Just Before There Were Journals...

there was the winter holidays of 2003. It was in those long winter nights that I was just beginning to wrestle with how to use the bazillions of books that I had been saving from my years of working in libraries & schools. I wanted to do something for holiday that was meaningful, bookish, & that gave a nod to the incredible community of friends that I had amassed in the first decade of my adult life.

I asked 20 friends what song was their favorite... in a text... with no clarity as to why... Then I burned a CD with all those songs. I made a basic Avery label that had the song, the artist, the name & from where each of my friends hailed. Then I adhered it onto a book page taken from a book about stained glass windows in churches. I sent them to everyone in my life as my holiday card that year & just my grandmother’s enthusiastic reaction (“Your friends are interrrresting, aren’t they?!”) made it a worthwhile experience.

That was my first attempt at upcycling a book & a little over three months later, in March of 2004, Attic Journals was born.

It’s in that spirit that I’m sharing this Spotify station with each of you. While this “Summer Market Mixtape” is definitely here to make online markets more fun for our retail partners, it’s also a way to introduce all of you to a group of makers I’m proud to have come to know in the past 17 years that we’ve been in business.

To know them is to know us & what better way to know someone than to see their bookshelves or listen to their tunes. Meet my friends:

• Crystalyn Kae
• Splash Fabrics
• MKC Photography
• Bird of Virtue
• Minor Thread
• Portland Bitters Project
• Wyldeflower Studio