June, 2021
This is a project that has gotten totally out of control. It’s what happens with a big stack of holiday card boxes and leftover notecards added to a huge stash of found and manipulated papers. Over the years I’ve made a habit of sending as many as 450 holiday cards a year to business contacts, and my favorites came in nice chipboard boxes with magnetic closures (Peter Pauper Press), so of course you can’t throw them away even if they were a great buy. On the other hand, I don’t need a big stack of boxes with pine trees and doves and that kind of thing. So, I learned how to deconstruct them, how to do corners the right way, and got to work. (Thanks to Nicolette Ross of Ross Press and BIndery for my first boxmaking lessons).
That’s how the first stack came about, and they seemed so empty. So, I remembered I also had a stack of notecards left over from workshops I used to do. Problem is that they already had line designs outlined on the front flaps (has to do with a workshop exercise, story for another day). So, collage stash to the rescue.
I didn’t really have a solid plan in advance for what to do with them, but some are in my Etsy store right now, and I still have plenty of raw material to work with, so I think I will be at this for a while.
June, 2021
I missed my Italian travel adventure in 2020 and again in 2021 (you know why), but I did finally make use of these beautiful fabrics from my last trips to Florence and Naples. The blue and green fabric is from a place in Florence, the Casa dei Tessuti – it is worthy of another post, so I’ll have to do that sometime. The others were from a place in Naples. If Casa dei Tessuti is a temple of fabric, the place in Naples was more like a warehouse. My friend/landlady when I visit Sorrento, Anastasia del Vecchio, was kind enough to go exploring with me one day, and we found a treasure trove of fabrics you would see on the runways – they had the catalogues to prove it.
Anyway, months passed and the fabrics seemed to precious to use. Finally, just before quarantine I found #sewanastasia and Kate Van Asten of #wulfka here in Chicago and they taught me how to draft patterns from examples already in my wardrobe and in my imagination so they would fit me. That gave me what I needed to spend some of that inside quiet time finally bringing these fabrics to life.
I don’t know what other people bring home from vacation, but I visit fabric and paper stores, and am happy to see these treasures finally brought to life.
June, 2021
I decided, at least for now, to house the 31 March collage-a-day pieces into their own little handmade box. This one is a drop spine, and I have to admit the collage on top isn’t from March first, it is one with the best color-coordination!
June, 2021
These are the last of the black paper collages I’ve been making every day this month. I found out it’s a lot more important to be really neat with adhesives on black paper (yikes!)
The next questions is – to bind or to box?
