Sorry! Two book related posts in a row. I'll stop soon I promise. I'm just quite into Japanese design and craft books at the moment. With holidays coming up and no travel plans, I will have a lot of creative "play" time and am looking for inspiration.
One "must do" is to get my nengajo done. Nengajo are Japanese New Years postcards. As they don't celebrate Christmas (unless you count decorating stores, playing Christmas carols, getting right into the commercial side of the holiday and then on the day itself going to work and ignoring it completely as celebrating), Christmas cards aren't sent.
An interesting thing with the nengajo, is that you post them before January first and the post office keeps them and does a special delivery on New Years Day of the cards only.
Last year, we did the traditional thing and used a photo of our wedding as we had just been married. You can see a picture of the result here.
This year, I want to do something a little more fun. I may design it from scratch, but I may cheat, and compile a design from a CD. That's where this book comes in.... At this time of year, the shops are filled with rubber stamps, stickers, gocco supplies, blank cards and books with CD ROMs filled with royalty-free designs.
After drooling over many of the books, this was the winner for the year. It has a great range of styles of designs to choose from. I picked up an extra copy in case anyone else wants one. You can see it up for auction here. Even if I don't use any of the designs, I find it great inspiration.
Once again, I'll leave you with some pictures.
1 comment:
Nengajo are great aren't they? I love the way lots of nihonjin make woodblock printed nengajo even if they don't usually make woodblock prints. It's a wonderful tradition and one I like to keep in Australia too (when I have time) because it's so different from all the cheesey xmas stuff that comes out here in the shops at that time.
And that book you displayed looks amazing!
Post a Comment