02.12.09: soon

blog swap valentine

hey hey, a project wrapped up in due time for once! this is the card i made for rachel, my crafty-giftin' counterpart in amanda's valentine's day swap. she's out in los angeles, so i decided to give her all things new york: the card is a cutout of the hell's kitchen skyline as seen from the hudson (the bat signal heart is coming out of what would be the new york times building). i picked up the japanese newspaper at sapporo, our favorite local ramen place. i sent it with a jar of ginger-grapefruit bath fizzes, made from the aforementioned citric acid from zabar's on the upper west side,* and a wee jar of david graves's nyc rooftop honey from the union square greenmarket (and rooftops all over the five boroughs). in return, she sent me two of her lovely stitched cardstock valentines, a pretty dessert** (which i have hidden from joe the pastry-seeking missile), and a garland made of hacked-up science journals, which, predictably, i adore. as she put it, what says love like the annual data for red tailed deer mating?

my swappy valentine

an upcycler after my own heart. thanks again, rachel!


*and some seriously peekaboo essential oils. when i was mashing everything together on friday night, our apartment was one big citrus slamdance; when i smelled the leftover crumbles yesterday morning, they'd calmed down to a positively timid salt-with-hints-of-ginger tang. still plenty fizzy, just not as stinky as i'd expected. that's how we roll on valentine's day around here, internets: we expect stink.

**specifically, tasty shortbread from sconehenge in CA - which is the best-titled business i've heard of in months. i kind of want to change my name to sconehenge.

4 comments:

east side bride said...

holy shit. my swapee did not get anything like this.

Rachel (heart of light) said...

Yep. I definitely got the best package. I am so crawling into the bathtub with that fizzy goodness tonight. Thank you!
Also, I am planning on stealing your lovely photos to post tomorrow. Otherwise they will be blurry and yellowed polaroid images that won't do justice to your craftiness.

Amanda Bruns said...

Wowee! This is so cool! Wow wow wow I want to get paper like that and make all sorts of amazing things from it.

lauren said...

@rachel: yoink away! internets, she has a great reason for being sans camera, incidentally: it's in dubai with her SO, taking pictures of bedouin tents.

@amanda: you're too kind! asian newsprint is my favorite stuff to chop up in collages (though since i can't read kanji, i run the risk of making things covered with wildly inappropriate text - which is both fun and a little weird). thanks again for organizing the swap - it was great fun!