Friday Feature

This week's featured shop is Molly Lee.



1. Tell us about you and your shop.

I'm the working mom of two identical twin boys, 8, trapped in a cube farm in corporate America. Designing and selling my cards has given me the freedom to explore my own personal sense of style and gives me an amazing creative outlet.

My etsy shop features interactive greeting cards and invitations. I specialize in cards with some type of movement, whether it be a pop-up that comes up when the card is opened or motion created from a pulled tab or turned wheel.


2. How did you get started in your craft?

When my boys turned two, I made ladybug invitations (an idea from a magazine) with wings that pivoted to reveal details of the party. People loved those simple invitations and I was hooked. After that, I would start planning their parties up to six months in advance so that I would have plenty of time to design the cards. After getting rave reviews about my invitations for years, I finally opened my etsy shop last year and posted my Interactive Fishy Spinning Invitations (http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=12823109) and my Circus/Carnival Invitations (http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=12034216), both of which were originally designed for my boys.

The positive response to my work has been thrilling and a reward in itself -- I love getting feedback from my customers. It is so exciting that enough people are interested in my cards to have propelled my shop to a modest level of success.


3. What is your favorite material or tool?

My favorite material is plain, white cardstock. I work digitally (with Illustrator and Photoshop) so cardstock is the blank canvas that I use for all my work. Using it, I can print any design that I can imagine.

My favorite tool is my Craft Robo. It's a digital cutter that interfaces with Adobe Illustrator to allow me to make perfectly aligned, intricate cuts. Without the robo, I could not possibly produce cards with enough precision to allow the types of movements that most interest me.


4. Where do you get your design inspiration from?

I troll bookstores, the library and the internet constantly, looking for new, clever paper engineering mechanisms. Taking a mechanism that, say, was shown on MarthaStewart.com to animate a dog's head and re-engineering it to instead create an expressive arm gesture is a very satisfying process for me and one that sparks endless design challenges.