A slightly introspective retrospective

Dear Everyone ~

Today, June 26, is my seven-year anniversary of opening Bari Zaki Studio on Lincoln Avenue! To honour the occasion, I have updated the “About” page on my website, highlighting major moments in the past seven years. The element that binds them together is paper, my enormous love for it, my endless desire to make beautiful and meaningful objects with it, and, of course, the ways that paper connects us!

It has been an eventful seven years, from filming my first online bookbinding video with Sonheim Creative (2017), to offering workshops via Zoom to an international audience (2020)... to my recent filming with The Crafter’s Box, which will debut this August & autumn. My postcard wall, which began (2015) as an ode to my love of correspondence, with a hundred or so postcards washi taped to the shop wall, now flows all the way back through the studio, with at least 1,001 postcard tales from customers, students, and ardent correspondents from around the globe.

I am infinitely grateful for the continued community & camaraderie that has expanded despite the pandemic. And for the ongoing pleasures that teaching workshops and receiving mail & photos provide. Students, shoppers & correspondents all contribute their creativity & ingenuity, renewing and refreshing my papery passions.

Speaking of postal musing, Alyson Kuhn has sent me two swoonworthy envelopes commemorating my anniversary. I want to share them with you here. Her address frame of postage stamps always delights me, and her use of “themed” postage is a bonus. The Postal Service issued very few 7¢ stamps, and these two are such beautiful examples of engraving. The blue-frame stamp, issued on January 3, 1959, honors Alaska’s admission as the 49th state. The red-frame stamp, issued on August 21, 1959, honors Hawaii’s admission as the 50th state—the envelope is winging its way to Chicago, hopefully to arrive today!

To envelop shoppers in my anniversarial happiness, I have assembled a party-favour: seven sumptuous scraps in a Cambridge Imprint envelope, super-sealed with a teeny butterfly-clip covered in Japanese paper and flap-happy strips of washi tape. Everyone who places an online order or shops in-shop through Tuesday, July 12, will be gifted these scraps of my paper gratitude.