Miscellaneous Stuff

Above: small collage by me.

So, yesterday I took the Empty Mailbox envelopes over to the Post Office.  Drum roll please....

The winner is Tracey Truly of Vista CA.  Congratulations!  A box of goodies will be coming your way very soon.  Thank you to everyone who participated.  I love getting mail.

Here is Tracey's entry again

I am still loving the handmade books.  I have been cruising the internet looking for ideas.  There are so many wonderful galleries here and there.  One artist who has caught my interest is Marianne Little.

Here is one of her books constructions.

Go visit this website for more books.

I love reading your comments on front porches.  It seems we all have great memories of our childhood, running around our neighborhoods. We had an empty lot near us full of weeds and tumbleweeds.  My brothers used to build forts out of the tumbleweeds.  My memory is of wanting to be a part of the whole fort thing, but it was full of stickers and red ants.  I haven't seen red ants or tumbleweeds in decades.  

I was never a tomboy, but I wanted to be.  Instead, I played in the storage room in our garage.  There was a printshop near us where we would get boxes of their excess cuts and mistake runs of paper.  I am sure this is where I learned to love paper.  I would make all kinds of things from the colorful sheets and oh, the games we would make up using these paper scraps.

Can you pinpoint where your love of paper began?

Comments

[TACE]

Holy Moly...that's ME! Seriously, definitely un-cool levels of excitement going on here haha...bleck who wants to be cool, I'm seriously thrilled! Wooohoooooooooo! Thank-you!!!!!!! I am off for a celebration lap around the living room to burn off some of this instant hyper your blog post has delivered me this morning. :)
As for the forts, if I can quit gazing at my own name adoringly, I lovvved making them as a kid. Snow forts, cold but fun. TREE forts, much better. If you have a four trees standing near each other, like four corners of a square, you can start laying long dead branches across the branches of the live trees. Like installing shelving, and you go as high as you can, on all sides and voila...instant woodsy cabin. With a roof of fir needles over head :).

[Pam]

My first memory is loving the smell of paper. You know, the lined newsprint tablets from grade school. I can close my eyes and smell the crisp newness of that tablet of paper.

Congrats to Tracey!

Pam

[justaplanerideaway]

My father worked for an architecture firm. They generated a LOT of paper and sometimes he would bring me HUGE binders full of one-sided printed paper and the end rolls of tracing paper. Yum! As a graphic designer, I used to LOVE to go to print shops. I hated doing press checks, but I loved the smell of the ink. I also loved the paper cabinets the printers would give me!! And not to forget the delicious smell of freshly printed--oh what were they called back in the 70s? Mimeographs or something. The ink was purple and the paper was always kind of wet when the teacher handed them out. :-)

[Rachel Greig]

Yay for Tracey - I loved her entry!
Off to NZ now, chat to you again in a few days :)

[Amy]

Hi, Ginny, me again. Where did I learn to love paper? In school. We never had money for art supplies, but at school if it rained, we got to stay inside at lunch and you got a sheet of manilla paper and crayons. I was in heaven! Maybe that's why I still love rainy days. And there were the times we got to wear our father's pajama tops backwards and paint on the easel. You also got me remembering the for my brothers built in our huge pine tree and how we would go up there and read comic books, then go in the house covered in sticky pine resin--to the chagrin of my mother. Then the boys got older and started having other "reading material" (ahem) in the tree fort and I was banished--but that's when I took to the front porch! You always get me thinking.

[TACE]

I forgot to add my memory of when I began to love paper. I can not remember like one instantaneous *aha* light bulb moment...but, there was a show we watched when we were kids called "Mr. Dressup". The man was alllways drawing. He took these big blank sheets of paper, like poster size and would draw these awesome cartoons. It seemed so amazing to me I actually concocted a theory that no one could draw that well for real. I decided he must trace in light pencil on the paper and then draw over it in his thick black marker while the camera rolled......hahaha anyways, he made a piece of white paper seem sort of magical. There were other instances of course, My Mom is super artistic but I wanted to throw a little credit Mr. Dressup's way too. haha

[Andi Sexton (rrlscrapgal)]

Congratulations to our winner! Gorgeous!
By the way Ginny, I was playing around in your store.. Each category only shows 1 page of goodies.. Is that right??? I was trying to find something...
xo