Pillows are part of Tyson Bodnarchuk’s ‘Monsterbet’ series.

My 2nd anniversary was quickly approaching and with a new baby added to the mix my muddied brain was struggling to come up with a decent gift idea. I wanted to follow the suggested list of anniversary gifts. Cotton, the traditional two-year anniversary gift, has a much broader array of possible gift options than it’s modern counterpart – china.

Without the time to create something thoughtful, I turned to Etsy.com for ideas. Searching cotton-based items, I came across the work of Tyson Bodnarchuk and his ‘Monsterbet’ pillow series. Intrigued by all things typographic, I really enjoyed his illustration work and unique letterforms. I was even more intrigued when I saw that you can buy a group of letters to spell out a word. I wanted these pillows, but I needed to convince myself it would make a good anniversary gift for my wife. I thought… one, they were made of cotton; two, our lives are now all about our son so these would make great hand-me-downs once the novelty of it as a gift wears off; and three, I was going to spell the word, l.o.v.e.

So with Tyson’s help I now have really cool, hand-printed, monster pillows in my living room, my wife and I celebrated another great anniversary, and my son is absolutely enthralled with his new ‘toys’.

My wife had decided one thing for our son – his nursery theme was going to be giraffes. And I had decided on one thing – his nursery mobile was going to be handmade. So together we crafted a giraffe mobile. The giraffes consist of only felt, string and buttons; and the hanging system uses ribbon and a twig wreath. I think this was our first time collaborating on an art project. It was fun showing her my creative process and learning about hers. This was also my first time using needle and thread for something other than stitching torn pants. Overall, it was a time-consuming and draining project but we’re both really happy with the outcome. We hope Myles can enjoy it as much as we do.

As soon as my wife and I found out we were having a baby we starting transforming our office/storage room into a nursery. We know someday in the near future we’ll be looking to move out of our place, and we know we’re too lazy to repaint, so the nursery walls remained its original neutral color. To personalize the room and make it fit for a baby boy we decided on wall decals to add color and expand on the theme of the nursery: a bright color palette with fun-loving, Sub-Sahara African mammals.

There are a lot of sites, like Blik and Etsy, selling some great wall decals. We found one that matched our theme pretty well, by XpressionsThatStick on Etsy. What attracted us to this decal, besides the use of high quality matte vinyl, was the option to swap out colors so we could match more closely the palette of the nursery. I’ve had some painful experiences in the past trying to get decals onto walls, but this was insanely easy… Not sure if it’s the vinyl, but either way, we’ve got nothing but high praise for XpressionsThatStick.

Lining up the elephant. Got my trusty headlamp on. I use it for everything.

A love knot is one of the most classic shapes in origami. It was used for hundreds of years to send secret notes between two lovers.

For my first wedding anniversary I struggled to come up with gift ideas. As most people are aware, there is a list of specific gifts for specific years of marriage. Leave it up to the Victorians to come up with such romantic debauchery. According to this list the traditional gift for the first anniversary is paper. My wife enjoys origami so taking that direction seemed only natural.

I found a type of origami called the Lover’s Knot. Instead of just folding one knot I decided to create dozens, with a special memory written within each. To present the collection of Lover’s Knots I strung them together to create a mobile. Below is a video of the mobile in action.

I found instructions on how to fold the Lover’s Knot on a great site called OrigamiTube.com.

During the holidays at the office we like to do the old ‘Secret Santa’. It’s an excuse to share something we all have an equal affection for… booze. Instead of a gift we buy a bottle of wine and personalize it for the coworker we’re each randomly assigned. This past holiday I was assigned our traffic coordinator Ashley, a lover of cats and horror films. Oddly enough, the two compliment each other nicely. (Wes Craven’s cat is said to be the inspiration for Freddy Krueger’s glove.) So I decided to dress the bottle up as a cat using a few dollars on supplies and a hot glue gun.

It turns out Ashley prefers liquor over wine so I decided to buy some mini, sampler-size ‘nips’ and turn them into mice. Mice that have been mauled by the cat of course. (I needed to get some gore in there somehow.) It’s not often I get to do crafts so this was a fun little side project. I’ve since fallen in love with foam paper, and the cat turned out to be a decent, little bottle holder which I’m proud to say Ashley continues to use.

The cat stared solemnly up at me during our commute.

There is a crest that is used throughout the Trump brand. To enhance the marketing materials I created a seamless repeating pattern based off the crest but personalized for the golf club. The pattern uses pieces of the crest (yellow) alongside other shapes unique to the club, such as oak leaves (cyan) to mirror the landscape of Bedminster. There are golf clubs and a champagne glass (both magenta) to represent the two branches of the club, memberships and events. Elements of the pattern are also used as ornaments beside drop caps in various sections of copy.

Below is one of the first design concepts that never saw the light of day… until now. I liked this version so I decided to include it here.