Cute Little Paper Blog

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  • Long Beach

    Long Beach is one of my favorite places in LA. I love the colorful horticulture and the perpetual ocean breeze. It embodies every idea of the concept of California. With the perfect temperature year-round and the low-key vibe of the entire city – makes it a perfect place to visit. I had an awesome vegan guide that showed me to all the coolest places.

    Fun things to do in Long Beach:

    Aquarium of the Pacific – I think this is one of the best aquariums I have ever visited. I’ve been to many aquariums, all over the world. Notable ones include the world’s largest aquarium in Singapore, New York Aquarium, to name a few. I unironically have some pretty high standards for how I think they should be… At the Long Beach Aquarium, they have extremely rare animals and an amazing penguin exhibit. Everything is academic as well as visually stunning. My favorite are the Japanese Spider Crab. They’re seriously an evolutionary marvel. The aquarium even has free entrance days for teachers.

    Retro Row – A row of cute vintage shops. You can find anything here. The parking is accessible and not in a confusing or expensive downtown kind of area.

    The Parlour – A cool speakeasy with live piano. Cocktails are good and and the time-period decor is so cute!

    Museum of Latin American Art – MOLAA is the only museum in the United States dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art!

  • Moscow

    Soviet-era birthday postcards and a matroshka doll from Izmailovsky market in Moscow

    When I was a freshman in college, I spent a summer studying at International University in Moscow. It was my first time alone abroad and my first time in Russia. I studied Russian in college, a brave and stupid decision that would leave me no choice but to travel a lot as an adult or suffer extreme wanderlust for the rest of my life. I saved all the little bits from my trip, from the flyers to metro tickets. It was my first time seeing beautiful Cyrillic everywhere and I was enamored. I wanted to get my hands on any print matter containing this beautiful alphabet. When I came home, I had a bag full of what everyone else would probably define as junk. Lots of papers, random photos, my university ID, all the random papers that came along with a six week trip to Russia. I only had few conventional “souvenirs” .

    I decided to put it all together in an unconventional album, a vintage book.

    This is a theory of music book found at a street market in Moscow. Don’t be fooled, this isn’t the romantic idea of street market that you probably have about thrifting and estate sales in Europe. Much of Russia is unemployed, especially the elderly, and people do what they can, selling their possessions on the street. I “thrift” as a foreigner on the streets of Russia with a tinge of irony and sadness.

    As promised, calling cards and bus coupons.

    Photos that I took on my first day there. I used old scrapbooking stickers and paper, hence the inability to find all the letters needed. As disorganized as it is, I tried to use make use of any little scrap.

    When I look back at these posts, I cringe a little. It was 2015. I was weird. This is embarassing. But I am also proud to have this mish-mash of my psyche. I remember exactly who I was and what I was thinking.

  • Cancun

    Something I’ve always liked about scrapbooking is that you can make one entirely out of found materials. 

    When I think of scrapbooking, I typically associate it with going to a craft store, picking out sheets of 12″ x 12″ patterned paper from the scrapbooking aisle of a craft store, finding matching stickers and putting it all together into a pre-bound binder, pages with glossy sheet protectors. It’s all much too fabricated for me, reminiscent of PTA moms. And a traumatic history where I was elected historian of a terrible “professional honor society” I was in while in university, forced to produce a souless scrapbook so sorority girls could display it while tabling. *Close eyes and rock back and forth*

    Anyway… in an attempt to stay far, far, far away from the traditional ideal of scrapbooking is to create one of all found materials or with unique materials, not purchased from the big box craft store. One idea I’ve come up is turning a paper bag into a scrapbook. A paper bag is something I usually have laying around, usually from a recent trip to the pharmacy.

    I’ve made so many of these little books that now I have a small shelf of these books, lined up next to each other. Finishing one and adding it to the shelf feels good. It’s as satisfying as putting all your hardcover Harry Potter books in order on a shelf, and seeing how uniformly neat they look.

    A small book made from a paper bag to document a recent trip I took with my family to Cancun, Mexico. We got to go to Chichen Itza and Cenote Ik Kil. It was so magical. Traveling in Mexico always makes me wish I paid more attention in Spanish class in middle school. 

    The pages are torn out of another small notebook. This map was cut from a mass-printed map that all tourists get as soon as they set foot in Mexico.

    Money always makes the best souvenir to include in scrapbooks. It’s something I’ve already usually acquired on a trip. A customs form is always given at the airplane too. I love seeing official documents in different languages. This one is in Spanish.

    Stamps made into stickers with a colored frame. All text “framed” by construction paper.

    I couldn’t just leave Mexico or any island place without a cheesy handmade bracelet. The small photos are either from a Mexico travel magazine I found at home, or printed from photos taken on my phone.

  • Why is stationery so special to me?

    Mun Guey means stationery in Cantonese. I believe I sort of have an ancestral memory for all things written on paper.

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    My paternal grandfather traveled all around the world with his friends when he was in his twenties and thirties. He’s been to practically every country in Europe and Asia. He has brothers in Taiwan and Brazil. My grandma has boxes upon boxes of the postcards he would send back home, always written in Cantonese.

    Stationery in East Asia is a whole other game and I have seen its increasing influence on Western culture.

    I remember sticking out as a kid in my Texas and Arizona elementary schools. I always had a pencil bag with Japanese characters on it. My mom always got me a Hello Kitty backpack. My paper was colorful. I always had stickers to decorate my schoolwork. Even my stapler was sparkly and pink. It wasn’t until middle school, I wanted to be like everyone else and opted for a solid colored Jansport backpack, Mead notebooks and Crayola supplies from Target. My mom always took my sisters and I shopping for cute stationery. There was a Japanese stationery shop downtown that my mom always took us to on weekends, our little downtown outing, when we were still in school.

    Washi tape is just becoming the new “it” crafting item and it’s been something that I’ve had at my house since childhood. My relatives all have mechanical pencils and ink pens that are specific down to the model and size of led they carried. Hello Kitty, decorated school supplies, mini-versions of things – all aspects which I associate with my Asian side and traveling in Asia – are all now getting mainstream here in the US. I’m glad I don’t have to fly back to Taiwan just to get skinny pens or save my money up to go to San Francisco’s Japantown just to pick up new rolls of Washi tape. I’ve seen entire stationery stores with Asian products in Austin, Portland, and San Jose.

    I try to think about why East Asian cultures value stationery so much, but I haven’t come near to understanding it. For now, I’ll continue enjoying the small greeting card shops that have popped up in the US as of late, and supporting independent printing presses.

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    My grandfather that I never met in front of the grocery that he owned in Tucson, Arizona in the 70’s and 80’s.

    My mom says my grandfather, her dad, always loved stationery and had always bought them notebooks as gifts. I never got to meet him but it’s a characteristic that I proudly find in my family history. She did the same for me and my sisters as kids. And I’m not the only one to retain this – my sisters hoard notebooks and cards as well.

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    Whether it’s photos or writing, families share a lot of precious written media between them. I love going through old photo albums, reading my mom’s iconic cursive script on a label next to each scene. Photos and paper share something timeless. It’s fun to go through them and even more rewarding to create new memories.

  • Taipei

    The first thing I do on every trip is buy a notebook. I used to take a journal with me from home, but now I always pick a journal while in the actual destination. I’ve found that there is way too much oh-my-gosh-why-didn’t-I-buy-this-notebook anxiety. I frequent book stores and stationery shops in all the places that I travel to, and in the past, I’ve turned down buying yet another notebook, as I always already had one in my bag. Then, I made notebook-searching part of the trip and I’ve looked at shopping while traveling differently ever since. The perfect journal matches the length of your journey. A short little trip would warrant a tiny little thing, a long trip might need a larger journal. Moleskine and Rhodia are preferred hipster notebook brands right now, but I always try to find something that contains elements of the country on the cover.

    This guy is a little 5″x”4 passport buddy that I found at a bookstore in Taipei, Taiwan.

    It was the beginning of a week long journey around Taipei. My family and I visited Ping Hsi Railway (where the lanterns get famously released into the sky), Yangmingshan National Park, and the Beitou hot springs. It was my second time there. I went with many cousins and distant relatives. As in, how many of you all know your grandma’s step-brother’s children? Hello, I do, and I’ve traveled with them to other countries.

    The first time I had been to Taiwan, I was only twelve and had forgotten everything about the place. Don’t you feel a little bit sad for all the places you’ve went, but you weren’t awake yet? That’s how I feel about so many places I went to on family vacations as a kid.

    Travel tip no. 397: The best part of traveling with well-travelled people is that the food you encounter is so, so much better. 

    Whenever I journal, I keep space to paste photos in later. Developing phone photos (versus film photos) at a photo kiosk is anachronistic. Developing photos is slowly becoming obsolete, yet to bring it back by developing photos taken on a smart phone is fun. It’s also inexpensive to develop photos. You can always just print photos out later and wait to journal when you’ve returned home. I find that printing out photos and then waiting to journal after the trip is part of a necessary post-trip reflective process.

    Receipts in a language that I can’t read.

    The best part is that you can write in your worst handwriting because you’re journaling for yourself. Or you can be as descriptive as you’d like.

    You can be as dorky or as personable as you want. I’ve printed photos from my own Instagram to supply pictures for journals, as well as picked up money and coins to line the pages. 

  • Brooklyn & Manhattan

    One of the best parts of traveling, for me, at least, is all the paper memorabilia that I encounter on the way to the destination. A business card written in French for a French company and a flyer for a French cafe actually in France are things so peculiar and special, especially if it’s a faraway land. It feels foreign in my hands. The words, and even the paper that it’s printed on feels different. But it doesn’t even have to be as far away as France for it to have it’s own explainable, quaint charm. The typeface, even the logos and the borders of movie ticket stubs from a theater that is not your local theater are enticing in its own way. Whatever piece of paper it is, its almost always more remarkable than the same of its kind back at home.

    Scraps collected during a three week long trip to New York. As a Native Texan, New York might as well be as far away and foreign as France.

    Collecting scraps along the way is another form of souvenir collecting. Buying souvenirs for friends and family members was always something that came natural for me, but buying a gift for myself to remember that trip while I am on that trip is weird, too self-involved. Choosing that one perfect item to carry back home seems too calculated. Souvenirs, like memories, and like memory keeping, should be acquired naturally. 

    I save all my little pieces of paper in an envelope until I get home. Or I tuck it into a notebook. This is a business card for a comedy show, a rubber stamp shop, and a Cajun-themed pizza place in New York City.

    We acquire scraps so rapidly that in our hometowns, it becomes an annoyance. Your pocket fills up with gas station receipts, concert stubs, flyers handed out at a busy walkway. You get a sticker for attending an event at a gallery’s latest exhibit. You get a wristband for going to concert in a bar. But in a new town, those things can be collected for later.