PASSION FOR PAPER
Barbara Bunke lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Her passion is  paper, books, cards, collages, graphics...
She loves to experiment with all kinds of materials to show her  impressions on paper. One of Barbara's success stories is her card creations for Unicef,  which became the best selling cards in their history and enabled the  organisation to gain millions of US-dollars to help children all over the world.For many years Barbara has been running one of the most admired paper stores in Europe where she offers paper products from all over the world as well as her own creations. Ljunggrens Pappershandel. Barbara has also written books on paper crafts and bookbinding and is currently working on her third book.

After a five year long art school education, she worked as a graphic  designer for almost ten years. But that was not satisfactory enough; she felt the need of using her hands much more and went back to a more artistic way of working. She learned bookbinding, a craft well suited to her, which gave her a new dimension of working with paper.In 1991 she opened the store, as a way to present her own work.The store attracted people who wanted invitations out of the ordinary and her skills in graphic design came to good use. Today, Barbara is  
a very sought after person in Stockholm when it comes to personalised, handmade invitations. She also offers customers letter press printing which completes the picture. Combined with her calligraphy skills, the invitations get admired by all their receivers. To offer a total picture, Barbara also designs a range of rubber stamps to use for invitations or just personal card making.She works with a stamp company in Germany, creating designs and as  a creative source. Barbara also gives demos, classes and workshops in Sweden as well as in Europe where her "simple" style in card making has inspired a lot of people and set the standard for the modern card maker.

Her spare time is spent in the studio in her country house, painting traditional oil on canvas, and her most favourite occupation - making mini collages from what ever she can find in the garden or small left 
over scraps. Many of these collages, made in the country house, actually turned into best selling Unicef cards. Her inspiration mostly comes from the nature but also from the chaos on her working table. Mixing all kinds of papers, different materials and all kinds of non-wanted-items bring unexpected combinations into 
collages. The biggest challenge is to do something out of nothing, she says. It is the doing itself that is the most important.

For the Swedish Design Centre of Saint Barthelemy she has picked her handmade books, perhaps to use as a travel journal, sketch pad or even a guest book for the villa or to take home.

The biggest challenge is to do something out of nothing.

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