Yet more incentive to get a Gocco, or follow the DIY silkscreening instructions in Ready Made this month: notebooks with silkscreened covers at Sukie. Some of them have glassine envelopes and pages of different sizes in them. They have a portfolio page with more prints, too. Found on the links page of the wonderful Bea’s Diary.

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I was at a really cute gift store in Soho today called Daily 235. Among many other things, they had these great, brightly colored, tiny Iota notebooks like matchbooks. The best thing about them was that instead of boring, normal notepaper inside, there was miniature first-grade learn-to-write paper! It was even on newsprint, just like in elementary school.

I found an instruction site on how to make one, not that it would be hard to figure out.

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I finally got to visit the wonderful Kate’s Paperie and found a few new stationary presses that I like. Elum, Two Piglets, and Aardvark Letterpress.

And a few others that I got to see in person for the first time after admiring them on the web: Jack and Lulu and Tops Malibu.

And a few old favorites: Egg Press, Snow & Graham, and Brookfield Press.

Also, Kate Spade has a letterpress line now, and their calling cards are very nice, if incredibly expensive.

And I went to a store (it’s closing, but they’re maintaining their website and will have cards in stores) called Papivore that had some pretty nice stuff.

One day I will have my own letterpress. One day.

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I made this the other night when I needed some immediate gratification instead of another square inch on one of my bigger projects. I recently saw some stationary and a dress in this color scheme, and I wanted to make something using it. As you can tell, I wasn’t very creative with the pattern, but it does seem like you’re looking into an ice cream box.

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The first time I ever crocheted was because of a story on granny squares in the November 2000 issue of Martha Stewart. I’ve been coveting a very cute bookmark made with fine thread and a tiny hook. Michaels (unlike Walmart and Joann’s) carries crochet hooks all the way down to 1 mm, and they have #20 crochet thread. Because they only had white #20 thread, I think I’m going to dye the finished squares. I haven’t decided what color yet.

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By way of Daily Candy, a very nice stationary company, Tiger and Jones.

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I’ve liked Jenny Hart ever since I first saw her embroidered cowgirl on the cover of Bitch. She’s got great embroidery patterns on her website, Sublime Stitching. They just put up a fantastic customer gallery.

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My mother in law gave me a skirt a while ago with this great Hawaiian print on it. I decided the likelihood of wearing it was small, so I turned it into a shoulder bag instead of letting it sit in the closet indefinitely. The bottom opening of the skirt, conveniently hemmed, became the top of the bag. I cut the waistband and zipper section off and hemmed up the bottom. So it doesn’t unravel, I overcast the cut edges. I first tried to make handles out of the excess material at the waist, but they were too narrow. Instead I bought some webbing and sewed that on. I think it turned out pretty nice.

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I’ve aleady played around a little bit with sewing paper on my sewing machine. unique artistry has some really great stationary using this technique. And most if it is pretty simple.

The other thing I read about at Mirkwood Designs is making or drawing postage stamps and then using an unthreaded sewing machine to perforate the paper. Isn’t that a good idea? The Mirkwood page is really worth a visit if you like stationary. They have a lot of neat templates to make envelopes and boxes and other stuff.

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Another idea for me to steal. Actually, two. On Reusablog the other day, they mentioned cutting up kleenex boxes for the pretty-patterned cardboard and making tags with it. I just so happened to need kleenex at Target the other day and found a really cute pattern. And then, I just so happened to get a cold and I’m going through the box in no time flat. I forget where I saw this, but once I get that eyelet setter I want, I can make one of these:

As with most of my craft things, I have no idea what I’ll do with it once I have it.

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