ArtyCrafts: Spreading the joy of handmade journals

By Fathima Riznaz Hafi

Hand-bound journals are not very common, what with the availability of machinery offering a quicker and easier option to the otherwise long-winded process. Sending them to the printers maybe the easier option for most, but Sithmini Jayanaga who loves craftwork, naturally prefers binding by hand after discovering the pleasure and fulfilment she gets by immersing herself in the whole process of finding the material, designing creatively and putting the journal together meticulously, page by page, thereby achieving a sense of satisfaction that it was all done by her.

A product of Ladies College, Colombo 7, Sithmini started off as an Insurance Analyst and when she left the job, the abundance of leisure time at home enabled her to indulge in her favourite past-time – craftwork! This hobby soon turned into a business when she launched ‘ArtyCrafts’ in 2011 with the plan to sell hand-made cards. 

“Initially I had a stock and I had to go all over the place trying to sell my cards and realised it wasn’t working; then I started customisation and got my first custom order from my brother-in-law’s company – they had some really weird requests! Soon I was getting four to five orders per month – that was enough at that time to keep me going,” she said.

The accidental discovery

Then one day she got an order to make a journal. She had never thought about doing this and had no idea how to make a book and was therefore really nervous but little did she know that this was going to be the start of a new success path in her career. 

“The client gave me a long period to figure it out because I told him I hadn’t done it and this is an art – I wanted to learn it properly. My father is a lawyer and he has hobbies, just like me. He was learning binding so when I got this order he was my first teacher for binding. He taught me the basics because he hadn’t learnt much at that time either. For the rest of it I went online, watched YouTube and taught myself from there. I took two weeks to make it and made mistakes and had to make it again but it actually turned out well in the end. 

“I think it’s when I started doing journals that things really started to take off. If I had been doing greeting cards for all these years I don’t think I would have gone far with it.”

Sithmini says all her products can be completely personalised to suit the customers and promises cruelty free synthetic leather as she is a big animal lover. I had already figured this out from the pictures on her Facebook page where we see a cat blissfully lazing around her work and how can I forget the moment we arrived at her house, when we were confronted by her large, beautiful dog who was not so happy to see us and ran towards us with loud, threatening barks, scaring the living daylights out of us! We got over it fast though because he was just such a beauty – plus we soon realised that we were safely on the other side of the gate. 

Range of products

“My main products right now are journals and custom-made cards but I don’t create stocks for any of my products; it’s mainly personalised for custom orders. I’m moving towards journals because I’m better at it. There will be a few more products coming out in the future – two more journals to my lot,” she said. 

She offers a variety of journals at present. “The ‘hard cover fabric journal’ is the traditional kind; then I started creating my own synthetic leather journals – they are not genuine leather and are therefore cruelty-free. I don’t want to use genuine leather because I don’t want to be a part of animal cruelty and killing. I have another kind of journal that I call ‘Coptic journal’ which is a very ancient form of binding and is really hard to do so I don’t have a stock of that. I have another small tiny journal called the ‘mini scribbler’. I also make diaries and organisers/planners. These are the main types that I have at the moment and will be introducing new ones pretty soon.”

Sithmini doesn’t restrict herself to just one kind of product – her range extends to scrap book albums, guest books and customised greeting cards (mainly paper cut and pop-up cards) and she adds that she can create pretty much anything that is possible to make by hand.

“I still do greeting cards and have two main ranges – one is a pop-up and if the customer wants it another way I do it that way. Otherwise I prefer to stick to pop-ups because I’m good at it and can create a better card out of it.”

Right now Sithmini is running a one man show where she goes out and gets the supplies, does the craftwork, communicates with the customers and arranges delivery but plans to get help as she expands because it tends to get overwhelming at times. She wants to keep learning and coming up with new products and assures that there will be more to come. Customers can choose to pick the goods up from her house in Battaramulla or have it delivered by courier.

Pix by Upul Abayasekara

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