DIY handmade holiday greeting cards

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Before Andy Warhol became a super famous pop artist designing Christmas cards for Tiffany's, he would hone his skills and express his holiday wishes by making handmade cards in the comforts of home. I read recently that he took so much joy out of making Christmas cards each year that he often started to design his card for the upcoming year the day after Christmas!

If Andy can start a year in advance, I think all of us card-making fanatics can safely say the time is NOW! And for all of you crafty crafters, we have the perfect book to help you design and create the loveliest, most original, festive, handmade happy holiday cards ever.

The authors of handmade hellos, Eunice and Sabrina Moyle of Hello!Lucky Letterpress offer easy to follow step-by-step instructions for a variety of styles - pop-up, thumbprint, fabric collage, photo ornament, accordian, embossed stencil, silhouette - as well as occassions: birth announcements, Valentines, birthday, cocktail party invites, thank you, everyday greetings and holidays galore! The best part is, the book, templates included, is available for $22.95. Please check here for a list of other great books we carry celebrating the DIY handmade spirit of art and design.

Weekend project

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I was feeling crafty this weekend and have had this project in mind for a while. To advertise our recent Old School exhibition, I had designed a 14' laminated banner to appear in a display window in the convention centre. I knew that I wanted to upcycle the laminated paper into products, so I experimented with the material and this is what I developed: large pockets in which you can safely store letter-sized papers. The sides are sewn together and the pocket seals with a silver snap. I've got a lot of banner left (and one leftover from The Shatner Show), so more will be made. It's just a matter of finding time.

Bee Kingdom

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The local glassblowing trio Bee Kingdom has a new show opening tonight at Axis Contemporary Art. (Axis is my Art Central neighbour on the main floor. I developed their name and corporate identity a few years ago.)

"Bee Kingdom is named so for a couple of reasons. Ryan, Tim and Phillip live and work communally at a seemingly constant non-stop pace. When relating the quality of hot glass it is appropriate to describe it as the same as flowing honey. We also run our own glass blowing studio which we consider our kingdom. Our attraction to glass is drawn from the natural beauty of glass. Glass as a medium is unique and working with the raw, molten material has limitless possibilities. The process is exciting, team oriented, physically demanding, requires precise coordination and demands your mind's complete presence; it is a richly rewarding medium to work with."

UPPERCASEyyc on Etsy

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There are many talented crafty business people whom I admire on Etsy, so I thought I would give it a try as well. Since I already had an account as a seller and my photos were ready, it took a little over an hour to get my shop up and running. Thumbs up! So in addition to being in the UPPERCASE online shop, Eclectonotes are now available on Etsy!

Christine!


Eclectonotes

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Eclecto notebooks

shop.











The perfect travel companion, “Near & Far” contains old maps, geography textbooks and historic images, allowing you to travel in time and space.



Be inspired to compose your next best-seller with “Read & Write”. Vintage papers include dictionary pages, images of great authors, pages of fiction and inspiring images of old.



For recording your creative endeavours, “Arts & Crafts” notebooks inspire your projects with inserted pages fun old-school craft books, needlework magazines, and crazy fashions from the 1970s.









"Flora & Fauna" contains encyclopedia pages, National Geographics, Audubon animals and other representations of animals and plants.



“Facts & Figures” contain old ledger paper, indexes, tabulated figures, how-to and other methodology of yesteryear.



“Peas & Carrots” contains old recipe books, Women’s Day magazines and images of food like Grandma used to make.

Details, below, of the transparent covers, interior lined and vintage papers, and the spine detailing.


Silhouettes

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This weekend is Calgary's annual ArtWalk and UPPERCASE will be participating (click here for a map of the ArtWalk route). There's plenty of Old School goodness to see in our gallery and the neighbouring gallery, One Blue Wall (aka The Principal's Office.) We will also have some drop-in activities such as the Make-a-Button station, Letter Necklaces, and the Old School activity sheet and colouring contest (you can also download it here).

At 2pm on Saturday, you can participate in the Silhouette workshop to make an old-fashioned cut-paper portrait. The new-school twist? We will digitize your silhouette and turn it into a vector file so that you can use it for all sorts of projects: make your own letterhead, t-shirts, use it in scrapbooking, on your blog or Facebook, on family Christmas cards... Or print it out on decorative paper and frame your silhouette for yourself or as a gift. (The fee is $20 for the digital file, which will be emailed to you early next week.)

This is a silhouette I made of Deidre. The top image is the digital silhouette made from the cut paper version below. Since the file is a vector file as opposed to a bitmap, you'll be able to scale the silhouette up or down without any loss of quality.


Silhouettes were a popular method of portrait-making from around 1790 to the mid-1800s, prior to the invention of the camera. You can find out more about the history of silhouettes at the time of Jane Austen on this interesting site. 

In UPPERCASE, we're using our film strip projector to cast shadows onto black bristol board. The shadow is traced in pencil and then cut with scissors. Classical silhouettes, however, were often cut freehand out of paper. This skill is quite rare, but American artist Karl Johnson excels at the art:

"Karl learned this unique skill as a young boy from his father who had been taught many years earlier by a long time friend of the family. Karl took to this unusual art form extremely well. Something he attributes, in part, to having vision in only one eye.  Karl was born being able to see only from his right eye. Not having binocular vision forces Karl to judge the distance and shape of an object by examining its shadow. This allows Karl to capture an image in shadow in an uncanny way." Some examples of Karl's work are shown below.

We hope you will join us on Saturday afternoon to take part in this fun activity. On Sunday, we will be hosting another workshop: Customized Lunchboxes. This requires a reservation and there is room for one more. Give us a call if you'd like to attend.

Ribbons

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Many things accomplished today on the new line of Eclecto Notebooks – files have been sent to the printers! I have designed interior lined pages and custom die-cut and foil-stamped spines, but the books will still have plenty of vintage papers, repurposed books and other paper treasures interspersed throughout their pages. I am also considering adding ribbon markers to my line of Eclecto Notebooks, in UPPERCASE colours of course!

Karen Gelardi: collaborative book project

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I first came across Karen Gelardi's work in Lines & Shapes (top image). She is currently at work on a book and installation project in which book blocks are purchased by "collaborators", used in the installation, and then shipped to the purchaser.

"Assembly is an artist book project where potential art patrons can collaborate in the exhibit content. It consists of a series of three books whose pages are composed of identical black and white drawings of botanical or geometric designs. When participants purchase a book online or in the exhibit, it will be printed “on demand” and displayed in the exhibit, adding to a growing, colorful stack of books (they will be mailed to their owners when the exhibit ends). The artist uses on-demand manufacturing because the scale of production is perfectly in synch with the demand. However, within the exhibit context, the print-on-demand books are sculptural objects, not functioning as books."

You can support this project by purchasing a book from the artist's website here.

Quit your day job

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There's a good interview with Jannick of Neawear over on The Storque. I've been following her posts on Flickr and recently purchased some earrings (below) that are simple, beautiful and very affordable. I always find it inspirational to read about other creative people "taking the plunge" into creating full time. There is such a big leap of faith when you put your creativity out there for all to see.