Our big 100 days of summer postcard project

While we were on our 100-day trip along the Mediterranean coast, M and I had a couple of little projects going on. One of them was take a duo-selfie every single day, so I could make a 100-frame video of our changing (tanning and growing beards. Him, not me) faces and changing surroundings. Lots of fun to see that now we're back home.

The second project was send ourselves a postcard from every place we were visiting. Arriving in a new town we had three tasks: get a postcard, get a stamp and find a mailbox. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was hard. But we always managed to send our postcard. We have both written a few sentences on each, so it's a bit like a travel journal.

After 100 days of traveling, we had sent about 60 postcards. Once we got home, we found a big lovely pile of memories in our mailbox. There's only one missing. It was a bit of a challenge making a book out of it, since the cards are all different sizes and the pile is rather large. I thought about it for a while and figured out the best way to do this. Even though I bended the rules a bit, my bookbinding days paid off.

Here's the result.

This is (most of) the stuff I used. What's missing in this picture is bookbinding glue. It's just a big ugly white bucket.

Bug-a-boo

I am back from my awesome crazy ridiculous 100 day trip along the Mediterranean coast. Yes, hello again! Tapas in Spain, hiking on Corsica, exploring the most gorgeous beaches of Sardinia and Sicily, eating all that delicious pasta in Italy and wandering through lovely towns, swimming in the bluest waters in Greece. Seeing the sunset almost every night, soaking up the sun. Yep, I would highly recommend :) I have been drawing along the way and there's some stuff I want to show here as well. But I will get to that later.

Being back home,  I wanted to start again slowly, give Stoffer + Blik a lot more of my time than I did before I left. I made the decision on the road to focus on illustrations and the things I really love. But as soon as I was back I was bombarded with a lot of cool projects and so I have been working a little more than I planned or even wished. But last week most things were rounded up. The inspiration was there all along, I just needed the time. And there it was: time. I finished two of the projects I had in mind. (I will definitely show you the other project too, it's too cool not to. Next blog!)

So that free afternoon I took my sketchbook and headed over to the Natural History Museum in my home town. I love the cabinets with all the bugs and shells. I spent a couple of hours sketching the creatures there. When I got back home my brain had worked out a little plan.  

I refined one of my sketches and started carving away...

Once the cutting was done, I made a test print to see where the stamp needed to be refined. And then it was finished. I am so pleased with the result that I feel like making a whole series of bugs and fellow multi legged creatures. This butterfly like creature is now a greeting card and for sale at Stoffer+Blik. Check it out here. 

Whale for sale

Instagram and Pinterest are great for inspiration. I scroll through their pages a lot and I usually feel like getting to work immediately. A few days ago on Instagram was no different. I came across this account of a guy who was making linocuts and prints. So lovely. And it immediately made me want to do that too. The larger lino's I saw on there were too much for 'right now', but a stamp was only a little carving away. So I did and that same evening a new Stamp Family member was born. A rather large one: Whale.

I really love how it turned out. I love the simplicity and the shape. Luckily I also still have a little stash of reclaimed wood to mount it on. It's all finished now and you can get 'Stamp Whale' at Stoffer + Blik. The image above might be a postcard one day, what do you think?

Freshly made: Clipboard!

Brand new at the Stoffer + Blik shop: This wooden clipboard with a corner of it painted in my very favorite Celadon Green.

I made myself one of these clipboards a while ago to see if I would be a nice addition to Stoffer + Blik. I love it, so yes it should be in the shop. I am using mine a lot. I change photos, postcards and in the kitchen it is holding different recipes.

I'm definitely not doing without my own, so I had to get to work and make another. So I finally found the time to get the wood, drill the holes, glue on the clip and paint the wood. And voila, there it is! At the moment there is just one for you to buy. I do have plans to add a couple in white as well.

Do you like it as much as I do? You can check out the result of my little photoshoot here at the shop.

One of my to-do lists just got shorter

I have a list of to-do lists. And it tends to get longer instead of shorter. I just add a lot, really. I do get to cross things off and I am about to, right after I click on publish here. One of the things on my Stoffer + Blik list was 'write a blog about the new handmade book'.

I added that when I finished making that book. It was the hand bound notebook that I covered with a vintage map that I found on a flea market. I was (and am) really happy with the result and wanted to share that with you. I say was, because a few days ago I sold it. And 'sold' in handmade-unique-one-of-a-kind things means 'gone'. I miss it. Boohoo.

So I am a little too late really, because I am about to show you something that is no longer for sale and that you cannot have. Sorry.

But it's pretty all the same. So here it is anyway. I made this hand bound book, without any cover in the course I took last year in hand bookbinding, so it was laying around for a while before I actually finished it. Then I found the perfect paper to make the cover: a beautiful vintage map of the United States, with NYC as the center of the cover when I folded it around. Perfect!

Usually I would say: you can get it here! But you can't... I should have written this sooner, I know.
I am now all out of these hand bound books. I am thinking of ways to get my hands on a good paper cutter so I can make some more. I'll get back to you on that.

A whole lot of X

Since about a year and a half I have this thing for the letter X. It started out as a creative way to say 'kiss'. Since then I have been seeing x's all around. And receiving them too. They are on number plates, on stickers, in fences, shadows form them and workers spraypaint them as signs on the pavement. I now have an X-radar. They're everywhere!

That made me think of the stitched heart card I made a while ago. It is looked at at Etsy quite a few times a week, but it has been sold out for a while. So on a slow evening with a cup of tea, I dusted of the needle and the brightest pink wool and put some x's together. That means I have one of the these cards in stock again. You can get it here.

Etsy Lookbook Spring/Summer 2016

I received an email the other day that made me go: Yeeej!! It was an email from Etsy Headquarters in Berlin. They want one of my items featured in their lookbook for spring/summer 2016. Uh okay, yes please!

They want to show my Chalkboard Week Planner. So I need to sent the item to Berlin, where it will be photographed for the book. They'll send it back before Christmas, which means I need to remove the item from the shop until I get it back, or make a new one soon.

It's funny because I just mentioned to a friend, right before I got this email, that this was the item in my shop that was looked at and favorited most, but never actually ordered. That might just change now...