Autumn-inspired notebooks

I've been making loads of tiny hand-bound notebooks lately. I love the process and I love the way they look and feel. There are several notebooks available for sale in my Etsy shop now.

These two are the ones I'm especially happy with. Basically I used the same idea I had for the Banana Pill t-shirts and tote bags a year ago. I collected oak and maple leaves outside my house, painted them with watercolor and transferred the paint straight to the carton covers. The paint didn't transfer as well as it did on fabric, so I had to add some color with a brush.

I'm totally in love with these leaves! I wanna try with other kinds. The only problem is that I don't know the names for all the trees.

Hand-Stitched Book

Once i've learnt how to hand-stitch proper notebooks, i started using my skill on a very nice collaboration project. We made a book with a poet called Platon Lliv (i've made another book with his poems in December) and an artist called Maiorov, who participated in some cover designs for Jozik records. We all were really happy with how this project turned out. The watercolor paintings went perfectly well with poems and i found a really nice carton for the cover, which added to the atmosphere of the book.

Valentine's Day Crafts

The Valentine's Day is over but i would still like to show you what i've made for it. Here are my tiny crochet keychains and below are my watercolor Valentine's cards. I wish there was Valentine's Day every day, so that i could make everything heart-shaped.

Hand-Stiched Notebook

I have been away from my blog way too long. The dark winter days have not been very inspiring for photographing, plus there haven't been much crafting going on here because i got a day job. But now i've reorganized my schedule and the sun started coming out, so i have many new things to show you.

I have finally learnt to hand-stitch notebooks! And i fell in love with it. I have been checking loads of tutorials for the past half a year or so. Finally i figured out the most clear way for me to do it and here is my first notebook.

 I was expecting the first notebook to come out quite lousy. Surprisingly it came out very nice. I used office paper of two different colors and i kept changing the color for each signature.

On the picture below you can see how the stitches look on the spine. I like the way the spine looks so much, that i've decided to use the cover only for front and back. This is also much easier than making the whole cover. This notebook now belongs to my friend Ksenia.

Poetry Books

I took part in a fun project this year together with two poets. We made books with their poems to sell/give away on a Christmas poetry event i mentioned in previous posts. The poets took care of all content and i've put together the books and made the covers.

The first book is by Platon Lliv. He wrote 10 of his poems by hand and added some cut outs from old books/magazines as illustrations. I've made 10 books with a minimalistic cover and scans of his writings inside.

The second book has poems by Tatiana Pertseva. She had combined her poems with loads of collages made of magazine and advertisement cut outs, own photographs, old tickets and lots of other found treasures. I've made 5 books with scans of her works. Each book has a slightly different cover made with two types of carton. The names and titles on the covers of both books were hand stamped using my alphabet stamps, letter by letter.

I really enjoyed working on this project. We already agreed on a larger project of this kind with one of the poets. Will start after the x-mas holiday. Can't wait!

Lots of little crafts and Christmas decorations

I've been making lots of small stuff recently, because I got a chance to actually show and sell some of my works. There's an annual Christmas poetry event we take part in (last year we did an installation and i always get to decorate the place). So this year i will also sell some of my handmade items there. I'm trying to prepare as much things as i can, so i've been busy with that a lot nowadays. I didn't bother taking proper pictures, because not everything is ready yet, but here are Instagram photos of some things i've made recently.

Lots of crochet doily coasters

Little crochet pouches (they still need buttons)

Fabric covered pins

And finally some Christmas stuff! Gingerbread-looking carton decorations

Fabric covered carton Christmas tree decorations.

Banana Pill Tour CD-R

This week is the last week before we go on tour and it has been a bit crazy as usually. I stayed up really late making covers and t-shirts. Today i can finally slow down a bit. I still have some things to do, but at least the biggest things are ready and i don't have to go to school today.

Two big things basically were t-shirts and a new Banana Pill live CD-R we've made especially for the tour. Now that the t-shirts are drying after a successful wash (the images have not disappeared!) and the CD's are packed i can finally show you the result of my work.

The idea of this CD-R was that we make it fast and cheap, so that anyone could buy it and we could give it as a gift to someone if we want to. We included only live tracks there, so that people who hear us and like it can buy it and listen to something similar to what they've heard.

So i went with this very simple design. I've ripped apart one simple white CD sleeve, traced it over this nice carton, cut it out and glued together. Then i've stamped the text on the front of each sleeve with my alphabet stamps. Stamping letter by letter doesn't give you perfectly straight text, but i like it because this way each sleeve is unique.

I've stamped the CD-R's the same way. I just needed to remove extra ink with a tissue, otherwise it wouldn't dry so well. I used inkjet-printable CD-R's.

Even though i didn't expect this CD-R to look any special, i am really happy with a result. Very minimalist and stylish. Cheap and easy, but it sure takes some time.

New notebooks

I've been working on these notebooks for the whole week. They don't take so much time to make, but for some reason i kept doing them little by little. They are not made with recycled paper, but with new paper this time. I really wanted to try making them with this yellowish paper. And i've also finally tried my new rubber stamps on notebooks!

For this one i used an image from a magazine for the cover.

These rainbow polka dots are made of color paper and cut with a hole puncher. It took some time to glue each dot on to the cover.

For this one i used black carton and one of my black and white film photographs of flowers.

The shopping list notebook was made from the scraps left from the first three. It also took quite a long time to finish this one, because the words on the bottom were stamped letter by letter using my alphabet stamps. So the letters are not at all perfectly aligned, but i like it this way. It also has magnets on the back for hanging it on the fridge.

Wind in Willows / St. Atom HRT605 split packaging

Here is the last release that came out on Jozik this summer. For this one, the paintings were done by another artist, Helder Coelho Dias, a friend of one of the musicians. We were not acquainted with Helder's work before, so we didn't really know what to expect. But once we saw the paintings, we loved them.

There is a separate painting for each side of the box (one painting per musician), and there are matching paintings for each side of the tape itself.

All i had to do was to cut out the boxes, print out the stickers and attach them to the boxes and tapes. Well, i also had to design the inner sticker with the info, but there's nothing to design there really :)

You can check the description and sounds at Jozik records.

Banana Pill / Timothy C Holehouse split packaging

We met Tim in Lithuania when we were on our Europe tour with Banana Pill. We played two shows together.

We really liked what he does and he liked what we do so we decided to do a split tape together. And now it's finally out! We released it together with Tim's label. He took care of the tapes and we did the packaging.

I really like the "reel-to-reel" tapes Tim chose. We wanted to use this kind of tapes for a while now, but we never ended up ordering them. Now we finally have them.

I did the same carton covers for this release as for the previous one. I didn't know what kind of carton to use, so i just went to the stationary store to see what they have. Once i saw this black carton, i was sure i want to use it. It was perfect thickness, and i liked how black and shiny it was.

I came up with this painting some time ago. When it came to deciding what kind of artwork to do for this split, i thought why not use this idea. I did the painting again in "portrait" shape and added the names of our projects to it.

You can check the description and sounds at Jozik records.

Punktieren/Ous Mal / Coaxil split packaging

For all the other three releases i've decided to make carton boxes. I kept the same shape and dimensions as i had for my previous boxes, but this time instead of gluing the boxes together i've decided to keep them closed by securing them with rubber bands (i got the idea from the other tape packaging done by our friend artist).

For this release i've decided to use Mitya's sister's old painting sketches that have been lying around in our house for months. When Mitya's parents were moving, they wanted to throw them away because his sister didn't need them, they were just some paint experiments. But we liked them and thought we could use them for something. And finally they were just perfect for this tape.

I just love how every box is unique while they all are done in the same style.

We used white tapes and plain stickers with just the artist names on them. All the info was printed on the label paper, plain text on a white background. I like how the paintings on the boxes go all crazy and colorful, while all the rest of the design is really minimalistic.

You can check the description and sounds at Jozik records.