MissPrint: Wallpaper and Fabric Designs

There is nothing like the oncoming spring to inspire redecorating. It goes hand-in-hand with that peculiar desire to purge the home of the dankness and darkness of winter, to clear the dust and evacuate the spiders from the corners of rooms, to bring light and colour and flowers inside. The annual Spring Clean urges us to make a fresh start, to clear our cupboards of the old collections from the last year and make room for new collections.

Whilst I’ve found time to do a little clearing this year, I have mainly been looking at beautiful decor to ring in the season – like the vibrant patterns by MissPrint, which adorn wallpaper, fabric, lampshades and more. I’ve had my eye on some of their beautiful screen printed fabric for some time, but am yet to find the perfect project for these perfect patterns! What I would give to have a house with walls like this!

Feels a lot like Christmas

The studio has been a flurry of activity this week, working late into the night to send off orders to their new homes across the world. This week heralded our final posting dates for most of the world, bar Western Europe (which is Tuesday 11^th December) and the UK (Tuesday 18^th December), and all orders placed from now on should arrive in the new year.

Since I also work part-time at a lovely craft shop and art space in the heart of the Cotswolds, my evenings have been spent catching up on orders, and days off have been at the heat press and the sewing machine, pressing totes and stitching lavender bags, pencil cases and felt pouches for pocket mirrors. Feeling festive midweek, I decided to make roast chestnuts but had a minor accident when one rolled away whilst I was attempting to piece the skins, which resulted in plaster-covered fingers and general fumbling when it came to using my sewing machine again! All seems healed now though, and I’m back on full form for the sewing in the week ahead! Every spare moment is geared towards making, packing orders or answering enquiries and updating sites. Although it is exhausting, it is also exulting.

My lunchtime post office trips have been taking considerably longer than usual, as I waddle in with bags of packets and parcels under both arms. It seems that the post office has become a gathering place for creative entrepreneurs, and I’ve come to recognize regular customers who seem to be on the same time table as me, also laden with bags of posting. With nods of recognition and semi-awkward grins all around, we acknowledge that we are major contributors to the queue, and share a desire to sincerely apologise to the people behind us, particularly the poor guys at the very back who only came in to buy one stamp. Last Monday I spent a full 55 minutes at the counter, much to the dismay of the patient folk in the queue behind me!

Lush Designs

If you are looking for colourful and quirkily designed home wares, I wholeheartedly recommend taking a browse through the delightful products by Lush Designs. Their screen printed lampshades are one of my favourite things to ogle at when I am in need of healthy dose of pretty things. Naturally I was drawn to the fox design, but after some thought I decided that I preferred it in the cream and pale grey to darker tones because of how the colours of a lampshade can affect the light in the room. The colours of all the designs are so beautiful and well combined that they seem to make my mouth water. The cotton napkins adorned with root vegetable screen prints are a prime example, with their exquisite array of purples, oranges and blues!

Craft Fairs

This past week has flown by in a flurry of new products and exciting orders, so that my update on my first craft stall seems to have taken a back seat. As I blogged last week about the preparations for my stall at the Made Market on Saturday, I have had many messages asking me how it went and asking for photographs of my stall. I have already posted a few on the Mystic Moose facebook page, but I felt a blog post was needed as well!

All the planning and foraging for display parts paid off, and I was delighted with the way the stall looked. By painting some of the wooden display boxes, which were all different kinds of wood, it gave a more cohesive look and made the products the focal point. Using upturned wine crates added height and depth to the display, and the mixture of large and smaller items drew customers in for a closer look. My one improvement for next time will be the find a better way of hanging the tote bags – I used hooks attached to the edge of the table, which worked really well, but because there were so many designs I felt it looked a little messy!

 I arrived with much more stock than I needed, and two boxes of totes sat under the stall waiting to replenish displays. Even through one never get used, I felt reassured by its presence, and would definitely bring more than needed again. As long as it can fit under the table, the worse that can happen is you turn up looking like you’re moving in!

 

I used the stall as an opportunity to launch a few new product lines; lavender bags, shrink plastic badges and new padded make-up bags. All three were very well received and have been launched in my etsy shop this week!

Selling fabric and paper crafts, and having an outdoor stall means the slightest breeze can cause chaos, which is where gaffa tape comes in. Honestly, my stall was held together with gaffa tape. I picked a spot that was relatively sheltered, but to be on the safe side I used it to tape tablecloths down, the hooks to the side of the stall, bags to their stands, price signs in their places, and to tape string around display boxes to keep cards from fluttering away. I used nearly a whole role, and gave some to my neighbouring crafters. I would recommend taking an emergency role of gaffa tape to anyone doing a stall.

Some things to bring next time:

More change – especially £5 notes!

Table clamps to save some of the gaffa tape.

A calculator – I had one perching on top of my bag before I left, but it must have fallen out!

Another calculator – in case the one you planned to bring goes missing.

A bottle of water, or a flask to tea.

Paper bags for customer’s purchases.

A card machine.

 

The wonderful thing about craft fairs is getting to meet your customers face-to-face. Selling predominantly online means you have some lovely email exchanges, but you never get the casual light heartedness of a conversation. You also have the opportunity to mingle with crafty peers, and meet some truly talented folk!

Craft Fair Preparations

It is with great excitement that I inform the lovely readers of this blog, and the wonderful fans of Mystic Moose, that the time has come for our first craft fair! If you are in the Cotswolds on Saturday 11^th August, then pop along to Gloucester Folk Museum for the MADEmarket, an exciting new series of craft fairs in the local area!

I am a great advocator of buying beautiful handcrafted delights and vintage trinkets whilst browsing stalls at craft fairs, but I have never been a seller at one of these events. The thought had always seemed a little daunting, mainly because of the amount of stock I would need to make in preparation. I usually keep about ten of each item and design in my stock cupboard and make more when they sell, but for a craft stall, particularly with the smaller and less expensive items, I would need much more than this or the stall would look rather empty. Having read many articles on the matter, it seemed it was far better to overestimate and arrive laden with too much stuff, and hide it under the table ready to replenish the displays, than to bring the right amount of stock and have a stall that is half empty!

Having thoroughly raided my belongings for all interesting boxes, containers and knickknacks, I have begun to sort the ones that may be of some use. A small set of shelves lying flat on its back can hold a variety of pencil cases, a wine box tipped on its side becomes both a shelf for a cotton tote bag and a display box, an empty tea chest given to me last Christmas becomes a handy container for pocket mirrors and badges.

My only problem is all of these items are made from different coloured wood and materials, and when placed together, despite making an interesting, efficient and varied display, they look inconsistent. I’ve resigned to painting them all matt white (bar a few lovely old items made from wood), with the hopes of bringing attention to the products they hold. I know from experience that having different materials to create levels or backdrops can be distracting if they lack a consistent style or colour scheme. I remember stalls I have seen that unitised wicker boxes, antique wooden wine crates, painted white benches, plywood card stands and chequered fabric covered blocks, which all looked lovely individually, but they lacked cohesion when arranged together on a stall. I guess such details are not really noticeable to the average craft-browser, who may not think twice about the design and would hopefully be gazing longingly at a beautifully handmade craft item, it is something I have noticed whilst scrutinising fairs for ideas and inspiration for my stall.

Ultimately, I guess much of the display is dependent on personal taste, alongside the style of your brand. The best stalls I have seen have used backdrops made of one or two materials, such as the aged wooden crates and some white washed furniture items. Such stalls lured me in, especially if they had smaller items that enticed me to peer closer. Whilst rummaging for display boxes, I found an old fold-up table which, with the legs removed, became a lovely screen backdrop for part of the stall, which can also be used to hang some smaller items from.

For the last month or so I have had several product lines that I wanted to make but never found the time. The craft fair is a perfect opportunity to make some of these smaller items and get a feel for how popular they are and whether it is worth making more. If all goes to plan, the below items should be available to sale online by the end of next week!

On the top of my new products list is our lovely new badges. There are two kinds – large button badges, made using my badge and mirror making machine, and the shaped ones made from exciting shrink plastic! I am very happy with these shrink wrap badges, although they can be time consuming to cut out, bake and varnish.

I also have been making lavender bags, which have filled my studio with a delicious scent. They are filled with French lavender, with a heat pressed image on the front and a twine tag for hanging in wardrobes. I have been hesitant to make them because I was uncertain about whether I could export lavender to the USA and Canada, so when I start selling them online, I will only be shipping these within the UK and Europe for the time being.

And not forgetting Make-up bags, filled with wadding to protect their contents! I planned to launch these when I started to making pencil cases, but they spent longer in the development stage than I initially thought, whilst I found the right material to use as padding. (No photos for these as yet, but expect many more to come after the stall!)

This craft fair, alongside spending many hours developing exciting new crafty products for my shop, is part of my excuse for my lack in internet presence over the last month. Blog posts I have intended to write haven’t had the time to manifest, or are waiting to evolve from hastily scribbled blurbs in sketchbooks whilst travelling on public transport. With less than a week to go, I still have many more pencil cases to sew, mirrors and badges to press, and a little bit of painting to do, but all is going exceptionally well!

The MADE market is at Gloucester Folk Museum on Saturday 11^th August 2012.

Woodland Animal Totes

It is no secret that I have a great fondness for foxes, and regular readers may remember several posts outlining or illustrating various reasons for this. Although it has been many months since I have mentioned them, do not assume that this is because I no longer think of them; it is merely because I cannot seem to find the time to make as many declarations of my love as I would like!

I have, however, been taking quite a few country walks recently, and these have given me some lovely quiet moments with a sketchbook. In true British summer style, the weather has been a little intermittent in the last few weeks, pouring with rain one moment and overflowing with warm sunshine the next, but on the dry occasions I have taken a few art essentials with me on my wanderings. There are some lovely worn footpaths which trace lines across fields of long grass and it is not uncommon to spot wild rabbits and deer in-between the occasional dog walker.

I quite often find a seat on a dry-stone wall or patch of mossy grass and fill a few pages with doodles and thoughts. The process verges on therapeutic, and these quiet moments are wonderful for planning new designs for my shop. Last week was perhaps a more obvious example of this, when I caught sight of a red fox along the edge of the wood across the field from me. Without my glasses on she looked like an orange smudge in the distance, but she slid into focus once I had retrieved them from my bag.

Perhaps she wasn’t used to humans, or perhaps she didn’t see or smell me sat upwind, or perhaps she simply did not care that I was there, but she came towards me in an unconcerned trot.

It was one of those instances when you daren’t move for fear or spoiling it, so I sat very still as she approached. She was a healthy fox, unlike the ones that has moved into my garden some years ago who had been covered in mange. She had a sleek coat, and a thick tail, although she was a little smaller than I had expected so I wondered if she were young, or if it were just because she was a vixen? I briefly wondered what she was doing out, being a nocturnal animal, but then decided it was relatively early in the morning and she may be on her way home for bed.

When she was about five meters away she caught sight of me and froze. We had one of those frozen and assessing moments, that seem to last longer when you’re involved in them than they do to those on the outside. Then she turned tail and melted into the shadows of the wood.

I had been thinking of heading back to my studio at that point, but instead I rummaged in my bag for my flask – for I sometimes bring a flask of tea with me on these occasions, never knowing if I will stay out longer. It is a lovely mustard coloured flask that came with a picnic set I got last winter in the sales, and I am very fond of it. Settling down with a cup of tea, I began another series of drawing of foxes. But once I had finished a few, I moved on to rabbits, who had been frolicking on the other side of the field during my drawing, and then an Eurasian Eagle Owl, which I had not seen, but had been on my mind a lot these days.

When the weather began to turn, I packed up my sketchbook and pencils and continued my walk home. Back at the studio, over another cuppa (raspberry and Echinacea herbal tea, this time, my favourite right now,) I coloured my drawings and scanned them in for preparation to transfer them onto tote bags for my etsy shop.

Making Pencil Cases and Websites

After many weeks with long hours in front of the computer, I am so pleased that the Mystic Moose website for my craft shop is finally up and running. It was a wonderful place to put all the lovely photographs of totes that never quite reach the etsy listing photos – usually because they are too detailed or busy for the thumbnails. It links to my etsy shop, since that is the only place I sell my things online at the moment, but I really enjoyed making and designing the site, and will sell things from it directly someday soon!

On the theme of lovely new things, I have also branched out from the cotton tote bags I sell in my shop. For the last few weeks I have been perfecting my designs for pencil cases and purses, heat pressing my illustrations onto un-dyed cotton and sewing them in my studio. I had a huge delivery of zips at the end of last week, but couldn’t start immediately because I was searching for the zipper foot for my sewing machine. Even though I used the normal foot for the trail runs, and it looked okay, I felt it was important to take extra care when making something I was planning on selling. I visited my local sewing shop hoping to by a new zipper foot, but they had sold out of that morning. Eventually I found it last night when I crawled into the attic to look in the box the sewing machine originally came in. The box now holds a collection of beloved children’s books I can’t seem to let go of, and right at the bottom of the box, nestled between The Lorax and The Cat Who Walked By Himself, was the zipper foot. It was still in its plastic zipper bag with a needle threader, and apparently had been left behind in my excitement to use my new sewing machine two years ago.

After that little adventure, the pencil-case-making road had few bumps, and it wasn’t long before I had quite a selection to choose from. Not using a pattern or instructions meant that it was an interesting learning experience, working out how to have all the seams on the inside and yet leave a space to turn it inside out. I tried various places for this visible seam, including along the zip and on the bottom of the lining, but eventually settled on the side of the lining since it is least visible, and it meant I could sew in a lovely little Mystic Moose tag. I altered designs that are currently used on my totes, such as the typewriter, and the vintage map hearts, but I have some new designs floating about in my head right now.

I am hoping to order my new business cards soon, but I’ve been waiting for the perfect photograph of my products, and this wider range of sizes should making interesting compositions more exciting!

Also, don’t forget to enter the Mystic Moose giveaway over at Lazy Explorers! You could win your favourite Mystic Moose cotton tote, and the winner will be chosen on 13^th June 2012, so head over to find out how to enter!  This giveway is now closed, and the winner can be found here.

Studio Inspiration and New Tote Bags

I gave my studio a good spring clean this week because I have a tendency to collect various scraps of interesting materials and memorabilia which may one day make something wonderful, but, inevitably, never get used! The result is a studio full of rather lovely bits and pieces which unfortunately just turn into clutter, and could be more valuable to someone else who might actually use them. But whilst I was clearing the space, cleaning scraps of thread and fabric which got swept onto to the edge of the desk and onto the floor in my haste to start some new, crafty project, I began to notice how beautiful some of the most basic of craft materials are. The piles of lined up thread spools which I gaze at daily, for example, inspired a lovely colourful illustration which evolved into a tote design, which is for sale in the Mystic Moose etsy shop.

I am now looking around my studio in a new light. I have already taken inspiration from my typewriter, and my blue typewriter tote is one my my more popular items in my etsy shop, but I haven’t yet fully appreciated my sewing machine, or the piles of lace and wool I seem to collect and never have time to use!

Bird and Deer Park Inspiration

My weekend was well spent with a visit to Prinknash Abbey Deer and Bird Park. Being the nearest animal park to me and one that homes beautiful deer that eat from your hands, I have made a point to go to Prinknash as often as I can. This visit was, thankfully, full of sunshine and friendly birds. I fell in love with a peacock, and spent an hour drawing him in my sketch book, whilst he pranced about proudly in front of me. One of these doodles made it onto a tote bag and is for sale in my etsy shop.

I am working on some more of my deer doodles, planning on making a papercut or illustration from one or two of them.

I also have a great fondness for the goats at Prinknash, having spent well over thirty minutes stroking one lovely black and white goat who seemed to love the fuss. I wonder how much proper strokes they get, considering many children visit the park and tend of give a few giddy pats and squeal with delight when the goats eat from their hands.

I am hoping to upload my new drawings and designs this week, and have so many exciting plans in the making, so expect more animal inspired crafty goodies soon!

A Mystic Moose Label Making Spree

 It’s been ever such a busy few days, after a few of my etsy totes were featured on CraftGossip.com and in the daily etsy email. My studio has turn into quite the production line to keep up with all the wonderful orders I’ve been getting!

Today I spent three hours making tags for my tote bags. Luckily they are fairly simple to make, so I can get lots done whilst I listen to audio books (currently on the final captures of American Gods by Neil Gaiman.) I think these little tasks are essential to ensuring your crafts are well presented, but often I forget to restock them until I’ve nearly run out, and need to make hundreds!

What is great about this tags is that although they are made of fabric, the transfer used for the image stops the fabric from fraying, so I don’t have to use pinking shears (which always take me forever to use!) and I don’t have to hem the edges either. The only hard part is getting achy hands after using the eyelet punch on 500 or so labels, but even that can be solved with a well earned tea break! I am a huge fan of eyelets; tying twine through it in a loop means that the tags can be quickly attached the totes using a slip knot when I am packing them!

But pressing the fabric is time consuming for something that some customers may not even look at, so I have been considering making printed card versions in the same way, with the bronze coloured eyelet and twine loop. Whilst they would still look lovely, they would have to added benefit of being recyclable – unlike the fabric tags, some of which may end up in landfills. It also means it is considerably easier and less expensive to do double-sided tags, with extra information on the back – perhaps washing instructions, a little blurb about Mystic Moose, and a ‘recycle me’ prompt?