On October 10, 2010, I made HandmadeBySaraKim official. It started as a hobby and now I’ve been doing this for 16 years. I’m so grateful. If you want the full story of how it all began, you can read the origin story here. This post is the fun lessons I’ve learned along the way to celebrate my 16 years in business.

Why I started this Craft With Me Series. I took a workshop recently with Catherine Lash that guided us toward an artist statement of purpose. I had a full blog post about it here. We chose words really quickly kind of like a gut instinct. Mine were create and experiment.

On October 10, 2010, I made my business page official on Facebook. At the time, that felt like a huge deal. Sixteen years later, I'm still here, still making things out of paper and still a little amazed that it worked.

We're kicking off Season 9 of Paper Talk Podcast and it also happens to be episode 200 and this is eight years in the making with Quynh from Pink and Posey and Jessie from Crafted to Bloom starting this podcast back in 2018. I only joined a little over two years ago after being a guest on the show a couple times. I believed in what they were building, a community for artists.

Let's Mail Flowers teamed up with BloomInk, a student-run sustainability project out of San Diego. This month we sent subscribers something extra special, a plantable dahlia seed card made from recycled paper and discarded flowers. It's a small way to bring a little more sustainability into your mailbox, made by high school students doing something genuinely inspiring.

I recently sat down for a podcast interview and got asked how I started my business. As I was telling the story, I realized how many hobbies I've picked up along the way and some turned into part of my business, some I just did for fun, and some I was honestly bad at. So I thought it'd be fun to rate them all.

About a year ago, the San Diego Natural History Museum also known as The Nat reached out and asked me to recreate a variety of California native plants out of cardstock paper. Some of the plants were already familiar to me, but others I had never even heard of until I started noticing them growing right in my own backyard. Funny how that works.

Spring is here and nothing says it quite like a handmade paper tulip. In this tutorial, I'm going to walk you through how to make a paper tulip brownie, a gorgeous open tulip that has line details and looks great in bouquets, as gift toppers, or simply as spring home décor.