Day 1: Vintage Erasers by Lisa Congdon

Day 260: Baby Doll Hands by Lisa Congdon

Hi collectors! It's Sara today, with two new prints from Lisa Congdon's A Collection A Day. An abundance of neatly arranged, slightly nostalgic pink things—what's not to love about Day 1: Vintage Erasers and Day 260: Baby Doll Hands? (Given, the doll hands are a wee bit creepy but in a good, goose-bumpy kinda way.) Jen first introduced you to Lisa's project over the holidays, and while the seasonal festivities are long over, there's still lots to celebrate with this pair of new prints—Lisa's forth-coming book, the turning of attention to a new full-time focus on illustration and art-making, birthdays and haircuts. And, then, of course, there are the collections themselves—and collecting itself.

Whether the art collecting thing is new to you or not, I'd wager that you were a collector of some sort at an earlier time in your life. As a way understand the things around us, to personalize and to make them ours, collecting is an instinct that's embedded in us, even before we're aware of what we're doing.

In one of my favorite photographs of my sister, at about age six or so, she is huddled over a pile of petals scattered between her bare feet, circling yellow and red tulips with pastel snapdragon heads and smudgy poppies. Between the two of us, we traded her arrangements—along with piles of sticks, rocks and mica, strawberries, raspberries and the occasional small toad—to win made-up "survival" games. All of these things that individually could be dropped and lost in the grass, blown away and forgotten, collectively took on new (and, usually, dramatically increased) value when gathered, piled and sorted.

Like leaves and twigs, erasers and plastic parts (whether on their own and/or buried in drawers) might not amount to much. But culled and categorized, they take on new meaning, aesthetically, or otherwise. Lisa's collections, smart and sophisticated, are the grown-up version of things we used to do unknowingly (and if we're lucky, continue to do)—the whole project amounts to 365 days of celebrations.