On the fleamarket I recently discovered some beautifully patterned books – they all belong to a series called Insel-Bücherei (Island library). I bought a few old ones and Nicki surprised me with some lovely pink, red and purple ones that are still in excellent shape for my birthday.

Yesterday I had a visit from Manuel whose Paperbot workshop I missed and together we spent a nice afternoon turning a couple of these books into file folders.

… and finally – after many many adventures in crocheting, sewing and knitting – I’m in the mood for making file folders again. And I think I never showed you the drawer, since I cleaned it and ordered all my papers several months ago.

It’s been coming back slowly. Last week I picked up tons of cardboard I had cut at Buchbinderei Schäfer. Then Fabienne surprised me with this amazing handmarbled blue paper, when we made sushi together on sunday. And yesterday I happened to walk by Balloni to find some more beautiful paper. And tonight? My fingers are itching again…

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

www.balloni.de

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.

What were your favorite paper finds this year?

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?

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

Tunkpapier – Trepplin, Georg, Berlin,-Rixdorf, 1909

Book End Paper / Vorsatzpapier – Hoffmann, Josef, Wien, 1902

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.

You can find some more pics in my flickr set at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kasaa/sets/72157604398289016/

So bye for now and check back in May – I’m sure there’ll be lots of beautiful paper stuff and pics from the trip to post.

… and I can’t wait to use them.

I recently started to design my own patterns with Adobe Illustrator. I went through lots of tutorials on pattern design online and I want to share some links:
Repeating pattern design in Photoshop and Illustrator
Pattern Plugins for Illustrator
Creating patterns in Photoshop CS2
The Power (and ease) of Patterns in Illustrator

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.