lately i've been thinking a lot about making fabric/applique/collage postcards. partly because i owe a few people something fabulous in the mail, and postcards are always perfect for that, and partly because i signed up for the halloween/day of the dead postcard swap on craftster.org (because i really can't resist anything halloween- though i'm not letting myself start on them until i get caught up on other stuff!). i've done some fabric ATCs lately, and i kept thinking how fun it would be to make them bigger so that they could go through the mail...
totally coincidentally, i found this blog tonight with some pretty amazing collages. wierd coincidence, huh?
but it's totally inspirational, and now i'm even more impatient to play around with them.
in other crafty news, the studio clean up project is going s l o w l y . . . .
part of the problem is my inability to stop making stuff long enough to actually get it clean, though the sheer amount of stuff i have in there is also to blame.
i did load up the trunk of my car with two boxes and two big bags full of stuff destined for the thrift store. i'm sure there will be more.
tonight i opened up an envelope of vintage embroidery patterns and hit a jackpot - there were 5 other envelopes stuffed inside! lots of pretty flowers, vintage cars, stuff like that. it inspired me to dig out a couple of other vintage embroidery envelopes i'd stashed away, and found some lovely letters and more fleurs. then i remembered that some of my old workbasket magazines had embroidery patterns in them too, so i had to search for them. i only found a few issues, but one of them had embroidery patterns in them, and they are super duper cool - paper lanterns and a pagoda and a lotus blossom and a dragon and a bonsai tree! so gorgeous, i need to find the perfect project to use them for.
i'm working on an ATC for the alphabet ATC swap on craftster, this round is Y and Z. i made a card that was Z for zipper, but i decided that it was too common, and it occurred to me that z can also be for ZINES! so now i've decided to make an atc sized zine for the swap, and i've been typing up the little pages on my fabulous new typewriter.
(click to see the full pic)
it's probably the best $4 i've spent in my life! i ran out of ribbon today, but damned if i know where any of my back up ribbons are in my disaster of a studio, so i decided to just rewind the ribbon enough to type the last few pages of the zine. so i took the ribbon off, winded it nicely, and then realized i had no flippin clue how to put the damn thing back in.
i mean, i THOUGHT i had a clue, i thought i totally knew how to do it, but i proved myself wrong. after much cursing, many inked fingerprints everywhere, waiting for my mom to get home and try to load it (since she's actually USED typewriters for more than crafting in her life!) and then much more cursing as neither of us could figure it out, it popped neatly into place, just to prove us wrong.
speaking of zines, i love them. i finally found the box in which i packed ALL my zines (it's a big box, actually, though i managed to lose it for almost 2 years) and i'm excited to start reading them all over again. zines are actually one of the few things that i'm super organized about - they're all stored in alphabetical order by title in little japanese notebooks (like the one i decorated here), and i have a corresponding excel file that documents the title and the author so that i can search it and see what i have before ordering more (i started the excel file after i bought my third copy of the same brainscan issue!) and find all the zines i have by the same author.
i especially love crafty zines, and i think there needs to be way more of them out there. i love love love CROQ zine and i fell in love with the cuteness of a zine called scrappy a few months ago, and just realized tonight that the author (niku) has an etsy store called The Ephemeral Mailbox Museum! where she sell several other exciting looking craft zines. i have to admit that i've had a mini i've-never-met-you-but-you-seem-super-cool crush on niku for several years now - she wrote a submission for one of our femme affinity group compilation zines, and her bio made me swoon. she's a pretty amazing crafty political femme, and those are all my favourite things for people to be.
since i have yet to figure out how to get moola off my paypal account, i ordered all the zines listed on her etsy that i don't already have, and i'm very excited for them to come! i also got really enthusiastic a few days ago and bought a ton of zines from not sorry distro. (that paypal balance was really burning a hole in my pocket!)
i'm super duper excited about all the zines - maybe the time has actually come to get my ass in gear and write my own??? we'll see, won't we?
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