandmother.) The richly layered and GORGEOUS overprints were cut to fit a standard envelope and a fun and heartfelt message of appreciation was added.
Not only are gorgeous cards heading out to each person who purchased calendars this year, we have kept what we thought might be garbage from the landfill, possibly created a new product collection, and had a whole bunch of jijinx making something from trash that far surpassed our expectations.
Kinda like that refreshing, thirst quenching delight on a hot summer day made from lemons, sugar and cold water….
So, if you are a calendar customer and reading this in late January 2024, keep your eyes on your mailbox.
Let us know in the comments if you love our overprint cards as much as I do. We might just be making a whole collection of them with our strike prints and studio proofs….
AND
If February 18th is a super special day for you, and you got a collector’s version of the 2024 Dolphin Studio calendar, let us know by sending us an email. We might just have an extra February 2024 with an 18 kicking around that we can send your way.
We love to create a little interactive high-jinx while sharing The Dolphin Studio in new and fun ways soooo… every once in a while you will find a FREE GIVE AWAY to enter on our Instagram and Facebook pages.
Today, January 17, 2024 we are kicking off our BETTER TOGETHER give-away. ONE very lucky entrant will WIN a brand new product from our shop - a Framed Better Together print.
I (this is Crispina here) designed this print a few years back. The image is taken from a Stitch-A-Long project we did to raise money for a women’s shelter during the pandemic. It turned out to be an all time favorite so we have kept it in circulation and now available in this super cute glass frame.
Okay, enough about that, let’s get right down to how this whole FREE GIVE-AWAY works…
So, if you are super into the idea of increasing your chances of WINNING here are the 4 ways you can enter:
Enter by midnight on February 1. A single winner will be chosen at random and announced at 10am EST on February 3, 2024 right here on our blog and on Facebook and Instagram.
Disclaimers:
Okay - I think that is it. Now, head on over to the socials and get your name in the hat!
Lucy, Crispina and Chris's middle kid, snuggled between Ben and Violet in birth order, designed our January 2024 Dolphin Studio Calendar image.
Lucy loves to learn and is pretty much waaay into science - micro-biology to be specific. She especially loves house plants. The image she made for January was inspired by a browse through an awesome local gardening/landscape design shop called Wards Nursery and Garden Center.
We love Wards for lots of reasons. They are kind people who support our community with their extensive plant knowledge and generous material donations, and, like The Dolphin Studio, they are a family business in their third generation! Our families share a lot of history and connection. If you are Berkshire based, or find yourself visiting our area and you want reprieve from the raw cold of winter go visit! Right on south Main Street in Great Barrington.
Lucy was 17 when she drew the begonia featured for January. She used our swanky iPad Pro which makes it super easy to play with the format and scale of images. Creating color separations for our printing process is easy peasy when images are created this way too. This kid is a dab hand with the technology involved and I am soaking up what she shares with dreams of using these tools to aid in my design process too.
Not only does Lucy draw beautifully (she created the image for December 2023 too), she excels creatively in ceramics too. Check out a couple of the pieces she made in her first ever ceramics class last year. The vase she made was based on a piece my dad, John ffrench made that is featured on the cover of his biography.
When she first brought it home and put it on our kitchen table I thought we had acquired a historical piece of his! The girl's got some talent!
In addition to being a super engaged student, creative maker/artist, Lucy loves, and has a gift with horses. Ginny Finn, a chestnut mare and one of our three equine family members, came to us having never been ridden or socialized with other horses. Lucy single-handedly trained her, riding her often and has even started showing Ginny. Horses have an uncanny ability to connect and share with humans. Lucy envisions a future with that connection maintained for years to come.
Keep an eye on this kid. The world is her oyster as later in 2024 Lucy transitions from her second year of college to ??? She is entertaining all sorts of ideas from travel volunteerism to apprenticing for an electrician before she continues her studies. She will be the designer of February of our 2025 edition of The Dolphin Studio calendar.
This month’s image was made my Your’s Truly, Crispina ffrench. My sister Sofia, and I run The Dolphin Studio and carry on the creative legacy left for us by our parents.
The 2023 November image depicts a pair of big cushy headphones with a curly cord and mic with subtle music notes dancing across the image. I designed this month’s image to honor my son Ben, an awesome funky, jazzy guitarist who graduated Berklee College of Music in 2017 with a degree in production and performance. This year Thanksgiving fell on his birthday, November 23rd.
You might not know that my sweet boy, Ben, died on July 30, 2019 at the age of 26 from a life-long heart condition called cardiomyopathy. When he was diagnosed at the age of two and a half, the doctors thought he would survive 18 months - to be 4. Miracles unfolded and we were blessed to have him around 22 beautiful years longer than expected.
Ben and I were super tight. I became a 27 year old single mom a week after he turned 1. He showed me a way out of the dangerous relationship his dad and I shared. He had Failure to Thrive from the time he was 6 months old so when he was diagnosed at 2 and a half, weighing 16 pounds, it was a huge relief and the most intense panicked fuck-the-world moment in my life.
Maybe this is not the most opportune platform to be sharing such a heartbreaking and, for me, personal story…. but maybe it is. Rather than disregarding grief, it is important for me, and our whole family (especially Ben’s little sisters) to see it and keep Ben in our midst. So every year you will see an image included in The Dolphin Studio Calendar for him, to celebrate his gifts and feed the magic we continue to share.
There were 33 of us at Thanksgiving dinner this year. (That is another legacy left to us by our parents.)
Sofia hosts the event each year at our childhood home on Main Street in Stockbridge, MA. This year, Ben's little sister, Lucy made gorgeous and DELICIOUS birthday cupcakes. As the turkey roasted, the lot of us descended into the cemetery behind the house where John, Primm, and Ben are holding down the ffrench family burial site. Birthday cake, tequila shots, a very tasty joint, and stories were shared as we toasted Ben and celebrated his short yet well-lived life.
The November 2023 image started out as a pencil sketch on a scrap of paper, from there I created a detailed and properly formatted pencil drawing on white calendar-sized paper. The lovely dark blue paper we used was harvested from a paper mill before they sent an entire pallet of it to the incinerator. (more on that in another post)
Next it’s color-separations - this is where it is decided what parts of the image will be what color. Our calendar images are usually created with two colors. Each color requires a separate screen so we ‘separate the colors’ into an order of printing that gives us our desired results.
In this image the ‘first’ color is either light yellow or lavender depending on which one you got. (We made two different colored Novembers). The second ‘color’ is a clear gloss medium used here for the music notes. The gloss adds a little sparkle, and in just the right light, creates what looks like a darker blue on the rich navy paper. It was fun to experiment with a new process and nail the ethereal vibe visually depicting music and nodding to Ben .
You can learn more about Ben, his music and contribute to the scholarship we set up in his name here.
We love to hear from you. Share your questions, thoughts, and feedback in the comments below.
This month (November 2023) we are hosting the first of a series of Give-Aways from our Silkscreen Print Shop in the Berkshire Hills of Western MA.
We figured that November is a great time to stock up on kitchen towels. Ours are affordable and a very functional way to spruce the kitchen up a little as we pull out the cookbooks (or er um google grand-ma's gravy recipe) and fire up the ovens for sharing holiday meals.
In the caption of that post, you will find instructions for entering to win. While you are there, checkout behind the scenes of our silkscreen printing shop where we hand printed 3000 of our award winning Dolphin Studio calendars for 2023.
In addition to our signature calendars we print kitchen towels, greeting cards, and framable prints.
We upcycle our off-prints and left over calendar pages into journals and origami paper. We print on the highest 'post-consumer content' paper we can find, and partner with paper manufacturers to use their waste. Our inks, emulsion and cleaners are the most gentle we can get our hands on and we are committed to always working to diminish our production footprint.
Our friends, fans, and followers are like family to us. We are a family. The Dolphin Studio is our family tradition. We love to hear stories about the melding of family traditions, ours with yours.
We appreciate the word-of-mouth marketing you do for us. Our customers have gotten us featured in glossy magazines and high traffic websites. You have gifted our products, shared our website and helped build our business.
We see you.
As a token of gratitude for all the awesome people we have met through our family business, we host GIVE-AWAYS. Take a look at our GIVE-AWAY and enter to win.
SPECIAL BONUS....
If you read this far, YAY! Leave a comment on this post telling us the last thing you won, we will put your name in the hat an extra time, upping your chances of being the WINNER!
One of the most unexpected and awesome things that has developed over the last 51 years is that our calendar has become a family tradition for our loyal customers located all over the world. There are actually some families who have gotten all 51 editions of The Dolphin Studio calendar.
We often hear about monthly reveals happening - when households gather on the first of each month to see for the first time the new month’s image. (this is why you don’t often see the upcoming year’s images in our marketing material). If you are one of those customers - let this serve as a spoiler alert. In this video we share our 2022 images and show just how you can start a new tradition in your home.
AND
How Dolphin Studio calendars really do make a suitable gift for pretty much - ANYONE. Fun, easy, repeatable each year.
What is your favorite family tradition? Share in the comments below.
The third video in our ‘2021 video shorts’ series, printers take center stage walking through the calendar compiling process here at The Dolphin Studio, from our print table to your home.
We walked you through our silkscreen printing process in Pt I. Pt II talks about the 50+ year history of ffrench Family business - The Dolphin Studio.
Stay tuned for the fourth and final video coming soon
Have you been a Dolphin Studio calendar recipient? Would you like to be a Dolphin Studio ambassadors? We are kicking off this super fun and engaging program to share The Dolphin Studio story and our artful calendars with more people.
Comment below if you have a story to share and would like to learn more about our new ambassador program.
The Dolphin Studio is actually a legacy left to us by our parents (or grandparents - depending) John and Primm ffrench. They founded the business in 1970 to augment their public school art teacher paychecks, and put us kids right to work.
In this video we share the history of The Dolphin Studio and our evolution over the last 50+ years.
If you had a family business how old would your kids be when they started to take on responsibility? We’d love to hear your thoughts on that question and anything else Dolphin Studio related in the comments below.
It is not uncommon for a customer (even ones who have been around a long time) to be bowled over by the fact that our calendars are hand-printed with an old-school method called silkscreen printing. It is certainly not a secret yet still, a lot of people really don’t know what is involved with that process, how does it actually work?
We made this little video to show you our process and help you understand the level of commitment, expertise and FUN that goes into each print we pull in our Becket, MA print shop.
Share any questions or feedback in the comments below – we LOVE to hear from you and read every single comment (actually we all do!)
