Rifling through the internet in search of some birthday card inspiration for my Potter-fanatic boyfriend (coincidentally sharing his first name with the world's most famous boy wizard), I came across these fantastic Valentine's Day cards from Kjersti Faret.
(Find more of her work on her Etsy store Cat Coven)
Given my Harry's proud beard I specifically wanted to include J.K. Rowling's hirsute half-giant wizard gamekeeper, so on seeing the not-so-flattering card featuring Hagrid (Faret says that "you can give it to your enemy to let them know you still don’t like them") I wanted to combine the format with something more complimentary, it being a birthday message after all. Nothing was more perfect than the idea behind the letter 'H' in the fabulously foul-mouthed Harry Potter alphabet, illustrated by Tumblr user Harry Potter's Mum. My resulting version is below, with a few tweaks, swaps and additions.
I have finally started sorting through the myriad of boxes filled with the contents of our student flat in Leeds. Both my parents have a penchant for stashing memorable trinkets - their treehouse business is named Squirrel Design after Mum's earlier obsession with 'squirrelling away' odds and ends in boxes, and Dad has always stridently refused to throw away anything that looks unusual or interesting or might come in useful at a later date to make into a piece of jewellery or a garden sculpture etc etc. With this in mind, the amount of sh*t I have accumulated over the last four years is quite impressive, albeit unsurprising given my parentage.
One item in particular that I seem to have amassed is notebooks - who can resist a little (or a lot of) quality stationery? I have a particular infatuation with the Moleskine and carry my weekly notebook diary with me everywhere. After studying Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines for the IB and learning the name and design came from the travel notebooks he used, I bought one as my homework diary and journal and since then I have found no other partner more perfect for my love of lists and minimal design formats. With the quality of the paper being infamously beautiful to write and draw on, even the lined pages provide a perfect canvas for sketches. In one of the boxes from Leeds I uncovered this old drawing in another Moleskine - not a diary but a simple hardback notebook which I thought had gone missing. I misplaced it after only starting this one page, but now it has been unearthed I can start filling it with more pencil.
