Beach Baby

Opposites attract, right? Right. Certainly with Captain America and me, at least.

I grew up in the flatlands of the midwest and he grew up on the beach. While I know for a fact that one should not jump into a body water unless one can see the bottom, he dives off boats and into waves without a second thought.

While I picked landlocked Norman, Oklahoma, for my college years, he made sure to find a campus a couple of blocks from the ocean in sunny Melbourne, Florida. And from what I've surmised, his professors probably had a better chance of finding him with his toes over a board on the crest of a wave than in the classroom.

So in honor of my favorite guy and anyone else out there with a love of the water, I present to you...

Buy me on Etsy!

This little jewel comes with a turquoise blue cover to remind you of the color of the Florida ocean...

...and this very groovy, sparkly surfboard on the inside.

You need to see this one in real life because the sand beach that runs all the way across the bottom actually feels gritty. But if you're more the lay-by-the-beach-with-an-umbrella-drink sorta person (now we're talking!), then maybe this Beach Bum is more your style.

Buy me on Etsy!

You're the kind of person that likes beautiful women in hula skirts throwing circles of hibiscus around your neck.

No worries, man. No matter what kind of  bum you are, I've got you covered.

Why, O Why, Ohio?

I've always been partial to buckeyes. My grandfather used to give them to us all the time. He said they were good luck. I kept mine in my coat pocket, and good luck or not, it always served as a great worry stone. I would wear the thing shiny with my thumb as I stood in line somewhere or sat in a crowd watching a ball game.

Even though my grandfather has been gone for many years, I still have my buckeye.

Recently I ran into another kind of buckeye. The kind from Ohio. One of my friends asked me to create a book for her alma mater, Ohio State.

We checked out all the logos, trying to figure out which one would fold well, and finally decided on this one.










Then I folded the book, and it looked like this.

So not awful, but I didn't think it was very easy to read. Part of the reason is because none of the letters in the logo have any serifs, so the side of an H and and the capital I right next to it look a lot alike.

That being said, whenever I asked anyone what it said, they all said "Ohio State," so maybe it's better than I thought. Especially when you look at it from this hero angle.

Someone needs to set it on a high shelf.

So I offered to make a new book with a different logo. My friend thought about it a bit and then said "You know, one of the things Ohio State is known for is the band spelling the word, Ohio, in script across the football field. Could you make that in script?"

Could I? Again I went to the Internet first to see this phenomenon and found this.

That's pretty cool!

Next I went shopping for an extra big, red book. Um, I mean scarlet. I found just the ticket in the Friends of the Library bookstore. And (BONUS!) if my friend ever wants to unfold this beauty, she'll find 4,139 strange and fascinating facts about WWII.

Then a little folding and some gray endpapers later, and we ended up with this.

Now all it needs a little tuba hovering over the "i". Wonder how you fold that??

Sneak Preview: Reading With Scissors Math

This atlas and its beautiful pages (that I told you about before)

plus this book (that I learned about on the All Things Paper blog)

equals these!

And I'm just getting started...

Who is Stealing the RDCBs of Houston?

The good news is my Etsy site has been going crazy recently! I've had more orders this month than ever before. Like books for...

...and...

I even got my first corporate gig. More about that at a later date.

But my supply of RDCBs is starting to dwindle, so this week I went into supply acquisition mode. I started at my local library where I picked up these two bags of solid covers. Green anyone? How about purple?

And while I was there I picked up this oversized atlas...

...which has these great maps that I think will be reincarnated into flowers before too long.

And I couldn't pass up this... 

...because......well just because. 

Then today was the neighborhood garage sale and I ran across... 

two boxes of RDCBs with patterned covers, like this golden beauty.

I did confirm, however, that I am the world's worst negotiator. When I saw an elementary dictionary, I asked, "Will you take a dollar for this?"
To which the lady answered, "Well, it's priced at 25 cents, but if you want to give us a dollar, then..."
And then to make me feel a little worse.
"We're all book lovers in this booth so we don't want to keep anyone from getting a good book because they can't afford it."
I think this was the point where I was supposed to confess that I was going to take the scissors to her 25 cent book and reimagine it...

...but I didn't.

But I'm sure she would have understood if I had. I mean look at that beautiful print.

Won't that make some gorgeous flowers?

And in other news, I also scored this great mid-century fondue pot!

Then I made one last stop at the library a little farther from my house. This has been my go-to library for RDCBs since I discovered they had a secret bookcase full of them behind a locked door. They usually have a couple of shelves full of them out front, too.

But today nothing. Nada. Nil.

Someone is taking all the RDCBs in Houston. This is war.

Book Review: The Interestings

Title: The Interestings
Author: Meg Wolitzer
Format: Hardback
Reading Dates: Feb 25, 2013 - Apr 13, 2013
Rating: ****

If there is one thing we have all learned from American Idol, it's that the idea that you can be anything you want to be is patently untrue. Some people got it and some people don't. 

Some people learn that ugly truth, early and hard, like those obscenity-spewing teenagers who have just been told that not only will they never be the next American Idol, they should give up singing all together. Other people learn it much later after they have spent year after futile year pursuing a dream that never comes true.

And then there are the others. Those who find their talent early and end up in the company of just the right people who can help them capitalize on it.

What if you are one? What if you are the other? What if you are one and your best friend is the other?

That's the premise of The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer. Six teenagers meet at a summer camp for the arts, each with dreams of pursuing an artistic life. They call themselves the Interestings and form a fast friendship. Out of this magical time, however, some become outlandishly successful while others live regular lives and still others become life long enemies. 

Being of a certain age, I enjoyed this book and its exploration of how life can seem "fairer" to some people than others and how some people with talent waste it. Wolitzer's characters are fully drawn and engaging and the situations they find themselves in seemed authentic. At some points Wolitzer's tendency to time jump several times within one chapter was disconcerting, so I took one star off for that, but all in all I would recommend this book to others. Good stuff!

Hollow, My Baby! Hollow, My Honey!

Flowers were some of the first things I made from book pages. In fact, my first bouquet still sits in my office.

One of the nice surprises from my day at Eggstravaganza was how quickly people snapped up the flowers I folded for when my baby got married. They were gone before noon.

These flowers are called kusudama flowers and there are tutorials all over the web for how to make them, like here and here.

Recently I saw some hollow kusudama flowers on this blog. I did a little digging around on the Googles and found that you make them with square frames instead of solid squares, so I tried my hand. Here's my first attempt.

Compare the back of one of these hollow flowers with the back of a regular flower.

So many possibilities with that flat back! Much easier to glue onto things.

And then I started to think about one of my other ongoing dilemmas--how to add color to my flowers. Most of the time I add a pretty bead to the center of the flowers, and I can still do that with the hollow version, but that's a really subtle color add. So I thought to myself...what if I combine a hollow flower and a regular flower and combine book pages with scrapbook paper?

And voila! Color and words!

 And I can do them the other way, too!

I really like these and I can't wait to make more.

The hard thing about creating hollow versions,however, or these combined versions, too, is creating a paper frame. Cutting out a square is pretty easy, but a square within a square? Not so much.

But my fancy-dancy new Silhouette Cameo comes to the rescue. I can make squares within squares within squares and cut them out of book pages or scrapbook pages. Whoo-hoo! Now I can't decide what to do next--fold more words or fold more flowers. What a wonderful problem to have!

I Shop, Therefore I Buy

Don't you hate it when you go to Goodwill to look for books to fold and you find a book you really want to read? And it's about making stuff with paper? And it's only $1.99?

And then you walk next door to 

and you find another book you want to read? And it's about making stuff with paper, too?

And you realize that "paperie" is actually a word? And more than that, you realize that in this store...

I mean, don't you hate it when that happens? Yeah, me neither.