Happy February! We are pleased to introduce Emily Mallory from Emily’s Papercrafts as our featured maker this month. She was born in Oregon, grew up in Northern California, went to college in Iowa and has now settled in Seattle! Well traveled! Her family gifted her quilling and origami papers as a teen and she’s been working with paper in one capacity or another ever since. She continued practicing quilling and origami throughout college and explains that she loved, “raiding the local libraries for more ideas and techniques.”

After college and getting settled in Seattle, Emily officially started her handmade business. Initially, she named it Emily’s Sunshine Room, but found that customers often mistook it for some type of cleaning or childcare business, so she changed it to Emily’s Papercrafts to avoid that confusion all together. I think this might be the first name change we’ve had on the blog too!

She still uses quilling and origami in her business but has recently started adding watercolor to her work as a way to enhance the look. I’m going to straight up copy and paste the explanation of her process because she says it so beautifully - “I attempt to make my finished products realistic but slightly whimsical because there is little in art that is an exact duplication or replication. Once I have my inspiration, I paint a watercolor background to add depth and a backdrop for the quilling. Then I searches for the quilling paper colors that best match her mental picture of the finished product and begin working. Sometimes my inspiration leads to a more detailed watercolor background and others to more detailed and involved quilling foreground. Each piece of quilling paper is individually cut to varying lengths, rolled, glued, shaped and then glued to other shaped pieces of quilling paper. Finished products can have anywhere between 50 to over 1,000 individual pieces of paper used depending on the design.” Reading through this I can totally imagine these pieces quite literally coming to life!

Emily is a stay at home mom and home-school teacher when she isn’t making and running her small business. The amount of time she spends on her craft fluctuates from week-to-week depending on what’s going on in personal life and with the business itself. She shared that origami ornaments and crafting kits are her best sellers and has been kind enough to offer you all 15% off your purchase on her website this month using the code HALFMILE at checkout! You can also stop in and shop many of her products right here with us in Bay City!

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