I have always been the type of person to tear something apart to see how it is made. I’ve lost countless springs to clicking retractable pens because I hastily unscrewed them to see how many components were inside.

That desire to be at the root of how and why things were made, and how they could be better, led me to my BFA in Industrial Design, or more commonly known as Product Design. Many of my classmates were master sketchers, and you would think that as a now-bookbinder, that I would be too, but no, I was more of the model maker. I had a part-time job as a theatre prop designer, making fake but believable props for plays and a few films.

When I found bookbinding, it opened a new avenue I had not considered before – I was actually a bit out of my element to be so interested in something that had so much history (blech, boring history!) – a very technical form of functional art. Sure, as an industrial designer, I could make functional “art”, but it might take months to years and a bit of luck for those items to come into production, and that even depended on the interested market of consumers.

Books were something I could make here and now, feel the heft, turn the pages, jot a few thoughts, make a few doodles. It became less about each tiny step of folding and gluing paper and more about the creation of raw materials into something beautiful, real and useful. My options are unlimited in color, texture, materials and form and I love the creative license I have when I'm creating books.

I started Winzy Design as a creative outlet that has led to a passion. The name of the shop was inspired by my oldest daughter's nickname.