Beautiful handmade designed calendars for 2008. here are some I love.

debi van zyl calendar [via freshly blended] limited edition count down the year with concentric circles, [sold out already] {blog here}

calendar from seasprayblue

linear calendar from lizardpress Poseidon 2008 is printed on Kitakata, a handmade, tree free paper from Japan of 100% Philippine gampi.

tarahogan letterpress calendar - INK+WIT has teamed up with Pistachio Press on this 2008 letterpress wall calendar. INK+WIT designed and illustrated the pages and Pistachio Press (pistachiopress.etsy.com) is doing all of the printing.

Cathy Cullis from November moon makes the most detailed mixed media dolls, little paper, fabric and yarn dolls with exquisite details and personality. check them out.

This one is (red shoes)’ is a mixed media artwork with fine handmade detailing - much of the papier mache unpainted as I really wanted it to be about the use of old pages from a book … Manipulating the page into a dress is an interesting process. One I’ve only just started to explore, really. I’m stitching the paper on to the doll, rather than using glue. I try to not use glue on my work, unless absolutely necessary (papier mache is an exception of course).

Miranda and Morton ‘arrived’ over the past few days. No matter how many dolls I make, I still like to take my time over them, adding the details so they are just so. …

‘grey girl house’ - I started on a doll - inspired by a beautiful grey linen I have in my fabric collection/stash. I knew I wanted her all grey, something enigmatic about that, … Grey is not a dull hue, I love how it works by itself and with different shades.

Jade Pegler’s work with paper and textiles combines a range of techniques including papiermache, bookbinding, hand and machine stitching, collage and origami - she lives in Wollongong, Australia - which is by the sea and not far from the big city.

She has a wide range of work - from fabric and mixed media, to wonderful whimsical drawings, to altered books and paper sculptures. There is something in her work that speaks of nature, the environment - is it her unbleached fabrics, worn and weathered papers, and organic forms.

these are stuffed drawings - more textiles

this is an inside out book

sculptural piece from a series titled desolation row made of papier mache, wood, wire, more paper, fabric and threads, in a show in Sydney titled IT”S PAINTING SO IT MUST BE GERMAN.

Also the drawings in her sketchbook as so wonderful - check out all her work at flickr and on her site here and here.

How to Make Books: Fold, Cut & Stitch Your Way to a One-of-a-Kind Book, written by Esther K. Smith from Purgatory Pie Press, with illustrations by Lindsay Stadig and photographs by David Michael Zimmerman and published by Potter craft.

This is one of those books that is a pleasure to hold and touch and you just want to keep on feeling it. It is weighty with a solid brown cardboard cover with red vintage hand set type for the cover and each chapter title page (by Dikko Faust of Purgatory Pie Press), it just looks and feels good. This is one book that I really enjoy the matt textured paper, the images come up slightly faded with a vintage feel to the colours - it fits really well with the hand set type throughout the book.

The author, Esther K Smith, has a lovely natural writing style, not too teachery, but still with lots of advice to impart. The chapters go through the various types of ways to make a book by hand - without using presses and lots of fancy equipment and glue. These are folded books and stitched books with lots of variations and examples. I was immediately taken with the very first chapter - ‘Instant books’ such a simple idea - folding a single piece of paper to make an instant book, zine, sketch book, note pad. I immediately made one from a scrap of paper, then I showed the children how to make them too and they spent the evening at home making little books and writing poetry, doing sketches and other secret children’s business. My 5 year old boy was so impressed with himself that he took his books to school the next day and taught the teachers and the class how to make them and now a whole bunch of pre-school kids are making their own books and writing and drawing their secret business.

I found these instructions for the ‘instant book’ or otherwise known as an ‘origami book’.

The rest of this book is just as wonderful, with lots of new ways with old techniques and new ideas to combine different techniques too. There are gems like making books from cereal boxes, and using recycled papers as well as 3D books and different decorative and basic stitches to use. A real gem of a book.
d

Phase 2 of the continued campaign by Jill Bliss to keep Gocco alive. I recently, finally, succumbed and bought a PG-5. I’m yet to dive in and can’t wait to!

save gocco campaign
although our own signature collection here at savegocco has ended, you can still help save gocco! we suggest sending a gocco’d postcard to the president of the company, explaining why you feel they should continue production on gocco:
Akira Hayama
President & CEO
Riso Corporation
5-34-7 Shiba,
Minato-ku,
Tokyo 108-8385,
Japan

Link

Fibre & Stitch is a new “online mixed media zine,” available as a PDF download and focused on mixed-media projects combining fibre, paper, paint, and other art forms. The zine is 62 pages worth of articles, interviews, and detailed tutorials for a range of projects and techniques, published four times each year, and available through one-time purchase or subscription.

Projects include a fun candy-wrapper box, sun printing on fabric, paper quilting, and beautiful collaged and stitched “door” art pieces.

Each project is given several pages of detailed instructions and step-by-step progress pictures. I found the instructions consistently easy to follow and understand even if the techniques and materials used were new to me.

The website also offers many free project tutorials; I love the fabric charms - these could look so modern or charming and cute, depending upon the fabrics and colors chosen. A reader-submitted version even used the instructions to make cheerful magnets!

A zine about making time for the small things. - what a great by-line - one I totally agree with. And I am so excited and inspired and in awe of the energy and creative spark that some people have. These girls - fellow Aussies, have done a great job with this zine. Only better things to come I am sure.

The gals behind it are Nichola from Nikki shell and Justine - 62cherry. The cover is by Shannon at Auntie cookie - fun fun.

Inside the zine are a range of contributions, craft, lifestyle and eco living. I like the combination of articles on topics from Eco - “go green with your new baby” to culture “grass roots footy” to books, blogger profiles and of course crafty - with kids art projects, etsy profiles, and “crafty 101″ - a great little article to guide your crafting life. Lots more of course - a very good sunday afternoon read with a cup of tea.

Can’t wait till the next one… If you are interested in submitting an article - check out their submission guidelines.

Three-ring binders: a school essential. After another year keeping records of my students, my binder was beat up once again, its flimsy plastic cover partially ripped. Instead of tossing it into the landfill for several thousand years, I decided to give it a second life. I pulled out the ever-handy duct tape to reinforce the rip in the binder and whipped up a lovely fabric cover closed with a Velcro strap. Here’s an easy way to give your ugly binder a makeover.

You will need:
Fabric for the cover exterior and the Velcro strap || Fabric for the cover lining || 3” x 3” piece of Timtex (interfacing/stablizer) || 1 ½” of one-inch wide Velcro || lid of a wide-mouth jar (about 3 inches in diameter) and pen for tracing || scrap of accent fabric for decorative circular closure (I used brown corduroy.)

Cut it out

(1) With your repaired binder opened and lying flat, measure the length and width. To find your fabric cutting dimensions, add 1 ½” to the width and 10” to the length. Using these dimensions, cut one rectangle from the exterior fabric and one from the lining fabric. In addition, cut one rectangle 3” x 6” from the exterior fabric. This will become the Velcro strap.

(2) Using the jar lid, trace and cut out two circles from the accent fabric. Set these aside for now.

Sew it up

(3) Sew together the exterior fabric and the lining: Pin the large rectangles together with their right sides facing. Sew along the edges using a ½” seam allowance, leaving a 3” opening in the middle of one of the long sides. Trim the corners and turn right side out by pulling through the 3” opening. Push out the corners with a turning tool and press. Set aside.

(4) Fold the 3” x 6” Velcro strap piece in half lengthwise, with right sides together. With a ¼” seam allowance, sew down the long side, forming a tube. Turn this tube right side out. Tuck in both short edges ¼” and press the entire tube. Edge-stitch a scant 1/8” around the entire Velcro strap.

(5) Sew the rough side of the Velcro to the middle of the right side of one of the decorative circles.

(6) Lay down the other circle with its right side facing up. Set the circle with the Velcro attached on top, with its Velcro side facing down. Pin the two circles together. Sew around the edges with a ¼” seam allowance, leaving a 1 ½” opening beneath the short edge of the Velcro, as shown below. Clip the edges and turn right side out.

(7) Cut out a circle of Timtex just slightly smaller than the decorative circular closure you’ve created. Insert it into the opening of the decorative circular closure and smooth flat.

(8) Tuck in the open edges of the decorative circular closure so they are both on the same side of the Timtex. Press. Insert the end of the Velcro strap through the opening. Sew around the decorative circular closure using a mere 1/8” seam allowance. This seam will attach the Velcro strap to the decorative circular closure.

(9) With a contrasting thread, machine stitch a design on your circular tab closure. You could also add hand stitching, beads, or buttons.

Finish the Velcro closure

)10) Lay the binder cover, with its lining face up, on a flat surface. Open your binder and lay it flat in the center of the binder cover. Fold the cover’s edges around the binder and close it. Place the Velcro strap on the middle edge of the back cover, pinning it in place.

(11) Using the pinned Velcro strap as a guide, place the soft Velcro piece on the front cover.

(12) Sew the strap and the soft Velcro piece in place.

Last steps

(13) Lay out the binder on the binder cover, lining face up, as in step 10. Fold the cover’s edges around the binder and pin the edges in place. Remove the binder.

(14) With a 1/8” seam allowance, stitch along both long edges of the binder cover, securing the folded-over cover edges and closing the opening that you used for turning.

Et voila! You just saved another piece of plastic junk from the trash can and made a unique and useful back-to-school fashion statement.

About the maker:
Meg McElwee is a Montessori teacher who lives with her husband and two cats in rural Mexico. She spends most of her free time fiddling with fabric and keeping up her blog. She recently began selling her original sewing patterns at montessori by hand.

Whip Up is now taking article and tutorial submissions - for more information please read the submission guidelines.

I have had so much fun exploring the paper craft pool - lots of scrapbooking and card making and other paper crafts too

paper beads

altered matchboxes

Look what I created last week: homemade jiffy pots made out of 100% recycled paper.

I needed some little pots for pre-sprouting and as I´m not very found of thee little green plastic ones from the super market I started experimenting with newspaper by wrapping some newspaper around this “thing”. I really don’t know what it’s called in English - it’s not to find in my dictionary. However, it’s a kitchen tool - a zinc cylinder with a hole in the bottom and a wooden part that fit’s into the cylinder. Traditionally used for making balls or dumplings for the soup - and to form dough into vanilla cookies. But now it’s also a gardener’s tool!

Anyway, this is what how to do it, it´s very simple: You wrap the paper around the wooden part, sprinkle the paper with water, squeezed it a little, removed the “thing” – and voila: a nice little jiffy pot for pre-sprouting made out of 100 % recycled materials!

And the recycling goes on: so one day when your pre-sprouted plants are ready to set out, you just dig a whole in the soil and place your plant, jiffy pot included. Don’t bother to remove the pot – the roots of the plant will easily penetrate the paper, and at the same time the paper will disintegrate and vanish into the soil.

Rare, centuries-old books can be a wonderful source of images, patterns, illuminated letters, borders, botanical illustrations and more. The Rare Book Room :

…has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

You can zoom in on particular pages to examine images. While a number of the books are mostly text, there are treasures to be found - among those I searched were botany, children’s books and typography. You can search by category, author or source library. As you load a book - particularly the older ones - the first image of the book laid flat, cover upwards, gives you such a sense of their age, and the craft of their making, and the pleasure of being able to ‘read’ them, rare as they are.

You are also seeing the contents contextually, rather than as images abstracted from the whole (eg. Arthur Rackham’s illustrations in Alice in Wonderland).

For those enjoying paper-based and textile-based crafts, scrapbooking, altered art, artists’ trading cards, quilting, patchwork, stitching of all sorts - there are many possibilities for being inspired.

Chaucer image from here.

Illustrating Children’s Books, written by Martin Salisbury and Published in 2004 by Allen & Unwin. The jacket cover at Amazon is different from the one I have, but be assured it is the same book - I checked.

What an absolutely stunning gorgeous book, aimed at artists and illustrators who want to target their creative endeavours toward children’s book illustration. The book begins with a brief history of of 19th and 20th century illustrating with lots of fabulous examples from illustrator greats such as Antonio Fransconi and Edward Lear as well as Randolph Caldecott and John Lawrence. Illustration now showcases several current illustrators who work in such different ways but each manage to capture the essence of the story. There are a few influential artists mentioned whose work is much admired and, such as Kveta Pacovska’s modern graphic style to Steve Johnson’s surreal and menacing images, Quentin Blake’s sketchy lyrical drawings and Tony DiTerlizzi’s fantasy style.

There is no one chapter in this book that I could say is more interesting or more necessary than another. Each chapter introduces either a style or subject that is necessary to children’s illustration. However the book begins at the beginning with the essential subject of drawing ‘the fundamental language of the illustrator’. Carrying a sketch book with you everywhere is suggested as necessary to honing your drawing skills and observation skills. Sketching everything, people interacting, facial expression, locations and textures are all important. The author also says that ‘it is vital not to pursue a style’ rather to work naturally and honestly and with passion for the subject matter and the work will evolve and ‘develop its own identity’. Different types of drawing are discussed in separate chapters, life drawing and the human body, drawing children and animals - ‘don’t be afraid to end up with page after page of unfinished scribble … the process is part of the skill development’.

Throughout each section (there is drawing, techniques and materials, character development and book style/types) there are case studies. The case studies highlight a few artists and dissects their style and way of working, such as Dan Williams whose has a wonderful sense of place in his illustrations gained from working on location and retaining a freshness and immediacy because of this. The creatures of Satoshi Kitamura and the different styles of Bee Willey who uses a combination of drawing and digital to create the wonderful fantasy characters and scenes, and Jane Simmons whose painterly and stylised approach is very popular with her books for very young children. The author uses the case studies as examples of ways of working I think these are vital to the whole book.

The second section, on media, materials and techniques is probably the biggest section and goes into on the pro’s and con’s and appropriateness of various styles. Watercolour (and the variations just in this is enlightening), paint and pastels, black and white - pencil, pen and ink, print media, collage and digital. The possibilities are mind bogglingly endless.

It is obvious that I love this book, visually stunning and full of inspirations, ideas and possibilities. Makes me want to take up illustrating and turn a part time hobby into a career. The practical section at the back on getting published just might make it all possible!

Image: WATER TANK, 19″ x 27″

As a mixed media artist I am used to working with many different mediums, papers and fabric to create the image I am trying to get across but the work of collage artist Laura Breitman is nothing short of astounding. As paintings they are impressive, but on closer inspection you realise that they are fabric collages as the close-up photograph shows. Her attention to detail and ability to capture light and mood create pieces that are almost photo-real. As well as beautiful trees and landscapes she also produces urban landscapes, interiors and still life, and also holds workshops.

Image: LOOKING UP, 38″ x 41″ (detail) and below full image

Shiso mama makes a small piece of collage art every day. See them all on her website and on Flickr. She explains her motivation on day 1. What a great way to keep the creative juices flowing, and develop your creative voice along the way.

Some are representational, some are abstract. Get a peek into her process here.

The collages are giving me all sorts of ideas for quilts and quilting patterns.

What other do-something-every-day projects are there out there?

Loaded Hips Press creates handmade cards and other unique works of art using a couple of methods, hand-carved from blocks of linoleum (handmade one-of-a-kind lithographic transfer prints) and printed using a C+P letterpress (hand-carved from blocks of linoleum and printed using a C+P letterpress, onto acid-free archival paper). All printed text is handset type, also printed on a letterpress. More more info on the processes please go to the website and check it out.

I like their philosophy: Now that television and computers have saturated our lives with images, we’ve become removed from the process of creating them. Hopefully these cards will inspire you to think more about the value of handmade things, and maybe even to create something that is uniquely your own.

[link comes via dear ada]

aptly named blog treats and treasures has some glorious visual stimuli like this lovely collage, and I really do like the pages from her visual diary/work books.

I love the blog bloody crafts - always something original and fun going on over there. This bunny garland made out of lolly/candy wrappers is so cute. (also love these placemats made recently too).

excellent book tutorial at instructables

love these adorable wall pieces by Lorena Siminovich.

The collages are made with found, recycled, painted and vintage papers. … She chooses maple plywood as a support for her work, to incorporate a natural element and the beauty of wood grain to interact with the re-used papers. … the juxtaposition of patterns, textures and languages explore different cultures and brings a tactile reference back to an overly digital world.

Pondosa

Mixed Media artist Rachel Austin’s work is lovely! Each piece contains a seemilingly endless number of layers and depth. They are fascinating, colorful and full of life. Rachel enjoys juxtoposing vintage papers, recycled woods, waxes and simply drawn shapes to invoke a sense of innocense.

Bollego