Sunday, June 17, 2012

Vintage Article-Super Scraps 1984 Christmas Annual- Velvet Hanging Boxes


I had regular columns in several House of White Birches magazines, and each of those magazines had special one-off issues during the year, and most of them also had a Christmas Annual. That meant that there were lots of pages to fill. In the 14 years that I wrote and designed for magazines, I don't think HWB rejected a single one of my projects (though several certainly should have been). If the magazine I targeted couldn't use the design, one of the others did. It was fun, and it kept me busy, and it paid well enough for the times ($25- $200 per article, and since I had 4 or 5 things out every month, and back then, gas was barely $1 a gallon and shoes were $10, that money went a fairly long way).

The point of Super Scraps (which I think started out as a quarterly but ended up bi-monthly) was in using up leftovers, which is a good notion, even now. My column was called Sew Special (no Taylor puns this time around), and since HWB wasn't into subtlety or sarcasm, you can assume that all of those column projects dealt with sewing in one way or another.
 These things are actually not a bad idea- little velvet trinket boxes that can be used as ornaments or gift boxes. They're horribly photographed, and the embellishments are terrible, albeit Of The Time, and the colors were peach and burgundy (urk), but the idea itself would work just fine now, with better fabric and maybe some embroidery.

 Again, I liked doing the illustrations. I'm assuming they had a lot of white space in this issue, hence a full page for these drawings.

I don't know why this one came out upside down, but if you download it and print it, you can flip it around... heh...

If you download the pattern page, print it with 1/2" margins all around, and it should come out okay.


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