Hiltl Building. Zurich

Oh. Oh. Oh. This is the TinyBuilding I am most proud of [excuse the bad grammar]! So much detail. This TinyBuilding is made from the business cards from a landmark vegetarian restaurant in Zurich. I've written about it in some earlier posts which accompanied much simpler and smaller Hiltl buildings.

Because their business cards are s-o-o-o-o nice, I am drawn to them again and again. And the cards I used for this special version are from my first visit there a couple years ago. My daughter and I had lunch there with the brother and fiance [now married] of one of my daughter's best girlfriends...the one who introduced her to her now husband of the Family Crest fame. In any case, we were so thrilled to find such a delicious vegetarian restaurant and to enjoy the charming company of our hosts, I just "had" to memorialize the visit with this rather intricate Hiltl building...Then, I sent it off to them without taking any pictures. Oops. It has taken a couple years for me to retrieve these...

This Tinybuilding is my attempt to render the actual Hiltl building. and, if I may say so myself, I did an excellent job. Even though this version is only about 3 inches tall [the Hiltl business cards are vertical instead of the typical horizontal format] by about 2-1/2 inches wide, I've managed to cut in the tiny, tiny windows and apply the tiny, tiny awnings just as they are on the real thing!!! Yum! [If you want to see for yourself, you can go to the Hiltl link...I think they have a photo of the building on there...]

c.2006

Summer Wedding. Mattituck

In honor of their union and their wedding this summer, my daughter and her husband created a Family Crest. They included various symbols of each of their histories and interests, combining them to represent their collective lives. Then, they used the crest as a connector throughout the communications and decorations for the wedding. They printed golden crests on Save-the-Date postcards, party invitations, cocktail napkins, The Invitations, anything that would stand still long enough. They stopped just short of requiring tattoos on the guests.

So, it was inevitable that the crest would show up on the favors for wedding guests. I had the crest printed in gold on some cardstock...lots of cardstock... then proceeded to cut out and form 85 TinyBuildings. It was an adventure. At least I had the sense to allow myself lots of time, which I then squandered until I had about six weeks to make most of them. I ended up generating about a half dozen a day. Rough, but driven by love....

The most difficult part was making a variety rather than replicating the same form and format over-and-over again. I always want to form the TinyBuildings based on the proportions and layout of the original material...In this case that was the same 2 inch by 2 inch card with the same slightly-not -symmetrical drawing; with some segments of the image [sketches of their two cats] 'demanding' that I not cut off their legs or heads. Arghhhh! I wouldn't say it got boring, but it was challenging to address each piece of cardstock with the same enthusiasm..HAHA!

But, they turned out wonderful, and everyone seemed thrilled to receive one. We packaged them in small lucite boxes so guests could drop them in their pockets to take home.

So, that's what I did this spring. I don't have, yet, any pictures of masses of these Tinybuildings, but I do have a couple shots, along with the special version I made for my daughter and her husband, which included their Invitation. The black dot on the roof of one little house is the fastener from the envelopes....

c.2008