With every leaf a miracle ... special edition (a gift I made for Felicity)

the cover of my small chapbook - a special edition for my daughter which is on fine watercolour paper and attached is a painted, clay leaf I made from a real leaf in pottery class

Click to enlarge images

This is one of the chapbook of quotes about trees I made for Christmas. It is hand-written with .35mm Rotring art pen and has simply painted illustrations of watercolour (just three colours - yellow and blue to make the greens, and yellow, blue and red to make the brown). I found quotes about trees, including a nice Maori proverb next to my Acknowledgment page, and copied them into the book.

I made 10 copies, but Felicity's is special because it is on the expensive paper which I had very little of, and it has the clay leaf (a great idea which the teacher of the pottery class had) which I painted with acrylic paint and it was attached as a bookmark by a gold ribbon. Or not. Pretty impractical as a bookmark really, but c'est la vie. Sometimes beauty is impractical...

a page in the middle which I stapled the ribbon attaching the bookmark to

another page

When I was writing out all the quotes, I was listening at the same time to a Pimsleur Greek as my daughter and I study modern Greek, among other languages. However, as expert as I am at multi-tasking, concentrating on and repeating a foreign language while writing out quotes, is not something that is easy to do. So there were one or two errors in each chapbook. But I don't stress about that. I have heard that the Amish women make mistakes in their quilt-making deliberately, because only God creates perfectly. And mistakes just add to the authenticity of a handmade item, as far as I'm concerned.

For years I have made handmade gifts for my loved ones, and any literature I have produced has generally been marked with jubilant emerald press and my little drawing of a radiating emerald cut ring. I also generally record the number of editions, and the date. You will see that I have also written Font: jules-te-reo. So why did I do that, since it is handwritten book, and not typed out in a font? Well, that is a little in-house joke, because a font I designed is called jules-te-reo (also known as juleswriting) which is based on my handwriting. I sell it in my shop in my 8 font pack, and it also one of the fonts available to use at picnik.

I have quite a collection of my little handmade gifts and sometimes when guests come over I get them out and show them. Maybe they are just being polite, but they seem to enjoy them, and I enjoy looking at them all over again every time! The pleasure of making handmade gifts is all mine. Often people have said, why don't you sell them at etsy? But they take so long to produce that I would get paid so little for my work and that would not be fun to think of them in this way (and I like to have the recipient in mind as I work too). I would consider being paid to make one for someone to give to someone else, kind of like a commission, because then it would feel more like a loving gesture I was helping someone do and less like commerce. Quelle dilemma, eh?