Crafts

I create greeting cards for close friends out of paper, glue, and mostly colored ink. I also enjoy gift wrapping other sorts of physical presentation design. Oddly this passion does not translate to clothes – I’m not very creative with fabric.

january 2020 – winter holiday cards

I ended up enjoying mass producing cards as i could refine my skills over time (the amount of love I put into each one is the same, but I just get a better sense of balance and finesse as I do more). A huge theme during this time in my life was burnout, and it was easier to do something concrete than to find headspace to relax without doing anything, I so I decided to design a card that described the mountains I climbed that winter in the Catskills. I wasn’t very good at hiking in snow so most of my memories were of the little berries, wood, and pine tree branches frozen in the ice under my feet. I was happy with the results!

december 2020 – project reclass holidays

Over 35 people have dedicated a large portion of their personal time to making Project Reclass take off, yet I have never met most of the volunteers as our program took off during the pandemic. My co-founder, Kunal, and I try to still create a physical component to our gratitude by sending holiday gifts. Kunal put together local jams and other treats from his town and I put together holiday cards thanking everyone for their work. Having no money doesn’t mean we can’t still express our appreciation for what others give to the cause!

September 2020 – jacqui’s wedding

My friend Jacqui is an incredible 3D artist and animator who put together a promo video for my non-profit pro bono. I tried extra hard to make my basic gift card gift a little more personal with some cute wedding stickers I bought while I was in Japan, and different types of string! A super fun project during pandemic times.

may 2020 – solidarity in isolation

The pandemic was a challenging time for me. I was struggling with all the small adjustments like not having a consistent laundromat to visit, not knowing how to wash / quarantine the vegetables so I don’t get in contact with the Corona virus which we didn’t fully understand yet. I quickly set up a routine – I went running every day through the abandoned streets, cooked more than I usually do, and took walks around the eerily quiet streets of Astoria. Astoria has this odd architecture that only makes sense from the front, the rest of the apartment is just a block of bricks, and you can really see this when there is no building to the side of a complex.

I fancied I was in a Minecraft universe and would run around these streets admiring the common brick patterns, stair ways, fences, windows, and roofs… these were no doubt the work of local masons who could build custom homes out of their little inventory of tricks for the Astoria residents. I recreated these scenes in a textured postcard to my mother where I synthesized the reasons I loved living in these architectural patterns. I cut layers and layers of fences and roofs and stairs from cardboard and used water color markers to create a layered, intricate representation of my neighborhood.

June 2019 – sister’s marriage

I couldn’t make my sister’s wedding since it was on short notice, but she visited a bunch of us in New York City! I didn’t have a card ready in time so I showed up with washi tape, cardstock, and colored pens. Her best friend is an actual designer and she picked some washi tape. We printed a photo we took that day at a Duane Reade, and then finished it up in Bryant park together.