Homemade Sign

Last week a friend of mine came back home after about a month in Europe. Another friend and I were thrilled to pick him up at the airport and we decided it would be fun to make one of those cheesy welcome home signs you always see in the movies. 

It began with a sketch of what the sign should look like. This also helped me catch spelling and logistical mistakes before we went large-scale.

Then, to the big blank page...

The plan was to have a faux bunting feel so I made a template triangle then traced it to get all the other triangles. Since we were being cheesy, I wanted the sign to have a playful/childish look so the triangles were free-hand cut with an X-acto making each one a bit different.

We just used glue sticks and my trusty bone folder to attach everything.

The letters were all hand drawn and colored; again to keep a playful look.

The finished sign was a hit! Sadly, I do not have an image of Sergei actually happy to see it, but it helped him find us, I swear.

Chickens, Beef, and Gift Tags

Last week I headed into the San Francisco Center for the Book to do some letterpressing. A friend of mine had found this great chicken letterpress image and asked me to print it. The form printed wonderfully and I was so enthused, I made a day of printing, making not only chicken cards, but also some beef cards and gift tags from the scraps.

I tried to make the perfect 'chicken orange' but I just ended up with regular orange. Oh well.

Chicken form, ready for printing

The cards got yellow and red envelopes.

I packaged the cards for my friend, using an old magazine page as the wrap.

Beef cards in the same style

Inked press, ready to print some gift tags

I made 5 different gift tags with various font colors, besides the 'hi friend' ones, I made tags that said 'awesome', 'hey there', 'love you', and 'why hello'.

I wrapped the cards, envelopes, and some gift tags for my friend in old encyclopedia pages and tied them with fancy kitchen twine.