Last week I finally made it to the Balloni store here in Cologne for the first time. As the name suggests they carry tons of balloons and other party decorations. But as I discovered they also have a huge selection of beautiful wrapping papers, walls covered with ribbons in every color and design you can imagine, as well as tables filled with wonderful paper goods.
I bought a sheet of this beautiful red Hiawatha paper that you can see in the second photo (btw a new addition to the good life series from NineteenSeventyThree, which I blogged about previously) and am thinking about using it to make a large photoalbum. The wooden toy crocodile also caught my eye. It’s handmade by a local designer and I’ll have to try and find out the name again.
BALLONI Ehrenfeldgürtel 88-94 50823 Köln On the Map
This is one of the lovely papers I found this year, designed by NineteenSeventyThree and printed on really nice & heavy recycled brown paper, which makes it fantastic for bookbinding. It is part of a series called the good life.
NineteenSeventyThree is a british design company started in 2003 by James & Emma Emmerson and named after the year they were born. They collaborate with some amazing artists like Pintuck and Sukie – you might already have seen one of the papers Sukie designed in this post here.
There was a bookbinding market here in Cologne a few weeks back. I still didn’t get a chance to go through all the photos I took, but I thought I’d just post a couple of pictures of the beautiful papers I got.
How do you like these wonderful wrapping sheets by Kamal, that my collegue discovered today?
Just a first try at making what I’d call a “paperama”. Wish I could add some nice music (without getting in copyright-trouble). Any suggestions? Will also need to try a better program for video-editing.
Today while searching for book end papers I discovered an amazing and inspiring paper collection “Sammlung Bartsch” on the german national library website. It includes lithographic prints, book end papers as well as paste papers (not sure how to translate Tunk- und Kleisterpapiere) from all over the world:
Book End Paper / Vorsatzpapier – D. Voigt & Co., Kopenhagen, 1906
I’ll be off to Thailand tomorrow for 3 weeks (!!!) so I decided to make myself a travel journal. The last time I was in thailand about 5 years ago I started to write a travel journal but I was just too lazy to keep going. Now I really regret it, because I can’t remember all the places we stayed at. So this time I want to make sure, I’ll document all the great places we see and things we do (I’m definitely gonna take a thai cooking class this time!!).
I used all kinds of different papers – mostly in oranges and pinks to match the cover.
I printed several pages to use as a daily journal.
And in the back I added 3 memo pockets to keep papers and cards. I did a little experiment by cutting them which turned out pretty nice.
I already printed some of them, but the print quality wasn’t too good. Though I ordered some really good archival paper last week hoping I might achieve a better quality, because I’d really love to make some memo pockets with my own designs.
Carta Varese is a series of really beautiful patterned papers made in Italy. They are just perfect for bookbinding. Carta Varese is available at my favorite german crafting online shop www.modulor.de.
