Month: September 2010

Bookmarks

Bookmark winner: Arya, Grade 2, NJI spoke to a book friend from San Francisco this past week, who mentioned that she’d gone to Roadworks, the annual Fall fund raiser and print making event at the SF Center for the Book. A few days later while unpacking yet another box I found a bookmark — moving & remodeling has meant a constant shift of boxes from one room to another, or one side of the hall to another, as we slowly finish off the various rooms. It’s always gratifying to empty a box and put its contents away, collapse the box and put it in the recycling pile! But back to my story — I think the bookmark was from a Roadworks several years ago where my friend Cathy provided book-ish activities for kids. At this one, she had them design bookmarks. Mine has a jaunty ballerina all in pink, pirouetting. I pinned her to the cork board behind my computer. That very day I saw a mention somewhere for the National Book Festival — “a celebration of the joy of reading for all ages” that took place on the Mall in Washington DC on Sept 25. I checked out their website and was immediately drawn to the Borders Bookmark Contest where children across the country designed bookmarks to convey their love of reading. The one to the left is by Arya, Grade 2, NJ. You can see the winners from each state here. There are also podcasts of the speakers at the event on the Mall — ranging from author Isabel Allende to poet Rae Armantrout.

2011 Calendar

2011 CalendarYeah — I’m all done. Here’s my 2011 calendar…

listening around the bustle,
delighting in the commonplace—
the rest is noise.

For me, much of what makes life great is the series of simple encounters and observations I have every day — from the smell of freshly dug dirt in my garden to watching the birds at the feeder outside my bedroom to catching a glimpse of a saffron colored sky at sunset.

The calendar has 12 unbound cards, one for each month of 2011, celebrating those commonplace moments with a haiku and a pattern. It comes housed in a plastic case that doubles as a display stand.

Ten of the months are letterpress printed on a hand-fed (and foot treadled) vintage 1890s platen press on plush off-white cotton paper. April and September are printed on Japanense paper (moriki) and the design is hand-marbled with a technique called suminagashi. These two months are unique to each calendar. All the months are pictured below — click here to see a much larger photo. You can order a copy here.

Washi Tales

Washi PaperAs we’ve been working on our new house in Santa Fe, I’ve often wondered “how did this get here” — yesterday my husband looked at me quizically and said “why would some previous owner have run the water pipe that way?” If only houses could talk… I recently ran across the recycling: washi tales project, a set of performance pieces that let the paper talk — each piece tells the story of a sheet of Japanese handmade paper as it is recycled through time. They seem to want to explore how the old influences the new, and in their description of the performances they say “The Papermaker, an actor who speaks the local language of the audience, serves as narrator and guide as she creates something new from what she learns of the old. Washi Tales explores aesthetic and spiritual values of recycling, beyond practical environmental concerns, into the realms of history and the imagination.”
There’s lots more on their website, with the added bonus of a lovely set of photos on papermaking and washi.

Ands and Thes

Typographic Elements, The and AmpersandWhile there’s lots of free clip art available on the web, much of it isn’t very useful. But I thought this set of “typographic elements” — a collection of ampersands and “the”s available from Free Fresh Creative — was pretty novel. Download a PDF here. (Although I have to admit that I can’t readily think of where I’d use one of those “The”s.)