I love these great postcards by Paul Davis, via Polite.

I was first introduced to Alanna Cavanagh's work at the Interior Design Show in Toronto this past winter. She was asked to design a mural for the Style at Home booth, which was really phenomenal. The booth was clearly one of the best in the show.

Here's a photo of the booth that I took during the show.

via DecorWrite

And here's a better view of the mural image in it's entirety.

Alanna is an illustrator and printmaker working in Toronto. She has an incredible list of clients, including The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Penguin Books. She also writes for Uppercase Magazine.

via The Workroom

Alanna's Scissor Prints were also featured in the windows of The Workroom during IDS. The Workroom is a great quilting and sewing shop in Toronto, and these prints perfectly suited their display.

It's Alanna's beautiful screenprints that I am most drawn to. I love her bold but simple use of colours, and of course, the whimsical nature of her drawings.

This is a cute example of her illustration work.

Above 3 via Alanna Cavanagh

And I love her hand lettering. It a perfect scrawl; a feminine script with an edge.

via Arren Williams

Here's a picture of Alanna, hard at work tea staining one of her Penguin Bookcovers. These are my favourite pieces from her portfolio. Each one stained by hand to create a truly one of a kind piece.

via English Muffin Blog

And here's a shot of it in situ. So beautiful.

Prints are available for purchase at Oliver Yaphe and you can also inquire directly with Alanna herself.

I first heard about Anna-Wili Highfield on an episode of Anthropologie's Man Shops Globe. She is an artist from Sydney, Australia who makes animal sculptures from torn paper. Paper is one of my favourite materials. I love seeing something so simple be transformed into such an exquistie sculpture.

I particularly adore the birds in flight, but she does several different poses, and even does horse and cow heads. You can find her paper sculpture portfolio here.

Here's a clip of her from Man Shops Globe:

Paper art is one of my favourite things and it seems that security envelopes are everywhere these days. Artist have opened these envelopes up, literally, to reveal the beautiful inner patterns, and use them in a variety of ways. Here are a few of my faves:

The above installations are by Francisca Prieto. These installations comprise her latest show in London, called Between Folds/Envelopes, where she has folded the paper using different origami methods to create the overall composition. There is nothing I love more than the sharp preciseness of the origami, combined with all the beautiful blue patterns. Photo's via Design*Sponge.

I first learned about girlprinter via the latest issue of Uppercase, which contains a spread of her collection of security envelopes. While looking at her site, I found that she recently had a show of letterpress prints featuring security envelope patterns. Very lovely. Photo by Carolyn Fraser.

And while I was checking out Carolyn's blog, I found some extra envelope eye candy. These images are of artist Kristiina Lahde's work. I love the lightness of these pieces. She has lots of great paper art on her site. It's so incredible the time and patience that must go into a piece like this. I want to hold my breath when I look at these, they are just so fragile and beautiful.

There are lots of people making buttons or accessories with security envelopes too. The image above is from Becky's Buttons etsy shop, but I've seen lots of these around. Actually easy to make yourself too, if you have a button maker.

My mailbox was full of exciting deliveries today! First up, was this great package from Nervous System. I first found Nervous System on Etsy a while ago, and had been coveting their stuff for awhile. All of their products are made using algorithmic tools, don't even ask me how that works, but the results are these beautiful, open weblike forms.

This bracelet is made from nylon using a 3-D printing method, where layers of nylon are slowly added to the form to build up the design. So cool! And they offer different sizes for their bracelets, which is great because this is a gift for my sister, who has very dainty hands, unlike me.

The next thing I pulled out of the mailbox was the new copy of Uppercase Magazine. Designed, edited, and published by Janine Vangool of Uppercase Gallery, the magazine is full of really inspiring creative tidbits and stories. She is also quite the local success story in my opinion, and it's so inspiring to see someone local doing something that has been embraced by so many people, and that takes up lots of webspace on my favorite blogs and twitter feeds. How cool to have people across the world reading this little magazine?

That's the first 4 issues all stacked together. Starting to look like a nice little collection aren't they?

I have piles just like this all over my house. Stacks of little notes, business cards I've picked up along the way, phone numbers or contact info jotted down. And my husband just despises them. They settle in unused corners of the desk or kitchen and just end up looking cluttered. This drives him crazy. So I decided to do something with all this stuff, to keep it more organized.

I've had this journey book from Lovely Design for awhile now, not really having a reason to put it to good use. I'm not much of a journal keeper, and I've tried a couple of times to start, but to no avail. So when I looked around for something to conglomerate my piles into, my eyes fell upon this little book, which coincidentally happened to take up residence at the bottom of one these said piles.

I sorted them into categories and taped and stapled them into the pages of the book. And simple as that, all my piles disappeared.

It's so great to have everything in one place. Now I can just reach for the book if I want the name of that store I visited in Vancouver last year, or the web address for someone I met in Toronto. And I'm happy that the book is living up to it's name and actually documenting my journeys.

One note if you are planning to do this yourself. A regular hard-bound journal is likely not the best thing because the cover is so hard. Journals are not designed to have all that extra paper and material stuffed into it. So find a journal with a softer cover. The lovely journal is great because the board used to make the cover is flexible enough to accommodate the extra fullness in the pages. It will need something to help keep it closed though, so a nice elastic or ribbon should do the trick.