Found Thrift Store Patterns

Feeling guilty because I decided to play hooky yesterday at the thrift store instead of getting work done, I decided to do a little research and take pictures of patterns I found around the store. Made me feel like I was getting something done!

TBT: My First Color Chart

When I was a senior in high school I received a large set of Berol Prismacolor art markers. This was my first set of "real" markers, some of which still work today, over 25 years later! Around the same time, my grandma had just retired from decades as a secretary, so she handed down her electric typewriter to us. I think I was more excited about making this color chart than actually using the markers. I'm thinking of investing in Copic markers now that I'm "all grown up", and you can bet a color chart will be the first thing I use them for!

TBT: '80s Pillow to Your Heart

These fancy little pillows are courtesy of a 1984 issue of the German magazine Brigitte. Many are made with satin, and most are very '80s, but the one in the top row covered in color-collaged buttons is amazing! Translated, the intro text reads:

A small soft feather pillows heart's there to buy, the right heart to envelope you handle work itself: an endearing, perhaps eloquent gift or even a piece of jewelry for your home. Where are the pillows and how to sew the sleeves, standing on the side 278.

Click on the image for a larger picture.

Translated captions under each heart, top to bottom, left to right: Goodnight Heart, Heart Full of Buttons, Heart for Green; Heart with Handkerchief, Heart of Glass, Kind Regards, Heart Wishes, Right in the Heart; Heart for Animals, Fragrant Heart, Braided Heart, Heart of the Funfair, and Heart Lady.

Happy Valentine's Day!

TBT: MacPaint

For those of you too young to remember MacPaint, this is what life was like 25 years ago. This was considered so "advanced"...futuristic! Considering how primitive it looks, people did amazing things with it!

Macintosh System 1.1 interface.

Above: Designed by Susan Kare, designer of the MacPaint interface.

UPDATE: You can now play with a modern, interactive facsimile, called CloudPaint. It's nearly identical! Check it out here.

TBT: 50 Quick & Easy Bazaar Best Sellers!

Included in the September, 1980, issue of Better Homes and Gardens was a section featuring 50 craft items you could make to give as gifts or sell at craft bazaars. Remember when they were called "Bazaars"?! I thought it would be fun to reminisce about what our moms were all making over 30 years ago: Bandanna Babies, Veneer Tree Dazzlers, "Hand" Bags, Country-Style Key Rack... Some might even be popular today, like the Loveable Fabric Doll, Crayon Caddy Apron, Needlepoint Door Signs, and the Piece of Cake Pincushions (awesome!)... I'll let you be the judge! Do you think all of these items we're making for Etsy today will look this groovy 30+ years from now?

TBT: Cross-Stitched Stockings

From the "Homespun Crafts" article in the December, 1982, issue of Better Homes and Gardens comes these cross-stitched stockings. Now, if you can get past the early-'80s pirate shirt and the kountry décor, the stockings are actually really cool! I've included the original instructions, which you can download here. Enjoy!

TBT: Rhinestones, Crisscrossing

On a recent thrifting excursion, I found another '80s issue of Brigitte, Germany's answer to Seventeen magazine. This one, from August of 1984, included a fun idea for embellishing a collared shirt with sequins and beads. I love the geometric pattern in which they were applied, and the contrast of the almost computer circuit-board look on the plaid flannel. Now all I need are some high-waisted jeans and I'm set! I quickly did a translation of the text using Google Translate:

Also sporting checked blouses can embellish with shiny beads, sequins and stones: Here they were arranged graphically. Material of mine.

Geek Chic: Dorky But Cool

It's that time of year again: time for the Robert Kaufman Fabric8 Contest. In this competition, the judges from Robert Kaufman Fabrics and Spoonflower pore over hundreds of designs (one entry from each designer) and choose 100 semi-finalists. Then the general public votes, and the top eight designers then create a collection around the original design. The general public then votes again on the collections to determine a winner, who will be given a contract to work with Robert Kaufman!

The theme for this year's contest is "Geek Chic", so I went back to my '80s roots and focused on fashion and hobbies of the hipster dweeb, naming the collection after the term coined by Judd Nelson's character, John Bender, in the ultimate '80s flick "The Breakfast Club". Using hand-drawn illustrations, as if doodled in a notebook or *gasp!* on a desk, the collection features cameras (perhaps thrifted for 25 cents before the obsession became mainstream), calculators (everyone turned into a nerd when the calculator became a necessity in the trigonometry classroom), record players, Swiss fashion watches, combs we'd put in our back pockets, hi-top sneakers, and of course, "The Cube". All of these things have become "cool" again, perhaps even more so, some 30 years later. The ultimate revenge for those of us who have always been geeks at heart!

The first design shown below, "Make It Snappy!", is the print I'm entering into the contest. It features a collection of vintage and retro cameras, including those resembling the Brownie, Polaroid One Step, Canon Snappy (my first camera)...even a couple inspired by Fisher-Price toy cameras. These may not have been geeky at the time, but collecting them now is all the rage for geeks like me. To me, "Geek Chic" could be defined as "dorky and cool at the same time." And it seems kind of dorky-yet-cool to go back to using analog objects now when digital cameras and apps for processing and sharing are the mainstream.

Make It Snappy!

Cal Q. Lator and High Energy (Gray)

Apple Pi with close-up

Hi-Fi (Black) and All-Stars (Gray)

May the Cube Be With You and Magic Cube

Hi-Fi (White) and High Energy (White)

Geeky Stripes (Black on Grid) and Oh, Goody! (Black)

All-Stars (White) and High Energy (Red)

Hi-Fi (Yellow) and Oh, Goody! (Pinstripe)

Swiss Time and Geeky Stripes (Color)

I've had so much fun working on this collection, not only because the subject matter is so nostalgic, but because it is different from anything I've done with surface pattern design. Doing the drawings and then seeing them come together with color and in patterns...I could get used to this! There are just too many geeky-but-cool things from the '80s--I have a feeling I'll be doing a second collection!

A Whiff of Nostalgia

Several years ago I purchased my first issue of Uppercase magazine. It was issue #5, and I read it cover-to-cover that night. I subscribed the next morning, also buying #3 and #4, the only remaining back issues. Every few months the magazine arrives, the inside of the envelope filled with that fabulous fresh ink smell. I had always dreamed of being featured in the magazine, of course for my design work, but recently an opportunity came up for me to contribute in a different way.

Some of you may know that my obsession with collecting (hoarding) includes a passion for vintage stickers from the 1970s and '80s. For the first 10 years of the 2000s, right after I turned 30, I was consumed with finding and buying all the stickers I collected as a kid, replacing all those I had stuck to old notebooks and magnetic photo albums with pristine, unused stickers on their original backings. This included scratch and sniff stickers, which had to be unscratched and still have their smell. And I wasn't the only one--eBay was crawling with avid sticker collectors, especially those who wanted sniff stickers. It was a tense 10 years, watching hundreds if not thousands of listings and usually bidding at the last second to try to win. But my collection is nearly complete, and occasionally I am able to fill in some holes when I get the inkling to check out the eBay listings again.

During this time I was fortunate to collaborate with a fellow collector, bubbledog, writing a book dedicated to scratch and sniff stickers: The Vintage Scratch & Sniff Stickers Collector's Guide. It took us a couple years to compile all the information and images (working on opposite coasts while also having full-tme jobs didn't make it any easier!), but the labor of love has brought me full-circle to the latest issue of Uppercase, #17, in which I am thrilled to have contributed a short article about the stinky pieces of paper!

This issue is the "Special Stationery Issue", so inside you'll also find profiles of 50 stationers, stationery from around the world, a history of the envelope, and so much more--too much to list--on over 100 beautifully-designed pages. Oh, and did I mention the cherry-scented scratch and sniff cover?! If you're not familiar with the magazine, you can check out their website here, and even flip through this issue here. If you decide to subscribe, use the special code "CONTRIBUTOR17" at checkout to get $10 off your subscription!

Thank Geek It's Friday: Calculator Color Palettes

Color inspiration can come from anywhere, right? That's why I thought these calculator palettes were so cool. I never really thought of how colors might be used on calculators to make them seem more appealing or superior to other calculators. But when the colors are taken off the surface and put together, they really are very modern, techy, and for the most part, masculine. Here are some images from the collection I found on tumblr (where you can find even more). However, the last image (the Texas Instruments TI-30 SLR) is my own calculator from 1987. I was so excited my senior year in high school to finally be in math classes that required such a "sophisticated" instrument. Do they still use calculators in schools?

Filography: Beautiful String Art from the '70s

In my spring cleaning quest I have come upon another book that was hidden away up in the attic. When I was growing up in the 1970s and '80s, my dad always had some sort of in-depth project going, whether it was putting together an intricate model of an old race car or building a telescope. But I also seem to recall him doing "string art" at least once, because I remember him teaching me how to recreate the same effect using lines on paper. So when I uncovered this book, The Beautiful String Art Book: 100 Projects You Can Create, written by Raymond Gautard in 1978, I couldn't help but spend the rest of my allotted cleaning time leafing through it. The book not only features geometric "filography" designs (betcha didn't know there was even a term for string art...neither did I!), but pictures that can be made, like butterflies and even the Eiffel Tower. And it includes detailed instructions and diagrams. Here are some highlights.










The attic is so messy that I can't even get to my stash of childhood artwork right now, so I couldn't find the filography drawings I did as a kid in time for this post, but I decided to do a quick version in Illustrator, to show how easy it is to do two-dimensional versions on paper, or virtual paper in this case. No string or nails necessary!

First, to make a basic curve, place dots down a vertical imaginary line, equidistant from each other. Here I placed them 1/4" from each other. Group them, then Copy and Paste and rotate 90 degrees so the copied dots are now horizontal. Place them at the bottom, 1/4" below and 1/4" to the right of the bottom-most vertical dot. So now you have vertical and horizontal axes. Next, you can either physically number the dots as shown, or just imagine they're numbered as such. With a line, connect the #1 dot on the vertical axis to the #1 dot on the horizontal axis, then connect the #2 dot on the vertical axis to the #2 dot on the horizontal axis, etc.



Once you have connected all the dot pairs with straight lines, you will have a curve! (Looks very Space Agey, doesn't it? Kind of like those '80s video game matrices... And didn't they use something like that for "Friday Night Videos"? Sorry, I got sidetracked there...)



Group all of the dots and lines together. Copy and paste the group three times. Rotate one of the pasted groups 90 degrees, rotate another 180 degrees, and rotate the last 270 degrees (or -90 degrees). Place them on top of each other so they form a square.



Now you can colorize each grouping, or even each line, however you wish.



Copy and paste and rotate as much as you like, and play around with all sorts of patterns.



Even size them, big or small!



Do you think you might try this? If you do, send me a photo!

Incidentally, when I tried to find if the book is still available out there, I found some copies on Amazon, new and used. Used copies are pretty pricey, and don't even look at the price of the original copies in new condition! You can also find similarly-priced used copies on AbeBooks (great resource!), along with a couple other related vintage string art books.