StickerKitten Penguins and Presents craft rangeNovember 4, 2016 |
Hi everyone, today I’m writing about my StickerKitten Penguins and Presents craft range because I realise it has been out for a whole month and I haven’t done a blog post yet! Following on from our Birthday Dinos range, James and I got to work on a range of Christmas papers.
James hand-illustrated each of the designs, including just the cutest little penguins you have ever seen, some pretty fairy light designs, bokeh backgrounds and scripty calligraphy and we got them printed locally in Newbury on recycled carbon-neutral paper. We chose textured 160gsm again, like the Birthday Dinos papers, because it has a good sturdy quality for crafting and the slight grain makes it feel a little thicker and more luxurious to work with.
Once the papers had been cut, we took them home, collated and packaged them ourselves and James built me a lovely new bookcase to store them on, alongside the Birthday Dinos collection, before they are shipped to customers.
If you’d like to have a look through the papers in the pack we have made a little twenty-second video that you can view on Instagram here. We also wanted some embellishments to go with the range so I put together some packs of pretty buttons and festive sequins that match the papers perfectly.
You can’t quite see in the last picture but there are some lovely dark winter forest tree sequins in the pack of blue sequins. I need to re-do the pictures when I have time to do justice to how pretty and sparkly the sequins are in person!
I am so proud of my little craft ranges and we had the opportunity to show them off at a couple of local craft fairs in October. James built me a brilliant wooden stand perfectly sized for the products! They look so pretty sitting all together.
And finally, the most recent addition to the range are these GORGEOUS wooden embellishments which I am totally obsessed with
Again James illustrated each of the designs by hand (and my job was bossily describing exactly what I wanted in case you’re wondering what I actually contribute to this whole operation – think of me as the MD). We sent the designs to a very lovely lady with a laser cutter who manufactured them for us and when they arrived I sorted them into sets and packaged them up ready for sale on my shop and on Etsy.
We would love to have done some stamps to match the range too, but it cost us a lot to manufacture the Birthday Dinos stamps and we haven’t yet sold enough to make back the cost so we couldn’t justify going ahead with penguin stamps. But let’s see what happens! Maybe next year we can build an even more expansive Christmas range.
Anyway, over my next few blog posts I’ll aim to give you some ideas of what you can make with the Penguins and Presents range, including cards (especially shaker cards!), Christmas decorations and decoupaged coasters. In the meantime, if you happen to live nearby (or are willing to travel) I can teach you to make shaker cards in person! I am running a workshop at The Mulberry Bush in Thatcham on Saturday 19th November 2016 and there are still a couple of spaces left. You can book through my online shop.