You’re a good kid. You’ve got your Mother’s Day gifting strategy planned to a T. The perfect gift purchased, all that’s missing is the vessel. You know, the accoutrements, the cherry on top … the packaging! With May 12th just around the corner, here are a few wrapping ideas to brighten her day and earn you a few brownie points.
Hand-folded paper flowers make for the perfect tie-on. These pastel pretties are from West Elm.
Perennial favorite Rifle Paper Co. offers the perfect amount of print to spruce up any parcel. I love their bakers twine topped gift tags, especially the pink ombre!
{top images via Mochi Things and L’art de la Curiosité}
On Sunday, I attended Amy Azzarito’s event celebrating her new book, Past & Present. Part book-signing and part craft workshop, it was held at Terrain in Glen Mills, PA. If you’re unfamiliar with Terrain, basically it is a magical wonderland of handsome gardening supplies and rustic home decor with a 12-acre plant nursery and one of the best brunch spots in town. With a carefully curated assortment of items and enough plant knowledge to keep even me from killing plants, Terrain truly is special.
Based on Amy’s popular column on Design*Sponge, Past & Present focuses on DIY projects and essays that explore how the past seems to always resurface in modern design. To take it a bit further, Amy outlines the history of a particular style, and asks various creatives—such as David Stark, Grace Bonney, Todd Oldham, and Anthology‘s own creative director Meg Mateo Ilasco—to contribute related DIY projects. For example, an overview of 17th-century Venetian mirros leads to a mirror mosiac planter project designed by Grace.
During the workshop, Amy explained the history of Native American trade blankets and then walked us through the related DIY project design by jewelry and textile designer Caitlin Mociun. While sipping ginger lemonade, we fashioned napkin rings out of PVC couplings with brightly colored duct tape applied in geometric designs. The end result is a relatively simple project that you can easily update for different occasions. As you can see, some attendees got very detailed with their napkin rings!
Many thanks to Amy and Terrain for putting on such an inspiring event!
{photos by Joanna of Jojotastic}
This week we have the third and last installment of the Crafts Folk videos, which we’ve been featuring as a more in-depth look at the “Timeless Trades” article in Issue No. 10. Photographer Thayer Allyson Gowdy put together these glimpses into the workspaces of a blacksmith, a group of hat makers and now denim designer, Loren Cronk.
Loren’s work as a denim designer is not an accident. After running street wear and snowboarding gear businesses, he landed a job with Levi’s and starting learning about denim. His obsession took off from there. Loren spent years studying and perfecting the craft in his apartment in his spare time while continuing work as a consultant before launching his namesake boutique, Loren, which retails his three lines of denim. In this film, you can really sense Loren’s passion for the craft and his dedication to the handmade process of making his jeans.
A couple of weeks ago we shared the first video in a series put together by photographer Thayer Allyson Gowdy. The series of three videos, which goes along with the “Timeless Trades” article in Issue No. 10, features a blacksmith, a denim designer and a group of hat makers working to preserve their crafts. This week we’re looking a little deeper at the work of blacksmith Daniel Hopper.
Daniel, who was formally trained as an illustrator, started learning about working with metal after attending an open house at The Crucible. His passion grew from there and before long, he opened his own practice. This video follows Daniel through the process of shaping a single rod of steel into an organic antler form for a light fixture. Each step of the process is amazing to watch — hammering, heating, shaping, cooling. And the tools are fascinating as well.
(And If you missed the first installment featuring Paul’s Hat Works, you can can find it here.)
by Alexis on February 15, 2013
One of my favorite articles in Issue No. 10 is “Timeless Trades,” which profiles a blacksmith, a denim designer and a group of hat makers, all working to keep alive crafts that are becoming rarer. I enjoyed the glimpse into each profession in the magazine, but am especially excited to share a series of videos photographer Thayer Allyson Gowdy directed for an expanded look. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting them here.
First up, a look at the work of the four friends who bought Paul’s Hat Works, a classic hat shop in San Francisco. Watching the process of steaming and shaping straw hats, hearing about the weavers these women work with, and seeing the beautiful, timeworn tools they inherited from the previous owner makes it easy to understand why they made the jump into the hat making business!
