Ok, after 2 years over at Wix, I decided to move back to SquareSpace. One nice thing about moving back to my site here is that my old blog posts are back online as well. I just did not feel motivated to blog on Wix… partially because I couldn’t get the posts to look the way I wanted to over there. Things are just much more aesthetically pleasing to me here. I thought I hated editing sites on SquareSpace, but it turns out I got quite used to it and actually missed the ease of making my design choices coherent across pages.
I also have a new hobby that’s taken over all my free time since my last post before the pandemic. At the end of 2020 I was farting around online looking for other stuff to do with my Silhouette Cameo (an electronic cutting machine), stumbled upon Lia Griffith’s website, and started making a paper plant for my windowless bathroom out of cardstock paper. I had a Zoom birthday party to attend, and quickly whipped up my very first crepe paper flower (the red poppy below). Things just kind of took off from there.
If you check out my portfolio section on this website or look at my Instagram feed, you can see that I have spent the last 10 months creating these lovely botanical sculptures from paper. I don’t actually use the cutting machine much anymore, as I predominantly use crepe paper now (and that’s just easier to cut by hand). I have also expanded where I learn to make flowers. I am now working through Tiffanie Turner’s book, The Fine Art of Paper Flowers. I am also doing nearly a year of workshops with the hosts of the Paper Talk Podcast. I actually need to head down to my local bookstore today, because my order of Jessie Chui’s book arrived on Monday.
Be prepared to see a lot of flowers on this site moving forward. I have never really considered myself a flower person. I am actually kind of a tomboy with occasional goth tendencies, so this hobby really surprised me. It makes sense though, when you consider that I studied natural sciences in college and have always loved crafting. This is like a fine art combination of those loves, and I find it incredibly fulfilling. I have also found the online paper florist community to be one of the kindest spaces I’ve ever found on the internet.