Marisa Girardi Presents

I’m loving the dark winter shades of grey, but I also love coming to my desk and beholding the smorgasbord of colour before me in the form of :

Felt

Embroidery Thread

and buttons

How could you not be inspired to make happy things with these?

I generally don’t like buying wrapping paper because 1.It’s too expensive 2.It’s wasteful and 3. I’d rather be creative.  So when I had to wrap my sister’s tea box, I thought of wrapping it in a pretty magazine page because 1.It’s cheap 2. It’s recycling and 3. You can choose from a wide variety of  images. But while this might be  fine for a very little present, for the slightly larger, it’s not going to fit. So I whipped out the ol’ sewing machine and zigzagged some pretty pics together. I went with a botany theme.

Trim it a little and voila! It’s a wrap.

Growing up in a creative family, our unspoken motto was “why buy it if you can make it”. Over the years we exchanged many handmade birthday (and other) cards as well as gifts,  and if  I have the time and a good idea, I still prefer to make a gift.

Here are the two most recent.

My friend Justin had a mexican themed birthday dinner and so I brought along a leetle friend for him.

I also printed a card with Signor Mustachio in front of his crumbling hacienda.

For my sister, I found a tea box in a charity store, sanded it down, painted a lovely poem by Su Dong Po on the lid and filled it with yummy teas.

I hope to have my own shop up and running soon, but in the meantime, here is my lovely Etsy shop.

Etsy is the reason I started creating things again and helped me finally say “I am a crafter!” with pride, rather than mumble it into my sleeve apologetically.  Okay, so I still sometimes do it…but less often.

The array of talent on that site is remarkable and browsing around the site never fails to lift me out of a creative slump.
Thank you Etsy!

My whole website / blog has been terminated (boo hoo!) and I have to start from scratch again. Luckily my archive was not very full as I’m pretty new to all of this and posting is still a huge task for me - thinking of what to post, how not to be boring, getting distracted a million times by looking up things I don’t understand (e.g. RSS, what “followers” are and how you get them, what the point of tags is, trackbacks, SEO and a whole lot of other lingo). I’ve never been good at lingo. Or Bingo. But I imagine I’d be brilliant if I knew how to play.” Legs eleven!”, I’d shout, “Fat lady with a flea!” …and other bingo lingo.

So, I’m going to be cheating and reposting my old posts as best as I can remember them (the ones I can remember).  Please bear with me. Our technicians are working on the problem.