Mushrooms and Kittens

New things to share! Two are made of paper, and one is covered in fur.

First off- mushrooms. A few weeks back my husband picked a couple of mushrooms growing in my mom's yard and decided he needed to know whether or not he could eat them. Yup. After some online investigating he found that one method of identifying mushrooms is to create a spore print. Directions, if you're interested, are here. So he went about some fancy business with a cup and some other stuff, and what resulted was actually really, really awesome!

Unfortunately the mushroom in question was not a mushroom you'd want to eat, but I really loved the print it created and besides plans to frame it and hang it on a wall forever, I also thought it could make a supercute pattern. So now we have the Mushroom Print Note Set and Notebook.


Nice collaboratin' Johnny! And while I wish we could take credit for the cuteness of the following item, we cannot, because it's not art, it's a cat.


And his name is Ivan! Full name Ivanhoe Martin, actually. Let's hope he's more well-behaved than his namesake. Have you seen The Harder They Come? If not, do! Immediately.


We adopted the little one Thursday and we're in love. His mom was feral and left him and his siblings under a porch, but a local shelter scooped him up and then I scooped him up and now he's sleeping on my lap as I type this. All 1 1/2 pounds of him. Sigh.

For a Friend

Hello again. I'm back and it hasn't even been six months since my last post! My my. I'm really growing as a person over here.

Just wanted to share some stationery I made as a gift for a friend's birthday recently:


I had already made a silhouette of her as part of a project for her wedding last year, and it was just so cute, (doesn't she have a lovely profile?) that I decided to change up the color and repurpose it for a personalized note set. I paired the cards with (my favorite!) kraft envelopes...

...and added a little cover design to the box.


And she liked! Thank goodness.

Oh Boy

Um. Yikes. Just stopped in here for the first time in months and I was shocked, SHOCKED! to see that I haven't posted since last October. That's about a year, folks. Or should I say, "that's about a year, NO ONE," because I'm pretty sure that anyone who visited regularly probably gave up on this blog very, very long ago. My apologies, of course- I was never very good at this in the first place, but I plan on being back in a very casual, inconsistent way. Fingers crossed.

But while I'm here, I may as well show you what exactly I've been up to. It all started with this:


A wedding invitation! Some good friends of mine decided they were getting married and then they decided to ask me to create their invitations. At my previous job I had a lot of experience helping customers design/order their wedding invitations, but I'd never actually designed any myself, so this was a kinda new thing for me and to my great surprise, I liked it.


Sooo, I started making more invitations.


And more...


and more...


And even more than that, but you get the point. (I have everything I've photographed so far on my flickr, if you're curious.) So a proper website is in the works, which will include all the paper-related things that I do, and I'm very excited that The Paper Apartment Invitations will be a part of that. There will be customizable options aplenty, and in probably very limited availability, (because I'm just a person, with two arms) I'll also be offering completely from scratch, custom orders.

I don't have an exact date set yet for the launch of the site but if in the meantime you, or a friend, or someone else entirely, is interested in invitations, please feel free to contact me at hello@thepaperapartment.com.

Happy September!

xo

A