A tiny Free Little Art Gallery inside my Little Free Library

 

I first heard of a free little art gallery as a place to exchange art locally when an artist in my area (South Minneapolis) installed a box on a post — the sort of thing that would usually be used as a Little Free Library — and called it a free little art gallery. She announced its arrival to our artist network, the League of Longfellow Artists (LoLa), and I remember paying it a visit and contributing some tiny art of my own. I don't remember if I took anything or, if so, what it was. This was nearly 10 years ago and I am relating this strictly from memory, which, as I'm sure you know, is never reliable. 

I have seen more things written about Free Little Art Galleries in the last couple of years; they seem to have become rather a big deal after the pandemic shut-downs began. It appears that the credit for starting the whole movement goes to Doug Millison and a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay area in 2013, to foster community and connections through the exchange of art. "By making and sharing free art, we seek to liberate our thinking and open more fully to the world and to each other," they write in the mission statement on their blog (linked above).

I have had this idea in the back of my mind ever since we installed our Little Free Library last year, but I didn't want to give up on the book exchange that is its original purpose, so I envisioned it as a subsection integrated amongst the books. Finally, a few weeks ago, I took some measurements and designed a kind of display box that wouldn't displace too many books but could still hold very small artworks for exchange, such as ATCs (artist trading cards). 

My art exchange display box in progress; it measures 7 inches long by 4.5 inches wide and deep.

The finished tiny gallery box installed in my Little Free Library

The box can be taken out to examine the contents.

I wanted to get it in place in time for the LoLa Art Crawl, which happens this weekend, Sept. 17–18 (2022), and I managed to do that just this morning (Sept. 15). It will remain in place hereafter, of course, and I look forward to seeing what happens with it. I even made a tiny zine about it — to give away, of course, and which you will find in my tiny Free Little Art Gallery. 

Tiny original art in the form of drawings, collages, paint-by-numbers, misc. paper crafting, etc., as well as literary art like short poems and stories are all welcome as long as they are no bigger than 3x5 inches and appropriate for all ages. Art by kids especially welcome and encouraged. 

You can find it, and me this weekend, at site no. 4 of the LoLa Art Crawl. I will have notecards featuring my artwork and several zines besides this free one (although some are this tiny), plus a few handmade journals and lidded boxes. 

To find a Free Little Art Gallery near you, try Find a Free Little Art Gallery.

Finishing up the Tiger Zine

It's not so much that I procrastinate. It's more like I get distracted and side-tracked, like a cat that hears a faint rustle in the bushes and must go investigate, forgetting about its intended destination. 

So although I started gathering information and writing articles many months ago for what I have chosen to call my annual zine, meant to be a compendium of informative tidbits I have collected in the process of researching and making the Useful Calendar each year; and even though by April I had completed a few longish articles about research-heavy topics like worldwide efforts to save wild tigers from extinction — because 2022 is the year of the tiger — sometime in May, it just stalled. 

This happens in part because I often sabotage my own efforts by gathering too much information and then feeling overwhelmed by it all. A case of TLDR only for the one doing the writing — too long, didn't finish! When mid-August came around, I was seriously considering abandoning the project, but then I thought about how much time and effort I had already put into it, including creating new artwork just for this zine, and I asked myself, What will it take for me to finish this? 

Well, I decided that I would not write those few articles that I had originally intended to include but had not yet written, even though I had gathered the information and found the subjects worthy and fascinating. I told myself there will always be another zine, I can always find a place for that topic if it's really important to me to write it. 

Then I looked at the draft document and realized that it was exactly 24 pages with just a few small gaps that needed filling either with new artwork or a short snippet of text. Well, any multiple of 4 pages can be made into a booklet, so suddenly the completion of my tiger zine was within reach. I was finally energized to finish it. I did two illustrations for the section on the evolution of cats (above) and a third of catnip (which I have growing in my yard), wrote a very short piece about tigers and catnip (yes, they like it), and selected a poetry excerpt for the last page, which goes nicely with an illustration I already had. Done, and done! 

I'll debut it during the LoLa Art Crawl, September 17–18, and then make it available in my Etsy shop and possibly at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, if they want it (they usually do want my zines, but last year's annual zine didn't sell very well, so I have no expectations regarding this one). 

It's kind of funny, too, how I can't seem to motivate myself to adopt a daily drawing practice, but when I need an illustration (or two or three) in order to finish a zine, I can sit down and really focus on getting them done without being led astray by distractions. I do enjoy it when I'm in the midst of creating the illustration, and I often say to myself, I should do this more often. 

I guess I just need to make more zines.

A Little Guide to Getting a Thing Done in a fun mini zine format

 

I've been playing around with a variation on a clever book form known as a meander, a kind of accordion-fold book made from one sheet of paper or, in this case, cardstock. If you do a Google search on the term "meander book," you'll find a lot of examples, instructions, and tutorials. 

The variation involves making pockets at three points where the folding of the book turns a corner. I made a template in InDesign that allows me to put content on both sides of the paper and have everything be right side up once it's assembled (no small feat!), then I blended some ideas, illustrations and content from some of my previous projects with new material I've been wanting to use that all go together thematically. I named it "A Little Guide to Getting a Thing Done," and so, of course, it's a very practical little zine in a fun package. 

I then realized that the advice applies equally to overcoming procrastination (what the title refers to), changing a habit (noted in in the subtitle) or solving a problem (not stated, because there's only so long a title can be, especially on something as small as this!)

I'm acutely aware of the irony that I started working on this, and finished it, as a detour from finishing my 2022 annual zine inspired by the Useful Calendar theme, the Year of the Tiger. That's still in progress, while this is done!

The book is about 2 inches wide by 2-3/4 inches high and a quarter inch thick. The pockets each hold a little card with an image on one side and a quote on the other, with one of the quotes coming from a dictionary. They relate to the theme of the book, of course, in slightly surprising and possibly amusing ways!

Today I brought 10 of these down to the Minnesota Center for Book Arts to sell in their shop. That includes one display copy, because people need to open it up and examine it, of course. The other nine are enclosed in little cellophane sleeves so they don't all get handled.

It's also available in my Etsy shop, here, with more photos, because you can't pick it up and examine it there!

Magical collage ATCs with security envelopes and a hat trick

 The theme for my little swap group this month was magic and/or secrets. We make artist trading cards (ATCs) based on the theme (or prompts, you could say), and everyone is free to not only interpret it however they like, but to disregard the theme altogether if it's just not working for them or they are jazzed about something else.

I decided to do two different kinds of magic — stage magic and the mystical stuff usually spelled "magick." But I started with a nod to the idea of secrets by using security envelopes for my background.

I often save security envelopes for their interesting patterns — not my original idea, but inspired by other artists who have used them. I included with that collection part of a paper bread bag that had a nice pattern that just kind of went with the envelopes. That's the light brown with blue dots above on the left.

I pasted the strips onto a piece of 100 lb card stock I had cut to 7-1/2" wide by 7" high to make six ATCs. I had drawn the cut lines on the card stock before glueing the strips so I could place them with that in mind.

So here they are all cut and ready for the next step. I wanted to feature a magician with a rabbit that could be pulled out of a hat. I drew the rabbit, then scanned it and shrunk it down (the original drawing was about 6 inches high) and printed seven of them on some white card stock (in case one got damaged when I was cutting them out). 

I searched online for an image of a magician, found a free one that was quite low resolution, so enlarged him to about 600–700% in Photoshop and traced some of the lines to make them sharper before making him the size I wanted, then printed seven of him too, on fairly thin paper that had something else printed on the back. I printed the rabbit on previously printed material as well.

  I sketched a top hat on a scrap of card stock and cut it out to use as a pattern, and traced it onto the back of some decorative paper with a black background and spattered gold and silver metallic splotches on it. I had some shiny gold paper I may have salvaged from an envelope lining (I don't really remember), so used that to make a hat band.

I cut the slit for the rabbit after glueing the hat in place, making two cuts so the slot was about a millimeter wide. Hopefully, you can see that in this detail. (Maybe if you click to enlarge it you will see the black strip by the ears, which is the pocket on the back of the ATC that holds the rabbit.)

The righthand card is the back, as you may have guessed. The vertical rectangle on the right side is the pocket that holds the rabbit, attached along the edge on all sides. On the left, a band of the same paper holds an accordion fold booklet, which you can see more of below.

To represent the other kind of Magick, I did a little searching on Etsy and bought a PDF called "13 Witch's Runes" from a shop called Like It All.  Although she had it nicely set up in narrow columns and two rows on a single page, I tinkered with the format first in Photoshop and then in InDesign so that I could print them at about 3-1/4" high, back to back. To make all the columns the same width, I added one and made a "cover" using assorted glyphs available in my font collection.

I am very aware of how lucky I am to have all of these tools at my disposal!

Here's the skinny booklet opened up: 

I really have no idea how one is supposed to use these symbols and the information about them; perhaps with some sort of oracle deck? I just like the symbolism and the mystique and thought it would be a fun addition to the cards.

By the way, I had to look up "grimoire" — it's a book of magic spells.

It was fun to start with a vision of what I wanted to create — a rabbit that could be pulled out of a hat, with the extra trickery of the creature being bigger than the hat — and then go about making it happen. The six doing the swap this month included myself, so I did make one to keep. I've actually picked it up and pulled my little rabbit out a few times, just because. Maybe I'll do a little research to learn what one is supposed to do with those runes, too. It might even inspire some additional art projects.

 

Making Collage ATCs With a Masterboard a la Margarete Miller

 I swap Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) with a group of friends, and on several occasions some of them have mentioned making their cards by starting with a collage masterboard, which means you collage a larger sheet, then cut it into individual ATCs (2.5" by 3.5"), and add some details to each one.

For some reason, I have long been skeptical of doing that, but finally decided to give it a try when the number of participants grew slightly — from typically 5 or 6 each month to potentially 8 to 10. Not exactly an overwhelming number, you might think, but I actually kind of panicked, because the way I make the cards, one at a time from start to finish, is pretty time-consuming. So I decided to give it a try to see if it would streamline my process.

The technique is championed by Margarete Miller, who is kind of a collage art influencer, in that she sponsors collage art challenges and makes tutorial videos, and her own artwork is very appealing. So I watched her video demonstrating how she goes about making a masterboard, in this case for a set of postcards.

I had initially resisted watching a how-to video on making a collage. I mean, I do know how to cut and paste, duh! But I decided to watch it anyway, just to see if I could pick up any helpful tips, and of course I did. The first thing, which had never occurred to me, was to place the elements without glueing them down yet, then take a photo for reference before beginning to glue. That was kind of a forehead slap for me, and very helpful.

The second thing, which she actually did first, but I didn't appreciate until I had begun to glue things down, is to draw where your cut lines are going to be. This became especially important to me, as I was using a letter-size base (8.5" x 11"), which meant I'd be trimming some away when I cut my ATCs. To avoid placing something I really liked in a spot where maybe I would end up having to trim, I added my cut lines after I had glued a couple of things down.

Our theme for this swap was botanicals, but I wasn't really focused on that as I made my masterboard. I kind of thought of it as a generic background, figuring I would add the botanical part after cutting them. 

I decided to leave off the paper tape measure in the end. It just didn't really work for me.

Cut into ATCs, but not "botanical" yet.

It's hard to say whether making my cards this way actually saved me any time, since I spent a lot of time on each card anyway. But I enjoyed the whole process, and felt that having the common background elements helped the individual cards relate to each other more than sometimes happens when I do them individually from the start. And there's a lot to be said for not starting with a blank "canvas" for each card!

I'm definitely going to use this technique again; in fact, I'm working on a smaller set (6 ATCs) for our March swap, which I'll show you after I finish them. 

 

My Calendar Cat

I was so focused on finishing my 2022 calendar in November that I didn't stop to write any more blog posts about the work in progress as I had intended, so this is more of an afterword to the calendar process.

Although the theme of the 2022 calendar is the Year of the Tiger, as per the Chinese zodiac, I broadened it a bit to include other wild felines, and a few domestic cats, too, specifically my own. Since I went from doing just one calendar illustration a few years ago to doing 12 of them now, I have taken some liberties with the zodiac animal theme to give me a broader range of models. 

I thought I would feature a black cat for October, but I don't have a black cat. However, shortly after our tortoiseshell, Molly, joined our household in 2013, I took a photo of her posing like the cat in those arty "Le Chat Noir" posters, so I decided to use that as my reference and paint her all black. That's the sort of thing one has an artistic license for, after all!

I like to use watercolors, a medium that poses its own unique challenges but appeals to me for a variety of reasons, including that I like working on paper rather than canvas or other surfaces, and because I find the process of learning how to address those very challenges enjoyable.

I decided I needed to work wet-on-wet, that is, painting on wet paper, to evoke the furriness of my subject. There is a trick to it that involves learning to spot when the paper has partially dried just the right amount for the desired effect. If it's too wet, the paint will bleed too much. This is a learning curve for me, as you can see!

One of the beauties of doing paintings to be scanned and placed into a document is that I can tinker with them in Photoshop to fix or change things that aren't working for me. In fact, when I am feeling intimidated about painting the next picture, I tell myself, "It's not Art, it's illustration," and then I relax and get it done. The point is not to disparage my own work, but to remind myself that the raw painting doesn't have to be perfect.

More recently, when Molly was doing that stereotypic cat thing and squeezing herself into a box from a recent delivery, I took a couple of photos, thinking that a cat in a box would make a good December illustration, especially if I added some ribbon and made the box look like a Christmas package (more or less). At first she just stared at me like, "What are you doing?"

Then she obligingly reached a paw out to push something around (she can go crazy over very tiny things, like a dropped coffee bean) and I thought I would try to make it look like she was playing with some scattered ribbon. Although I initially imagined a scene with scattered wrapping paper and ribbons all around, I quickly realized that I would have an easier time completing the illustration if I kept the composition a bit simpler. And it was the last one I needed to finish the calendar, so I didn't want to drag out the process!

You can see how these, and my other illustrations, ended up looking once placed in the calendar here on Etsy.

Sketching Tigers for the 2022 Useful Calendar

Quick sketches with a brush pen help me
loosen up and get a feel for drawing
tigers without overthinking it.

Ever since the LoLa art crawl ended (Sep. 18–19), I have mainly been focused on finishing my 2022 Useful Calendar. It's the Year of the Tiger — beginning Feb. 1, 2022 — and so that is the animal that I will feature on this calendar. Tigers and cats, that is, because I did a whole year of dog illustrations a few years back for the year of the dog, so it only seems right for the upcoming calendar to be all about the cats.

A lot of the work I do in preparation for making my calendar is research, which I commence in the spring and pick away at through the summer — updating all the floating holidays from various faith traditions, and the US holidays that land on a weekend, and new holidays, like Juneteenth in the US, which I've always included, but now that it's an official US holiday, the Monday rule applies, and so the federal observance will be on June 20 next year, because June 19 is a Sunday. 

For many religions, the ones I didn't grow up observing — Baha'i, Buddhism, Hindu, Islam, Judaism, Orthodox Christian — I feel that I need to check a few different sources, because any one source could be wrong. So it actually takes a bit of time, even though I only include the major holidays of these religions; there are many I leave out because only followers of those religions need to know, and they're not counting on me to tell them. But the impetus behind the Useful Calendar is to help people be considerate of one another's cultural and religious traditions when planning events that might affect them.

It's the same reason I always include the date of the Super Bowl — not for football fans, but for the rest of us, who may need to plan around it. 

My sketchbook page is in the middle of the two sources I was
copying and studying, including one with text I can't translate!

But the part I always leave for last are the illustrations. I have been collecting images of tigers and cats on a Pinterest board, and doing light research about these magnificent animals, and a wee bit of sketching, and examining studies of tiger anatomy and interesting facts about them, and really appreciating all the artists on Deviant Art who share their studies, instruction, and photographs on any subject you could want to draw!

But here it is early October and I don't have one finished illustration yet! So it's time to shift from sketching mode to get-serious mode. That includes finding images that photographers give permission to use, such as this German photographer (featured below) who goes by the business name Fotostyle Schindler and asks only that people credit him and provide a link to his Facebook page.

For the next few weeks, tigers and cats are going to be the focus of my attention, at least when I'm at home in my studio. I may even pay a visit to the Minnesota Zoo to see a real live tiger.

Two Soft Cover Journals with a Cross-Stitch Binding

 In my last post, in which I wrote about the crisscross aka secret Belgian book binding, my first photo included two soft-cover journals with exposed stitches on the spine that cross over each other to form overlapping X's. It occurred to me that a person might think that would be called a crisscross binding, too, so I mentioned simply that those are different, but didn't want to say more about them in a post about the other journals. So now I am going to tell you a little about those.

It's called a cross-stitch binding, though I've also seen it called by other names, including a "corset" binding. In order to get the stitches to cross on the outside, you have to double back some on the inside of the signatures, so the fancier the X-pattern on the spine, the more stepping back and doubling up on the stitches you need to do on the inside, which can get a little tricky and may make the middles of those signatures a little bulky. Find a good demonstration and examples of this on Margarete Miller's website here. I agree with her conclusion that, while it's an attractive binding and kind of enjoyable to figure out, it's not something I want to do very often, because it's pretty fussy and the enjoyment diminishes after you've done a few of them.

These two small journals are made with a flexible cover-weight paper that has attractive striations on one side. I made them with a wrap-around cover and pockets in the back with the idea that they would make nice travel journals. They're about 4–5" high and wide, with moderately heavy paper that will take light use of wet media. The pockets are made from some large security envelopes I saved because I liked the pattern on the inside, and the paper was fairly heavy and durable.

The back cover wraps around and tucks into the front cover, where I put a circle of decorative paper and a white label so you can give your journal a title — or at least to make it clear which side is the front! But, seriously, I label my travel journals with the year and some reference to the contents, such as "2021 Road Trips," so I wanted to facilitate labeling them like that.

Come to think of it, I should do a post about my travel journals sometime. They're kind of a cross between a journal, a sketchbook, and a scrapbook. I guess that would make them visual journals. Anyway, I'll show you some examples of those next time.

Thanks for reading. These two journals will be available at my site during LoLa, which is coming up very soon! September 18–19 (2021), from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I'll be in my front yard with the journals and some other things on a table out there, and more items in the front porch for socially distanced browsing inside and out. My site is number 23, which you'll find on the LoLa website here. Or click on "Artists Directory" and enter my name (Sharon) into the search bar at the top (blue background). 

Stop by and say hello if you're in town (Minneapolis, Minn., that is).

Crisscross binding and a not-so-secret Belgian book artist

Here are a few more of the handmade journals I'll have available during LoLa, Sep. 18–19. Last week I showed you my casebound journals, now here's a different type of binding.

One of my favorite forms of book binding for journals is the secret Belgian binding, or, more properly, the crisscross binding (shown above at left; the X-binding at right is a different matter). I learned this one a few years ago at Articulture, a local art education center. I like it because it offers the convenience and decorative stitching of a Coptic or chainstitch binding (here's an example of that)—that is, it will lay flat when open, making it user-friendly for left-handers as well as right-handers, and it has a decorative exposed stitch across the spine and on the covers. 

At the same time, unlike Coptic binding, it has a board covering the spine, which protects the pages and interior stitching, and gives you a place to write the date range or other information where you can easily see it when it's on the bookshelf. I find it to be a good choice when I want to repurpose an old book cover into a journal, especially if I want to use the spine from the original book—which I trim and then glue onto a strip of cardboard to make the new spine.

You make the cover and spine boards first, then stitch them together, which is kind of fun and reminds me of the sewing cards I played with as a kid. Then you sew the signatures to the ladder of crisscrossing threads on the inside of the spine. I made a slight adaptation of the way the signatures are sewn in because it felt a little more stable to me than the method I was taught. But this is not a technical blog, so I'm not going to go into that here. 

I was kind of attracted to the name, too: My sister was living in Belgium at the time, and my paternal grandparents had a fondness for the country because that was where Grandpa Parker served in WWI; after WWII, they signed up to send CARE packages to a Belgian family and maintained a lifelong correspondence. 

Inside the back cover of the "Microbes" journal

And who can resist the allure of something that's secret? I wondered about the name, though, and my teacher didn't know why it was called that, so I did a little research just now. It's not so secretive, after all, but its origin was a mystery to the American book artist who learned the technique in Europe and introduced it here.

The book arts underwent something of a revival in the late 20th century, and in the 1980s, a Belgian book binder named Anne Goy wanted to make a book with the decorative appearance of Japanese stab binding, but that would open flat, so she invented this technique, which she called crisscross binding. Later, American book artist Hedi Kyle learned it without knowing who invented it, only that it came from Belgium; hence, she called it the secret Belgian binding—because, to her, the origin was a secret! Sounds much more poetic than the IDK Belgian binding, doesn't it?

So, the secret isn't in the binding itself, but the seeming mystery of its origins. It's so easy to find these things out via the Internet nowadays, but when Hedi Kyle in the 1990s wanted to know about this mysterious new bookbinding method, she couldn't just google it. (Google was founded in 1998.)

(The "secret" to finding accurate information on the Internet is to examine multiple sources and check them against one another.  Although I link to just two sources about secret Belgian binding, I consulted several more to confirm the accuracy of the information in those two. Never trust a single source! And be very suspicious if they use identical phrases—that's a clue that they probably all just copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Not that Wikipedia is bad, as long as you check its sources and look to independently verify its factual statements.) 

Journal-making Season

My art-making tends to have its seasons, influencing what I work on at various times of the year based on external circumstances. I mean, I have my internal inspirations, which are both constant and constantly changing, but it's those immutable events throughout the year that cause me to set aside some things for the sake of completing others.

It's one of the reasons I sign up for my neighborhood art crawl, which takes place on the third weekend of September (except last year, because COVID, of course).  It's organized by the League of Longfellow Artists (LoLa) for creative folks in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis to showcase their artistic output. 

LoLa gives me a deadline that motivates me to finish things I've been dragging out, and make new things to show and, hopefully, sell. I also enjoy the face-to-face interaction with neighbors and strangers and people I know and others I only kind of know—although two days of that is quite enough for this introverted artist. After that, I'm quite happy to retreat to my studio and focus on completing the Useful Calendar— my next art-making season.

I really just wanted to show you some of the journals I've been making lately, but I felt the need to put them in some kind of context, and then the whole art-making seasons idea came to me. 

So. I make journals for the LoLa art crawl and then after the weekend I consign the ones that are left over with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts in plenty of time for holiday shopping. In 2020, we cancelled LoLa, the MCBA was closed, and I didn't make any journals, so I was a little concerned that I may have forgotten how to make them. I did have to consult my notes for the first ones, but I soon got in the groove again. Like riding a bicycle, I suppose.

I always put a pocket inside the back covers, which holds a "library card" with  information about the journal, and my bookmark-style business card

The ones I'm showing you in this post are all casebound, with a flat spine rather than a curved one because they're a bit more user-friendly that way: you can make them lie flat when opened fairly easily. 

Casebound journals are a bit more involved than other types I also make, such as Coptic and secret Belgian, which I'll show you in my next post. For casebound journals, the spine is stitched, then glued, then reinforced with a fabric called mull and a strip of paper glued the almost-length of the spine. Optional but desirable is the addition of headbands at the top and bottom of the spine to protect the inner edges of the pages, and, one of my favorites, a ribbon page marker; because if I'm gluing all that stuff to the spine anyway, why not add that nifty little touch? 

You can buy headband material that looks like the old-style handstitched headbands, but when I read that binderies used to make them using leftover shirt fabric, I thought that was a really cool way to make my own. I wrap strips of cotton fabric around a hemp cord and glue it with the same PVA glue I use in the other stages of making the book. Then I select a color that goes with the cover and cut off a piece the width of the spine. (I wrote about making headbands in this post a few years ago, should you want to read more about it.) 

I've been using only supplies I already have on hand, and I make the journals in a range of sizes, largely determined by available materials. The red/postal journal shown at top and below is a full 5-1/2 by 8-1/2 inches, the next one is about half that size, and this last one, above, with William Morris's "Strawberry Thief" on the cover, is about 4 inches high.  I'll have a few in each size available for LoLa. 

To find me during LoLa, see my artist page on the LoLa website.

Here's a photo of my ribbons, mull fabric, and prepared headband strips, just for a little postscript. Some of the headbands really are made with fabric cut from my husband's worn-out shirts, others are just from scraps too small to use for anything else.

Little Boxes

I've been making little boxes this summer and it occurred to me that there's no need to keep that as my little secret, so let me tell you — and show you — a little bit about them. The boxes shown here (and more boxes yet to be made) will all be available at my site during the LoLa art crawl in September. (My page on the LoLa website is here.)

A couple of years ago I had taken an in-person class (remember those?) at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts on how to make a specific type of box called a clamshell, which are mainly made to protect old books. That's a worthwhile thing and I do intend to make them for the old Bibles that my husband and I each inherited from our mothers. But the real reason I took the class on making clamshell boxes was because it was the only box-making class being offered at the time.

So when they offered an introduction to box making via Zoom this June, I was happy to jump in. What I really want to make are small lidded boxes and that's what this class was about. The boxes we made for the class were about 4" by 6". After finishing those, I started making smaller ones, both because I really like small things and also because I like using up scraps and bits that are too small to make much, but that I like too much to discard.  

For example, in the photo above, the small neutral-colored box in the back to the left has a decorative square on the lid covered with a piece cut from a metallic gold envelope somebody used to send us a greeting card. And I'm really tickled by the blue-and-white one at the front, which is covered entirely in security envelopes, then topped with a vintage shanked button. That box is about 2" by 3" and is constructed with scrap chipboard left over from other projects.

This green box is a good example of using up leftover supplies. I bought the green book cloth this summer, but the rest of the materials I found by rummaging in my scraps. I've had the green paisley paper for a very long time and I don't know when or where I first acquired it. The lining of both the lid and the box (the bottom part of the box is called the tray) is the last of some scrapbooking paper I bought when I used to use that type of paper to make sleeves for my calendar cards. I love the distressed look and the pastel colors, especially pale pink! With subtle green polka dots! So I made a box small enough to use the available scraps I had.

The handle at the top, as you have no doubt guessed, is a vintage wooden game piece, like from Sorry or something. It has a lovely aged patina and is the perfect shade of green to go with the other materials, don't you think?

I'm also making journals for LoLa, and some of those are also small, to use up leftover materials. But that's a topic for a different blog post.