Color Plates: The Original Infographics

My visit to the thrift store last week was not only an opportunity to play hooky, but it yielded a few awesome thrift scores, including a near-complete set of 1923 reference books. Each volume in the Home and School Reference Work: A Library of Practical, Authoritative Information Drawn from Every Department of Human Knowledge (!) features four to six color plates, which at some point I will probably remove from the books and frame. Here are most of them, for inspiration. The cashier at the store asked me why I was buying all of the books. When I told her there were "lots of color plates inside", she looked at me confused and said, "Color plates?" I tried to explain, but I think she still thinks there was ceramic dinnerware hiding somewhere between the covers.

TBT: I Spy Mod Hand-Drawn Type

Spring cleaning is allowing me the opportunity to look through and reorganize the books on our shelves. I had forgotten about the awesomely MOD hand-drawn lettering on the endpapers of this 1966 Whitman I Spy: Message from Moscow book.

TBT: Needlepoint Alphabet

Words cannot even describe the fantastic needlepoint alphabet found in this recent thrift score. From 1972, I bring you these beautiful excerpts from Carolyn Ambuter's Complete Book of Needlepoint.

Three and the Moon: Early Work by Illustrator Boris Artzybasheff

During a recent thrift excursion, for some unknown reason I picked a book from the shelf and boy was I glad I did! You see, the library-bound cover was nothing spectacular, so who knows why I was drawn to it.

But as soon as I saw what was inside, the book was in my cart. And I haven't read any of the stories, yet, because I can't stop looking at the striking illustrations! The book is Three and the Moon: Legendary Stories of Old Brittany, Normandy, and Provence by Jacques Dorey, illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff, and published in 1929.

Later in his career, Mr. Artzybasheff moved on to produce more detailed illustrations of three-dimensional, often surreal and grotesquely anthropomorphic objects. He also illustrated several Time, Life, and Fortune magazine covers.

Sewing for All Seasons

There's a secret I've been dying to tell you about for over a year ("for all seasons"!), and today I can finally spill the beans!

Last summer, Susan Beal contacted me asking if she could include my Retro Tea Towel Calendar in her newest book. Could she include it?! Can I just tell you how hard it was to reply because I was shaking so crazily?! Susan is the author of one of my favorite crafty books, World of Geekcraft, and the idea of having my work included in one of her books was just mind-boggling.

This calendar was the first design I ever did for Spoonflower back in the Fall of 2010. I entered in the Tea Towel Calendar-themed Fabric-of-the-Week contest and it came in 2nd Place! Needless to say, I was hooked.

Since the book was scheduled to be published in the Fall of 2013, the calendar would need to be updated for 2014, so I dropped everything and jumped into changing all the dates and holidays for 2014 (sneaking a 2013 version in there for my Spoonflower shop, too, while I was at it). This all happened around the same time Spoonflower was introducing new color formulations, so I had to make sure the new version printed with the correct colors, and then whisked some of the printed calendar fabric off to Susan so she could do her magic.

Fifteen months later the book, Sewing for All Seasons is printed and available at all major retailers, and it's gorgeous. And I'm not just saying that because my fabric is in it. Every project is for something you can use and will want to make! I can't decide which one to do first. The design is beautiful, and, well, the book just feels good in your hands. Check Susan's blog frequently because she loves to do giveaways, and has a freebie or two in the works!

Richard Scarry Is Golden

I found this Rabbit and His Friends Little Golden Book while thrifting recently, and bought it not only because it was written and illustrated by Richard Scarry (1953), but because my son is obsessed with platypuses (platypi?), thanks to Perry the Platypus from "Phineas and Ferb". Anyway, I thought I would share with you a couple of my favorite pages: the title page, with some chalk lettering (!), and the last page, which features a poster set in several kinds of wood type.

Find & Keep Project #1: DIY Bleached Tee

A couple weeks ago I started reading Beci Orpin's book Find & Keep and, while I've finished the main text of the book (I couldn't put it down!), I have only just started the 26 projects in the book.


For the first project, "Fun with Dyes & Bleach", I decided to use the bleach method to customize a T-shirt for myself, and one for a friend celebrating her 40th birthday. This is a relatively easy project, and only requires a few materials:

Plain, dark T-shirt, washed and dried

Newspaper or scrap paper

Piece of thick cardboard

Bleach and a bowl to pour it in

Rubber gloves

Objects to apply bleach

In her book, Beci uses a small paint brush to dot the bleach onto her tee. I decided it might be fun to use some small plastic lids to apply the bleach. I've been saving the lids, which cannot be recycled, so that someday, when I have enough of them, I can use them to make a funky chandelier. So after covering my work table with several large sheets of newsprint, I picked out various sizes of lids. I inserted the piece of cardboard inside the shirt, so that the bleach would not bleed through to the back side of the shirt. Then I put a tiny bit of bleach in a small bowl.


Next, I started dipping the lids in the bleach and stamped the shirt in a random pattern. I was worried at first that nothing was happening, but slowly the color started to come out. Occasionally I would pull up the shirt and look up through the top from the inside. I could tell by how translucent the rings looked from the inside that it was working.


Beci says in the book to leave the bleach on only about 20 minutes. It took about an hour for my shirts to really bleach as much as I wanted. I would suggest keeping an eye on your shirt while the bleach is working. Using too much of the bleach, or leaving it on too long, could cause the fibers to disintegrate.


Let your shirt completely dry. You can then turn the shirt over if you want to do the same thing to the back. Once you're happy with your shirt and it has dried, you can wash and dry it as usual, though I washed mine separately for the first wash, just so no bleach would harm any other clothes.



Please note that not all fabrics dye the same way, so you might want to test a small drop of bleach on a test spot of your shirt to see how it works.
Enjoy!