Sweet, Silly, Serious

This fall I was asked to be part of a craft fair to raise money for the amazing nonprofit and reuse center, Materials For The Arts (http://www.mfta.org/) In the spirit of reuse, I stuck to materials I already had around my apartment including a shoebox full of little cards that had been sitting on my bookshelf for a year and a half. In my last year of school, as I was cleaning out my flat file in the printmaking department, I came face to face with all the prints that I had abandoned. Unwilling to throw away the paper itself I spent a few afternoons tearing these unfinished prints into 4x4 cards.

One of my favorite ways to ways to make cards is to harvest an image or two from one of my Goldenbook Illustrated dictionaries. From the moment I spotted La-Po at my local secondhand store in high school, I knew we belonged together. It was love at first sight. Over the past five or so years I've accumulated a fair number of them and the spark has not faded. Published in the 50's and 60's, these books are full of tiny, bright colored, graphic and sometimes charmingly outdated illustrations. They are an endless resource. Let's just say, I'd consider them for the short list of things I might grab if my house was burning down.

With my plain cards ready and my Illustrated dictionaries close at hand, a whirlwind of cutting, gluing, sewing, watercoloring and typewritering passed through my little apartment and a batch of 35 unique cards were born. Sweet, silly, serious - here's a sampling as they were packaged for the craft fair:

Of course, in all my wisdom, I neglected to consider the lack of 4"x4" envelopes, so I ended up making those too. I wouldn't rescue my collection of brown paper bags in a fire, but I would mourn the loss.