Our Weekend Art Project has been making the blog rounds including mentions at Apartment Therapy, How About Orange and Craftzine. Welcome, everybody! Even more exciting is the fact that others have been inspired enough to create their own versions of the painting. Neat to see DIY examples from: A Late Afternoon, Hanna Kim, Holley Simmons and Tabitha Pacheco. Nice work, folks! More to come…Have fun and send us a pic of your creations.

I had a housewarming dinner party with my friends from work last year and I decided to make it a little bit more special by making everyone their own place cards that they could take home with them. I chose my favourite origami patterns and created little envelopes by folding the origami paper in half and stitching the side for a more hand crafted look. And to make it even more fun, I put random goodies inside each envelope which everyone excitedly opened to see what they got. It was like Christmas all over again!

I always like dinner with friends to be more interactive and add an element of playfulness to it. These are super easy to make and your guests gets to take home something special that you personally made for them.

We often like to wrap presents in newsprint or butcher paper. It has a nice raw texture and neutral palette. All you need is some nice ribbon to finish it off but sometimes you just want a splash of pattern. A couple months back, YouWorkForThem was clearing out their book collection. They were practically giving away their newsprint zine, “Sentence 01“, for 95¢. A different artist designed each page of the 16 page zine full of abstract black and white imagery. At the risk of offending the artists and author, I bought three copies not to read but for the sole purpose of using each sheet of the zine as wrapping paper. And it works wonderfully. Rissa put the package above together for Doni, Gen & Aoi. Inside is a loaf of home baked cinnamon raisin bread (Rissa’s go to gift for 2009). Newsprint ink tends to run, so if you don’t want ink on your gift, you’ll want to wrap your gift in an additional layer. In this case, Rissa wrapped the raisin bread in cling wrap before wrapping it in the newsprint.

Below is a gift given to Luna by my sister also nicely wrapped in newsprint with a simple pattern of chinese characters. So simple. So lovely.

Rissa and I are currently working on Luna’s birth announcement. We sketched up some ideas together on the weekend. Rissa spent yesterday reformatting some of them into InDesign files to print out and mock-up on paper. Other than posing for cute photos, Luna wasn’t actually too helpful on this task. Her favorite activities continue to be eating, sleeping – I think she dreams about swimming in rivers and oceans of milk – and something new: stretching out and exercising her limbs. Maybe one day soon she’ll have fun putting stuff together with mom and dad. We’re hoping to finalize the design and production this week and send off the announcements asap.