Hi, there! I’m Sarah Werner and I have no professional design experience! But I do have a lot of professional experience thinking about the public domain and looking through digital databases of images of rare materials. And my commitment to the rightness of placing faithful reproductions of public domain objects into the public domain and my joy in how many gorgeous images are out there have somehow combined into the hobby of making designs from the things I find in the digital collections of libraries and museums. Everyone needs a hobby, right? Especially where you get to learn new skills and make beautiful things and sometimes experience the jolt of people enjoying and even buying the things? Thank you, pandemic, for driving this home.
I’ve got shops scattered around the web. The bulk of this stuff is in Shopflower, but I’m also starting to use Contrado for premade things like scarves and bomber jackets and dinnerware. I started off putting things up in Threadless and still have some favorites there—Suck it, Bowers!—but it’s not been a high priority recently.
If you want to know more about me professionally, you can get started with my professional calling card. If you want to browse some open-access digital collections of early printed books, I’ve got a list of those. And if you have a hankering for a custom design from some old book, give me a shout!