Thursday, August 28, 2008

BAD DRAGON!



Okay, so I didn't keep to my goal of posting every Sunday. I'll keep working on it.


In other news, I have been keeping up with my crafts. I recieved a special order from a coworker for a sheet of blue handmade paper, so that is finished and currently drying. Another half-baked project is a box covered in recycled magazine pages. So far I have one side done and lots of work ahead of me. Because of repeated requests, I have ordered some flat rate envelopes yesterday from the USPS so I can implement international shipping in my etsy shop. I also made a card from my handmade paper and some old magazines (I have far too many laying around, so I am using them whenever possible). You can see the card in my shop here.


I'll try to be better about keeping up on my posts.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Enter: the Dragon

Well, I've finally decided that, having recently opened an etsy shop, I should also start a blog about what I do. I don't hope to gain fame and fortune (although that would be WONDERFUL), but I do hope to further expose myself and my crafts, and motivate myself to be more creative and adventureous. I also hope this blog will serve as an easy place for people to comment about my work, offer suggestions, things they'd like to see or have discussed.

So, with that having been said, I'll tell you about what I do. I'm an avid fan of dragons (to the point where I wrote my senior research paper in high school about them) and I have a love for working with paper. So my etsy shop was named after those two things, as well as the surname of a loved one.

My shop is quite new, but my experience with paper is not, though I'm by no means a master craftsperson. However, as I am further exploring the possibilities with paper, I am expanding my crafts and my skills. I work with paper in many forms. I make my own paper at home out of things friends and family would have otherwise pitched or recycled. I also use commercially produced paper and alter said papers to create my art. With this I make drawing paper, scrapbook paper, handmade envelopes, handbound journals, boxes, cards, and artist trading cards, to name a few things. I branch out from time to time (to keep from getting bored) so now and then I might interrupt my paper crafting posts with ones about polymer lcay, woodworking, woodburning, drawing, or who knows what. I get my grubby little fingers into a lot of things and am a notorious packrat.

My goal is to post at least once a week, to keep myself involved in my crafts and to make sure I keep making things, so look for a new post each Sunday. I tend to start projects and then leave them halfway done for a long time. Writing about them will (hopefully) motivate me to keep going start to finish.

At the moment I am in the middle of binding a journal with pages made of my handmade paper. It's going nicely, but slowly. It's a learning process. At the moment, I have made three (and a half) journals out of my paper, and each one has been a significant improvement from its predecessors. Even though it isn't perfect, I am proud of my journal and am anxious to see it finished. When it is, I will be sure to post pictures.

Also, today I purchased a book called Paper Transformed: A Handbook of Surface-Design Recipes and Creative Paper Projects by Julia Andrus. It has a lot of neat projects that I hope to incorporate into my work. Once I finish some half-baked projects I have going, I intend to go through it page by page and use each technique in some kind of project.

Now I need to find my thread and finish that journal....