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February 13, 2023

Valentine Origami Papers for YOU

Hello, hello! If you’re looking for some last minute, why-did-I-wait-till-now Valentine’s Day craftiness, you’re in the right place. I designed some origami paper for you and had fun folding them into different shapes. The heart above is iconic, of course.

Envelopes are fun – you can write a secret or lovey-dovey message on the back of the origami paper and fold it up.

I am particularly smitten with the origami box. It’s surprisingly easy to fold and is a perfect container for little sweets!

There are several designs included in the PDF that you can click on the image below or download here.

I referenced a bunch of different origami tutorials online and meant to create my own illustrated tutorial, but well, I’m one of those why-did-I-wait-till-now people. If you search on “origami heart” or “origami envelope” or “origami box with lid,” there’s a wealth of video and step-by-step instructions on the interwebs.

Alright, just wanted to quickly pop in to share this. Have a lovely week whether you celebrate this day or not, my friends!

And check out my Valentine’s Round-Up for more printable goodies:

December 16, 2022

2022 Free Printable Holiday Tags and Mini Gift Wraps

Can December 16th still be considered early December? No. It cannot. I erroneously believed and declared that I would have these holiday printables for you many, many days ago, but here we are. Let’s not dwell on excuses or explanations, though. If you need last minute tags and mini gift wrapping paper (ideal for tiny presents — jewelry, perhaps?), I got you.

I’ve designed some fun ones, which I hope will come in handy. Lately I’ve been really, really, really loving the Procreate app and have been playing around to see if I can make my digital watercolors look like the real deal (not that digital painting isn’t real — it’s just a different medium). I’ve sprinkled in some traditional watercolor illustrations amongst the digital ones. Can you tell which is which? I’m actually having trouble differentiating them myself.

For your merry-making and gifting pleasure, simply click on the image to download the PDF file. As always, I recommend printing the tags on card stock or sticker paper or textured inkjet paper like this one. If your printer has a borderless option, please select it; otherwise, you’ll have a 1/4″ border for the wrapping paper, which isn’t too big a deal. I tried to create some designs that could be used all year-round, just because I’m a practical gal and like to have options.

I will one day round up all the tags and wrapping papers I’ve designed and posted on this blog over the years, but if you’re looking for more options, please search on “holiday tags” and a whole slew of them should pop up!

Anyway, here are the 2022 holiday printables (click on the image to download):

TAGS

MINI GIFT WRAPS

Alright. That’s it for me in terms of 2022. What a year! I am looking forward to some R&R, and other than a couple of short posts for Patreon, I will log off from the online world to allow for some much needed rejuvenation. I’m going to hang out with my fam, eat some good food, read lots and lots of books and paint up a storm in Procreate! Oh, and I’ll squeeze in some sewing too. Sounds divine.

I am thinking of you all with a heart brimming with appreciation and a sense of wonder. We’ve made it to the end of another year — this alone is cause for celebration!

Sending you so much love and wishing you the most glorious holiday season and the loveliest start of 2023! I’ll be back at the end of January. Stay cozy, my friends.

November 30, 2021

2021 Advent Calendar + Free Printables!

Hello, hello my friends!

If you’re in the US, I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend to kick off the holiday season. Mine was quiet and very low-key, which is exactly how I like my my celebrations, especially celebrations about gratitude.

One of the things I’ve been working on over the long weekend is the annual Advent Calendar. It’s going to go on top of the piano, and this tradition is a much beloved one in our family. As I was cutting and assembling, I realized that this will be my 10th Advent Calendar. 10 years!! Isn’t that mind-boggling? As always, I’ve listed all the calendars I’ve made to date at the bottom.

It’s always a challenge to come up with a different concept, and this year I designed a bunch of patterns, then I folded them into triangular boxes (I followed the tutorial from here, but made my own template of quatrefoil shapes). Aren’t the patterns cute? Can you find the boba tea and volleyball ones? You can tell that I had a lot of fun trying to make them holiday-esque! I created about 30 designs total but obviously only used 25, and tried to include a few motifs that represent K’s favorite things. I had a “doh!” moment, however, when I noticed that I forgot to include a music-related pattern. Music is at the top of her favorite things list! That and true crime podcasts, which I also didn’t include. What would I have drawn? Knives and blood and dead people? Crime tape?

So I started by cutting out the shape…

Then folded in the “petal” edges…

Then folded each triangle inward to create the square base…

Added the filling and punched a hole in each petal tip…

Threaded a cord through and attached a little circular label (for the countdown numbers 1-25)….

And voila!

I was especially proud of the idea of including a puzzle piece every day. I got one of those DIY puzzles from an art store and painted it with watercolors. I love that she’ll be able to slowly put together the puzzle throughout the month.

Fun, right?

Here they are…adorable triangular gift boxes, ready to be opened (sorry for the image quality — I was rapidly losing natural light):

Every year I like to offer up some free printable holiday tags for YOU, and realized that I could simply reduce the size of the quatrefoil shapes into sweet little tags. You know how much I love tags! If you’d like to download some tags from years past, scroll down after the list of Advent Calendars.

For this year I selected 12 of the designs that felt more generally appropriate (you probably don’t want a volleyball themed tag, right?) and arranged them onto one sheet as tags. Click on the image or here to download the file. I recommend printing them on card stock or textured paper like my go-to Inkjet paper for best results.

I’m so excited for K to see the calendar tomorrow morning (December 1st)! That’s the most thrilling moment for me: when she wakes up and beholds the whole shabang.

By the way, if you’re subscribed to receive blog posts by email, I’ve switched email services and will be sending the blog posts from a different email address (sanae[at]sanaeishida.com), so you may find the blog updates in your promotions tab or in your spam folder. Please have a look there if you notice that you haven’t been getting updates from me. Thank you!!!

Oh, and here are the past Advent Calendars:

And here are tags from years past for your convenience if you’d like more options:

August 31, 2021

SUMO COUNTING + SUMO OPPOSITES!

Wow, August just vaporized and I’m reeling from the fact that September will be upon us in a matter of hours. How are you, my friends?

I’m doing a quick check-in today for a couple of reasons:

I wanted to say hello – August has been somewhat rough for me and my monthly ritual of updating my blog has a helpful, grounding effect. Though I’ve been pretty overwhelmed especially in the last week, there’s a chance that life will calm down very soon. Whew. My favorite autumnal season is just around the corner, and I’m excited to savor it. Things are starting to look up!
I have new books coming out:

Oh my goodness, aren’t they CUTE?????? SUMO COUNTING follows a typical day of sumo wrestlers with little rhyming couplets. SUMO OPPOSITES is just that — opposite words, plain and simple. I did try to incorporate lots of Japanese cultural elements in the illustrations for the OPPOSITES book too, though. Plus, there are Japanese words accompanying the numerals and English terms. I always love it when board books are informative and interesting for adults as well as for the littles, and I kept that in mind as I created these.

The official release date is next Tuesday, September 7th! They are available wherever books are sold (you can click on the book images on my sidebar or click here), and pre-orders are always awesome!

I am particularly in love with this spread from SUMO COUNTING (the most elaborate one):

The Japanese garden I painted is a mash-up of three local gardens: The Seattle Japanese Garden, Kubota Garden and Bloedel Reserve. All three are incredibly beautiful and it was such a delight to incorporate various aspects of the three gardens.

This is the opener for the SUMO OPPOSITES book:

I loved trying to balance the minimal and complex illustrations for the series.

So! I like to include fun extras whenever possible, and to celebrate the forthcoming launch of my adorable sumo guys, I designed a little repeat pattern, which can be used as gift wrap for small presents. Click here to download the printable PDF file.

I taped two sheets of the sumo paper to wrap both books. As you can tell, I’m very into blues and greens lately.

Here’s what’s even more thrilling: there are TWO more Sumo books in the pipeline! Like all of my kids’ books, the next two will be published through Little Bigfoot/Sasquatch Books. The entire set will be a great addition to any library, and these make excellent baby gifts. The best way to describe how I felt making these books is “joyful,” which was much appreciated since I was working on these during the height of the pandemic lockdown last year. I’m so grateful to have had these sumo books to keep me company during these uncertain times.

Yay! Please order these joy-boosting books for every baby/toddler you know :-)!!!

December 18, 2020

2020 Free Holiday Printables

Hello, hello!

I am, as ever, a creature of habit: the annual Advent calendar (this year’s is my absolute favorite to date, by the way), the monthly blog posts, and all the other various habits I’ve cultivated over the years that I uphold with a Pit Bull determination. For the month of December, I created some cute holiday tags and print-at-home goodness for my Patreon members and then remembered that I normally offer up free printables here on the blog during this season.

So I started to play around with a more simplified set of tags and wrapping paper designs and things got a little out of hand.

I created 16 tags:

…and 10 wrapping paper designs (ideal for wrapping very small gifts):

The tags and wrapping paper can be easily printed on 8 x 11.5″ (or A4) paper. I always recommend thicker paper for the tags like this one. I’ve finally figured out how to make seamless repeat patterns, which has been a major learning curve for me. Surface pattern design is SO fun. Most of these were created using Photoshop, but some were done in Adobe Illustrator. I’ve also learned how to use Procreate to make patterns, but I’ve had the best luck with Photoshop so far, especially since I like to use my watercolor illustrations which often don’t vectorize nicely in Illustrator

I hope these come in handy! I may dip my toes into printing some Spoonflower fabrics with a few of my designs in 2021. My mind is now spinning with ideas!

Anyway, since combining all the files into one PDF created a giant document, I had to split them up. Please click on the images below to download the PDF files:

Let me know if you have any issues!

Alright my friends, I’m wishing you all a festive end of the year! I’m looking forward to posting in January — a fresh new start is exactly what I need. I don’t want to put too much pressure on 2021, but I’ve got high hopes! Cheers!