Mother’s Day Crafts!

With Mothers Day approaching in the UK, I’ve been playing with the idea of updating some of the products in my etsy shop. Lavender bags, pocket mirrors and make up pouches have all had a little spruce up in the last week, with more designs on their way!

I found some super soft natural cotton linen fabric in my local haberdashery last week, and knew it could be used to make something wonderful, so I bought a meter to play with. It wasn’t long before my new range of illustrated square lavender bags were on their way! With a heat pressed image of my illustrations on one side, and filled with aromatic French lavender, these little beauties were finished just in time for Mother’s Day! These lavender bags are perfect keeping drawers and wardrobes smelling sweet, freshening up rooms and tucking beside beds to promote a restful slumber! Lavender has traditionally been used to aid sleep, calm and soothe for centuries, and the French Lavender filling in this bags has a lovely relaxing fragrance.

I have also been expanding on my range of pocket mirrors. As regular readers may be aware, I recently started making these with lovely fabric illustrations instead of the old paper and cello designs; they have been very well received and are flying off the shelves! The pocket mirrors come complete with a lovely blue or pink hand stitched felt pouch with delicate off-white lace detail. Now my teacups and saucers illustration and eagle owl illustration have been added to the designs available!

And finally, the makeup bags are somewhat of a work in progress, something I have been playing with for the last few months. Having finalised my designs, sewn my prototypes and ordered my fabric, all that’s left to do is wait for the supplies to arrive and sew! I have a feeling that due to various time constraints, they may not be ready for Mother’s Day in the UK this year, but they should be available towards the end of March!

A new customer favourite this week is our Breakfast in Bed IOU Coupons. I guess some lovely mums are getting a breakfast-y treat very soon!

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!

Valentine Heart and Fairytale Papercuts

It’s been such a wonderfully busy week in the lead up to Valentine’s Day, but I’ve finally found time to finish off some papercuts and upload them to this blog and to my etsy shop. The first follows along the Valentines theme, with a decorated heart and the delicately cut words ‘You Make My Heart Sing’. I am very fond of the two little birds in this, and the ornate decoration took such a long time to perfect! When designing papercuts, it’s really important to make sure the lines are all connected so that it doesn’t ‘fall apart’ once you begin cutting. I quickly found a good way to work this out is to draw the image in pencil, then go over it in pen, checking all the joins. It sometimes takes a little while for your eyes to adjust to which bit is being cut out, so I usually scribble a pencil shading on the cut out bits if I keep getting confused! The image is then scanned into my computer and printed out on thin printer paper, and attached to a piece of card so that printer paper acts as a guideline for where to cut the card. It’s really useful to masking tape it to a self healing cutting mat to stop them sliding around as you cut!

The second is inspired by all the fairytales I’ve been reading lately, and features a fairytale scene with an elegantly written ‘Believe’ across the page. I spent such a long time picking out coloured card for backing, and eventually decided on a lovely light blue shade which always reminds me of the painted illustrations in old fairy story books.

I really love the imperfections that come from hand cutting paper, but I wanted to be able to sell multiples of these at a reasonable price in my etsy shop. I decided to compromise, by hand cutting both of the designs and cutting electronically cut duplicates for my shop. I am hoping to have many more papercuts availible soon, as I enjoy the process of designing and making them so much!

Valentines Day IOU Coupons

With Valentines Day fast approaching, I’ve just finished off my IOU coupons for the occasion! Whilst it’s lovely to be treated to a delicious breakfast in bed or a romantic meal, it’s also wonderful to have something tangible to open and remember it with – which is where these vouchers come in! They were inspired by 1940s vintage ration cards, after I spent an evening with my grandmother, looking through her old photographs and keepsakes from her childhood in WWII. There’s something wonderfully charming about vintage styles, which I’ve tried to capture when I was working on these, whilst also entitling the bearer, be they your beloved, friends or family, to a wonderful treat!

They have an aged card appearance, and a space for the giver to write their loved ones name and their own signature, and also circle an expiration date in the grid. I’ve made these two coupons at 10.5 cm x 7 cm, because wanted them to be small enough to slip into Valentines Card, as a beautiful token of their gift to come.

I started with a Breakfast in Bed coupon and a Romantic Dinner, but plan to have many more IOU vouchers soon, after seeing how well these go down in my etsy shop. Anyone have any ideas of lovely IOUs they would like to see –or receive?

Colours of Love Paper Cut

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ve been working on these delightful papercut crafts. I spent a lot of time working out how to age the pine frame to create an effective rustic charm. It involved hammering dents and chips into the wood, and then using a diluted wood stain to wash over the wood using an old cloth. Although its a time consuming process, I decided to do several shadow box frames at once – some smaller 5 x 5 inch frames I hope to fill and put in my etsy shop soon – and found it takes less time to do a batch than each individually!

The paper cut is made from natural brown card which reveals recycled paint charts underneath, showing a selection of charming earthy tones. Romantic-themed colour names are written underneath each heart in typewriter style lettering, and the title on the top reads ‘Colours of Love’. Since this is for sale in my etsy shop, I decided that I would make a version with the US spelling (‘Colors of Love’) and ask people to leave a note specifying which spelling they would prefer! I am so in love with this little framed paper cut I found it difficult to list it on etsy; it’s so sweet that I wanted to keep it for myself! So I had to promise myself that I would make a bigger version for my studio wall soon!

Also, I recently set up a facebook page and twitter account for my etsy shop, and welcome followers and ‘like’ers! My New Years Resolution was to keep all these social networking outlets up-to-date, and its going fantastically so far, especially since I worked out how to link the accounts together!