Happy New Year!

Wow. I can’t believe the holidays are already over and it’s back to work in 2014! Life just seems to get faster and busier as each year passes, and with that said, my new year’s resolution.. or hope… or mission is to make time to do creative projects purely for myself, for the simple joy of it, to inspire myself, and sometimes to collaborate and connect with the people I love.

When Marc, my boyfriend, asked me what I wanted for Christmas I replied “Time working together in my studio on a fun creative project!”. And that’s exactly what we did to welcome in the New Year. I have been collecting security envelopes (from random mail and bills) for about 3 years now and I’ve been dying to do a project with them. I’ve always wanted to tile/shingle a wall with pieces of paper and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

When I brought out all the envelopes I had collected we were amazed by the wide variety of patterns and colors… more than 75 different patterns! Marc, who is very mechanically minded, helped me map out the overall layout and calculate the size that our oval needed to be… thank goodness for handy boyfriends! I had a custom cutting die made for the oval (for those of you who are unfamiliar, a cutting die is like an extra sharp cookie cutter). While Marc fished through the piles of envelopes and found the interesting ones I cut away on my tabletop die-cutter.

We started our first row with halves and set up our grid so that the ovals were laid out like wood shingles. We attached them to the wall with a neutral pH white crafting glue. They looked like little Easter eggs sitting on top of the wainscot.