A Handmade Birthday Card For A Friend | Personal Creative Project 2018

This incidental personal creative project, The Project Unplugged 2018, took me longer than expected to complete. What was initially intended to be just a simple, flat, one-fold birthday card I wanted to make for a friend, got spiced up with more and more finer details as my enthusiasm grew in the process. I became overly ambitious, wanting to stretch my right brain as far as I possibly could as I worked on it.

Wholly-handcrafted, no means of digital assistance, except for some iPhone apps used such as Google Translate to help me with Chinese word searching tasks to lessen the pain in the ass, and Calculator to do some arithmetic. This project allowed me to be in touch again with my inner child, ground myself, heighten my physical senses as I came in contact and experiment with the different mediums and materials of craft-making, study their functionality and characteristics which I would not have known before, since I have always been working on the Mac and iPad most of the times.

The challenges I faced were figuring out the mechanisms of the pop-up card and envelope, my unfamiliarity with the types of mediums as on how they would react to different surfaces, sourcing for the right materials, and most of all, there were no Command-Z buttons available to undo my mistakes! Some of the papers and the multicoloured string that were kept for quite a number of years, had finally found themselves well utilised in this project.

I had almost given in to the temptation of keeping the end product for myself when it was near completion, but that would be sinning against myself if I did. So, in October, I turned into a courier woman and hand-delivered it to the rightful new owner. It was 2 months late after Ms. Phang’s birthday. Luckily, it was not a client’s deadline that I was missing but a belated birthday gift to a friend that could surely be pardoned. The gift was scented with a sweet-smelling Neroli & Orchidee by L’Occitance, a perfume that I would not use on my body but it totally fit the bill of a birthday card, surprisingly!

Here’s the birthday gift set, a 3-month worth of intense idea-hatching, creative juice-squeezing and right-brain-expanding piece of chef-d'oeuvre, as I would like to call it. No damage done in the process but all experience gained. I got to learn about the various types of adhesive tapes too!! Those were the blissful moments spent with less interference from the electromagnetic waves of digital devices. Unplug from the external computer, plug in to the inner supercomputer and let the magic happen!

Check out the reaction of the birthday girl when she received the gift.

Videos shot, compiled and edited on iPhone X.