Notes from the the West Village counter
Practical notes about craft and specialty paper, written by the people who stock it.
Ordering paper for a classroom or a workshop
Buying for twenty people is a different exercise from buying for yourself. The failure modes are running out mid-session and buying a material nobody can actually use, and both are
Transfer paper: getting a drawing onto an awkward surface
Graphite transfer paper puts an existing line drawing onto a surface that is too dark, too rough or too valuable to sketch on directly. It is a simple product with two or three tec
Felt sheets: craft felt, wool blend and what each is for
Felt is sold at very different prices for material that looks similar in a photograph. The difference is fibre content, and it determines how the edge behaves, how it takes a needl
Origami paper: size, weight and why squares matter
Origami is unusually sensitive to paper choice because every fold compounds. A sheet that is slightly out of square, or slightly too thick, becomes visibly wrong twenty folds later
Buying kraft paper by the roll for wrapping and backing
Kraft rolls are one of the few materials where buying more is genuinely cheaper per use, and they turn out to be useful for far more than parcels. The variables that matter are wid
GSM, pounds and what paper weight actually tells you
Paper is sold by weight in two incompatible systems and neither of them directly tells you how thick a sheet is. Understanding roughly what the numbers mean removes most of the gue