Tag: stationery

Business dinosaurs

This is #3 from the Craft Countdown.

Sometime early in 2010, after calendars went on deep sale, I bought the 2010 Sewing Calendar from Accord Publishing. It was an odd beast; it looks like it should be a page-a-day, but each page has three to four days on it (weekends share a third of a page). Still, that makes 104 sewing projects, of which I had yet to make any before New Year’s Eve.

As I flipped through, the felt business card case caught my eye. I have been unable to find it online – the website of the person it’s attributed to, Lauren Brandy, is now all about painting – but there are a great many tutorials available, several of which are similar.

calendar and page

I thought about embellishing mine with buttons, but was dissatisfied with my selection. However, I had a number of iron-on appliques bought before I realized I just don’t make things that appliques go on, and they came out to play. A button did as well; I changed the closure from velcro to a button and elastic loop.

outside view close-up close-up

Originally I planned to have a shot of the open, empty case, saying I just needed business cards to go in it, but between then and now my lovely sister made me some!

inside view

Paint card notepads

Onward to Craft Countdown #4. I’ve been enamored of this idea since I found the tutorial for it on Whimsy Love a long time ago. The idea is to make little matchbook-like notepads out of paint color cards. My paint cards were all boring colors I’d actually considered using for decor, so I used different heavy paper instead: two cards from the Pilates Body Kit (not ones with exercises on them) and one former notebook cover. You need some things:

materials

The paper trimmer isn’t essential, but it would not have been possible for me to do this as one of my ten-by-midnight crafts without it. The sturdy stapler is definitely a must. I trimmed the notebook cover to remove a strip of black material that had formed the spine, and the opposite side to eliminate the rounded corners so it would be symmetric. To fold the covers, I scored the paper with a mechanical pencil – with the lead out on the bottom (3/4″) fold, and with the lead retracted to fold the top down. As recommended, I used 20 sheets of paper per notepad, cut 1/4″ smaller than the covers in each direction, and centered. That was about right – too much more and stapling would have been very difficult.

I didn’t worry much about getting my staples symmetric, but I definitely felt two would be necessary for notepads this size. Since the one notepad had a large stretch of plain blue, I applied some additional decoration.

front view back view

looking inside