Custom work

I recently had a customer ask me to make a custom card for a friend's birthday. As you know, I love custom orders! He wanted a sleeping girl in a bed because his friend slept a lot, but aside from that, I was given free rein. I thought it would be really cute to have a bird by her window singing 'happy birthday' (an idea he liked as well), and then it was figuring out how to sketch out the scene and which papers to use. I went through a few origami papers before I settled on this green floral piece. I also went through several shades of yellow for the curtains and several shades of blue for the bird before I picked these final ones. And voila! A new custom birthday card! When I showed it to my husband, he said, "I think you can relate to the theme of this card, too."

Custom Work

Once in a while, I get a request to make a custom design. Although these requests initially cause me a lot of stress, it actually becomes quite fun once I get the process started. It gives me a chance to exercise my creativity!

I made this card above at the request of my friend Cecile. She's started to learn how to sew from her mother, and she wanted a card that illustrated this for her mother's birthday. My idea was to make an image of a girl and her mother sewing a quilt together, and to stitch "Bon anniversaire, maman!" into the quilt Cecile liked this idea, so it was full steam ahead.

I ran into a few snags along the way. I didn't like my sketch and so postponed working on the card for a few days. Then I had trouble finding good paper that would represent a quilt. (I finally found it.) I was originally going to use pink thread to stitch in the birthday greeting, but when I found a spool of orange thread, I thought that would be even better. And that was how the card started to come together! Instead of using patches, I found some origami flowers, which worked with the color scheme better, and I made the girl (Cecile) more active in sewing, as you can see. And it was done!