There's a simple beauty to the fact that sometimes all you need to be creative is a pencil and some paper. So with that in mind, I designed and handprinted these using linocut printing on some 5.5"x3.5" Moleskin notebooks.
Recently I picked up a Dremel electric engraver to, you guessed it, engrave some stuff. So for a little practice I took an old soup can and made a new receptical to hold our X-Acto knives around the office. After sprucing it up a little, of course. And the engraving went easier than I thought, too. So hopefully this is just the start to many projects like this.
Have you ever worked with leather before? A little over a year ago I got my first chance to do so while making some brand books for Redhook Ale. If you haven’t done any leather work before you should, because it’s pretty cool. And slightly weird. Especially when you think about the fact you’re using the skin of a formally alive animal for something other than it was originally intended.
The best thing about making these was being able to get away from the computer and having a chance to work with your hands. Tangible stuff. Stuff you can feel. Every cover piece was cut out by hand, as was every bit of the type. That’s a heck of a lot more rewarding than just printing everything off and binding it with a piece of plastic.
Sometimes the best projects are the ones you can make for yourself. So luckily for me, I was in need of some new business cards. A damn good project to take on. Because if you can’t have fun doing that, there’s something wrong with you.
Well, clearly there’s something wrong with me because I hated the whole process. I hated searching through smelly old antique stores for stupid dinosaur stamps. Writing self-deprecating messages for the cards made me depressed. Then having to stamp each card by hand gave me a rash. I don’t even understand how that happened. But it did.
Thankfully that horrible process is over and done with. Now I can get down to business.
After being inspired by the bottle cap pin that Carl wore in the movie “Up”, I decided to design my own. Only instead of using a safety-pin, I chose to retrofit a pin from a regular button. I also opted for my favorite carbonated drink of choice, root beer.
A few years ago, a friend was telling me how foods like carrots and potatoes to can be carved out to make stamps for printing on clothes and stuff. And because of their density and other delicious vegetable qualities, they work surprisingly well. Then somewhere from this conversation, the idea come up to try the same thing but with bread. Which for printings sake, does not have the same qualities as carrots or potatoes. But we tried it anyway and I’m glad we did.
Since then, I’ve made quite a few shirts and ruined a lot of possible sandwiches. Plus, since no two pieces of bread are exactly the same, each shirt is slightly different than the next. Perhaps one day bread will overtake snowflakes as the symbol for being unique.
If you’d like to make one for yourself, here’s what you’ll need:
01. A shirt
02. A loaf of bread (find a loaf with a nice iconic bread shape. You’d be surprised at how much bread isn’t baked this way)
03. Fabric paint
04. Paint brush
05. A human torso
As a man who’s comfortable with his manliness, I decided to make some girly felt earrings for the ladies in my life. Which if you think about it, is pretty manly.
If you’re not familiar with needle felting, it’s actually a cool process involving wool and sharp objects. Basically, you take a wad of loose felt wool fibers and poke the hell out of them with a needle that has backwards barbs on it. This packs everything together as the barbs grab and pull the fibers into place, making whatever shapes you want. The process goes something like this: HERE.
Now to be quite honest, making little felt balls like this is actually quite rudimentary and the first thing one makes when learning needle felting. But I don’t care. They were still pretty fun to make and a good thing to cut my teeth on. The same goes for bending the wire to actually turn them into things to hang from your ears.