Tag Book

Happy New Year! I hope 2007 will be a year you can enjoy: a year in which you find the inspiration, willpower, and energy to create a life you find productive and satisfying on all counts, especially in connection with your art.

I spent yesterday playing with ideas for my upcoming library project. I'll write more about that in late January or early February. Anyway... one of my arty friends, Gena, was home in the USA in December, and while she was there she picked up a box of 500 shipping tags at an office supply store. Most European-based paper artists will know how delighted I was at this news, especially as the box wasn't all that expensive. (Artists from the USA might need to know that craft/scrapbooking supplies in most of Europe are nothing like as good or as easily available as in the USA. I can't even get simple things like shipping tags in Germany.) PayPal and email are great for things like this: Gena emails to tell me what she's found and to ask if I can use it, and I PayPal the necessary cash to pay for it.

So there I was yesterday afternoon, trying to come up with one or two "success guaranteed" ideas for first-timers that also don't make a lot of mess or need a great deal of clean-up materials/facilities. This tag booklet is a prototype of one of the ideas. I used eight tags here, and I think this model would work nicely with anything between three and thirty tags (think phone list to mini journal).

I'll post a picture tutorial tomorrow.

So Long Since Summer

A while back, a friend (Ursel) from Berlin visited her mother, who lives in a village not far from here. While she was up north, she dropped in for a couple of hours one evening and, among other things, told me about her summer holiday and events she'd experienced. She had a sheaf of photos to document it all, too, but no album in which to stick them.

Well... as you can guess, that's a state of affairs it takes next to no time at all to change. While she was here, she admired a little envelope journal and a tag booklet, and as I know here tastes and color preferences quite well, it was easy to create something similar that will be to her taste.

Ursel has been on dutiful daughter detail over Christmas, so I think she deserves a little something to remind her of more abandoned days of summer long gone. I'll be popping her journal in the mail tomorrow.