Her Empire Is Crafted by Hand

Kellene Giloff plunges into her overflowing stash of flattened shoe boxes, vintage adding machine keys, floral cellophane wrap and torn-out magazine pages with the zeal of a child encountering a new box of crayons. What some see as trash, she sees as limitless possibilities for art. "Look at these," she says, smoothing out some copper and gold metallic Godiva chocolate wrappers. "I just had to keep them. They're so beautiful."

Her affinity for scraps is understandable to readers of the many craft magazines she has published since the first, the Stampers' Sampler, debuted in 1994. Somerset Studio is a bimonthly devoted to stamping, paper crafts and calligraphy. The quarterly Inspirations features projects using Giloff's own Stampington line of stamps. Belle Armoire, introduced last year, is a quarterly dedicated to wearable art and jewelry, and the new Legacy is another quarterly that draws on family history and heirlooms as the basis for scrapbooks, art journals and quilts. Set to hit newsstands next year is Art Doll Quarterly, on handmade dolls. It grew out of "The Art Doll Chronicles," a book published this year by parent company Stampington that details the efforts of nine artists collaborating on a series of dolls.

Although publications such as Crafts Magazine and Doll Crafter have been on the stands for years, the 42-year-old Giloff has introduced a sophisticated sensibility to paper arts that reflects an evolution from cutesy country teddy bears to the use of images taken from paintings, botanical illustrations and hand-carved designs, as well as vintage photographs, Victorian ephemera and found objects. Recent themes have included "Gone With the Wind," Tuscany, the circus and India. The magazines' showcasing of collage and assemblage in lush photographs of note cards, journals and shadow boxes has not only become a signature style, but it has also nudged craft and fine art closer together.

"It's no longer just homespun crafts," Giloff says, sitting in her office in a nondescript Laguna Hills business park. "I think we've given people a new perspective on what crafting is about. When I was planning Somerset Studio, I was talking to [multimedia artist] Rona Chumbook, and we never talked about collage as much as the romance of paper. When I started stamping, there was just glossy cardstock, and all of a sudden there were these new papers, and I was enthralled because I could tear off a piece of handmade paper and add it to my stamped image and all of a sudden it was a new thing."