Yes, it is Thursday, which means I get to stay home from work work and do the work I love: art. I do love the holidays, but they definitely throw my art-making schedules off, so it is with great relief and joy that I find myself inside a whole glorious day dedicated to art-making.

Last night, and this morning, I have been playing around with different handmade typefaces, inspired by hand typography in two books: Kate Bingaman-Burt’s typography in the Handmade Nation book by Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl, and the foreword typography by Michael Mabry in the book Fingerprint: The Art of Using Hand-made Elements in Graphic Design.

I will leave you to go out and look at these books yourself for typographic and creative inspiration (I found both at my public library), but here are some of my experiments at trying to make different typefaces that convey moods:

The “Happy Thursday” type at the top of this post is a personal interpretation of one of Bingaman-Burt’s type faces, and the rest are just me messing around. This exercise was highly fun, so I recommend it to all of you creative types. There is always more room to explore!

I think I will be using the “Happy Thursday” typeface for my wedding invitations (for those of you who didn’t know, I’m engaged and getting married next Fall!). I’m very excited to design various paper items for the wedding. I’m starting in on the brainstorming phase right now—more to come on that in the next several months.

What better way to pass the time at work, while the IT guy was fixing my computer, than to draw the letter “A”?

Just in case you think I’m entirely crazy, other than the fact that I love letters, I have been working on different incarnations of all of the letters for an alphabet book of food. I came up with this idea a while ago, and it is slow going, but every once in a while, I pick it up and work a little.

On another note, I have been starting to put originals in my Shop, so check it out when you get a chance. I am putting them in slowly, so stay tuned– many more originals (and prints) to come.

I hope you are having a wonderful beginning to the week. I am very thankful for a wonderful breeze this evening–it made walking my dog so relaxing and cool.