I’m drawn to multiples in design. I love wallpaper with its often repeating patterns, I love blocks of stamps, I was drawn to the multiple prints at the Photography museum and today at the flea market saw multiples again in the repeating pattern of Christmas Trees from turn of the century Germany scrapbooking paper. I don’t see all the edges of this yet — I used to just think I was into wallpaper — but I’m beginning to think that its more about multiples in design. Just a note to myself (images to follow) and keep trying to identify what holds my attention about multiples and how to apply it to my business and art.

The trees:

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While I dislike the pollution, heat and general sense of dislocation I’m experiencing as a traveler in Paris, I would move here just for the bakery bags (and for Kayser). They are such lovely bits of design in the everyday. Scanned examples to follow PP (post Paris).

Today, at the flea market at St. Ouen I fell in love with the shop Daniel et Lili and I’m sure I’m not the first. It is stuffed to the brim, floor to ceiling, with clear plastic boxes full of buttons, hair clips, combs, earrings, beads, vintage ribbon, wallpaper, decals of all sorts of monuments in Europe, plastic bangle from the 70s and 80s (including some florescent colors I haven’t seen SINCE the 80s), cards, religious icons of the Mother Mary and misc. paper goods (more on that later).

I spent two hours looking at everything twice. A designer’s dream — a museum of sorts to accessory deign in the last hundred years. I felt like I was stuffing my face with the best buttery croissant except it was plastic bric-a-brac and paper goods I was gorging on. I ended up with red paper lobsters, gold paper elephants, tiny pink pigs, elegant blue and pink paper lovebirds nesting, cowboys, circus animals, christmas trees (in multiples), a decal or two, easter bunnies in elegant pastels, some interesting cards that I bought for their folds (they might become Abigail Stationery cards someday) and two pink art deco-y combs that made me feel cool and sexy in 90 degrees.

I’ll post images of all the loot as soon as I am home in Brooklyn with my scanner. UPDATE — Here they are!

http://www.lilietdaniel.com/pages/vernaison.htm

We weighed our wedding invitation today and found that is was… 2.10 ounces. A 2 ounce stamp = .63 cents of postage. Anything over 2 ounces a .87 cent stamp. So much for using the beautiful, pastel .63 cent “wedding” stamps. The post office only sells one .87 cent stamp. Of a scientist.

Visted zazzle.com and stamps.com which were too expensive at a $1.30 a stamp for the face value of .87 cents. Six hours later I’m still looking and now am desperate for 1970s stamps. A selction below:

I was trying to explain to the budding stamp obsession/appeal to Tim: is it that stamps somehow represent our collective best intentions in less than a cubic inch? And, they are just beautiful, affordable design in our every day lives. To be continued…