My Lunar New Year Projects - Tailored-made laisee/ Red Packets/お年玉

With the inspirations from all the calligraphy classes I have learnt so far, I have tailor-made some red packets for my family, friends and colleagues for the celebration of the Year of Tiger.

This year, I applied the Imperial and Modern scripts that I learnt from famous calligrapher master Suzanne Cunningham and pointed pen Uncial from Barbara Close on nearly all my red envelopes, or laisee 利是 in Cantonese.

Thank you so much for the fantastic idea and sharing from Cannier Lui (IG @cancanwrite), a local modern calligrapher, who simply used an embossing glue pen and different colors of foil paper to create the decorations on gift boxes and red packets. You may refer to her IG account if you would like to make your foil decoration! This idea really elevated all my handwritten red packets and it was so much fun! This could allow me to showcase my foil paper and laisee collection to create all these special packets!

I have to admit that I am a stationery haul as well. I took out some blank envelopes and laisee with beautiful designs that I bought in local department stores. As I love to collect some pretty and Japanese style stationery, I also have many stickers, envelopes or small packets made in Japan that bought during my numerous Japan trips. I tried to find out the possibilities to handwrite on different envelopes and most of them work well with my pastel purple gouache mixing with bleed proof white, and the high quality metallic watercolor by Bas & Nana The Creative Kinds and FineTec.

Here are some of my work:

I was lucky enough to join the laisee exchange activity organised by Cannier. Here is my creation for the exchange:

My Chinese calligraphy is poor and I did not practice it since primary school..... but I enjoyed writing the fai chun 揮春 with my sister and nephews so much. Perhaps we should do this next year, too!