Coming Soon...

Next month my books and butterflies will be available to buy at the MassArt spring sale, running from May 4th to 10th. Below is a sampling of what will be available for purchase.

Your very own small butterfly collection. Each butterfly is hand painted in watercolor and pinned into a handmade box lined with cork. Every boxes lid contains the name of the butterfly as well as a carved indent of its shape.

These blank sketchbooks are inspired by old furniture from auction catalogues. Each book is wrapped in hand drawn paste paper and decorated with a  cut paper piece of furniture. Pages of soft drawing paper are sewn into a durable spine of bookcloth.

Merry Christmas! (Book)

I usually like to make small handmade gifts to give to all the family friends I see around the holidays. After a busy month at work there wasn't much extra time so I went to my parents house empty handed. On Monday morning we were looking through our Christmas cards we had received and I was noticing all the great festive stamps people were using on the envelopes. I thought it would be fun to make more little stamp size books that opened up into Christmas cards. I ran to the local art store and picked up some matte board, an olfa knife and some decorative paper and hammered out a few books. This was the tiny adorable end result:

Birthday Banner Book-Card

I love love love making people cards. Birthdays, holidays, valentines, thank you cards, I love them all. You may not know this about me because I usually don't take pictures of them before I send them out, but this time I did. I was inspired to make these based on those birthday banners people hang on the wall at parties, the ones like this:

So I took that idea and I wanted to make a banner that you could hang that would say 'Happy Birthday' but at the end of the week when the festivities are over you could take it down and fold back into a book. Here was what I came up with:

And here is another one, just with different colors and a bit bigger (the first one measures 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches) this one is about 2 x 2.

 just went to Micheal's and bought about 10 rolls of ribbon so I expect to pretty crazy with making a bunch of these in all different colors and styles.

Tiny Homemade Shelves

Recently pictures have been popping up all over the internet of those curio cases or old letterpress trays people use store cute quirky little things in, like skeleton keys and old toys and shells. These things are like 'I Spy' on your wall. And I thought, "Hey, I have cute quirky stuff that needs somewhere to go!" But I do not have an old letterpress tray or the know-how to build things out of wood, so I turned to my dear old friend, book board. Who needs wood when you can just draw wood grain?

Now originally, my overwhelming ambition said "Alice, you're going to build a box like 1ft by 2ft. It's gonna be huge, you'll fit all your things in that box." Then I started to do math...

 

Then I started to draw the wood grain...

And then my box ended up being 4 3/4 by 6 inches! Victory!

I rationalize that I can just build a series of them, all catered to the different things I put in them.

 Contained in this box are: a letterpress block 'A' I got on Portobello Road, an old pocket watch found at a flea market, a Totoro my mother felted for me for Christmas (she might be more crafty than me!), an unusual take on the runcible spoon (layman's terms - a spork) and a doughnut Christmas ornament made by my coworker, Jocelyn Gomes, who unfortunately has no website I can direct you to, which is shame because she is fabulous.

Repurposed Christmas Gifts

Around Christmastime we all realize there are lots of people we would like to get gifts for but can't really afford to do so. This year I decided to make something quick and easy to give to the people I couldn't afford gifts for. So I made ornaments and nice little boxes for them to go in.

 

The boxes were made out of (very seasonably appropriate) Trader Joe's bags wrapped around card stock to make them more durable. 

Inside were ornaments made of old Christmas cards and 

homemade paste paper.

Yay! Instagifts!