StickerKitten Bold Floral Papercraft RangeSeptember 16, 2024 |
Bold Floral design process
I’m very excited to introduce our brand new Bold Floral papercraft range! This is the first collection that I’ve designed and illustrated myself completely from scratch (usually James does the majority of the illustration work for our papercraft and sticker ranges).
The first item I started working on was the paper pack. I doodled a design of some colourful flowers in my sketchbook and I soon could picture a whole range of colourful flower patterns with bugs and butterflies mixed in too.
I first sketch out my pattern and illustration ideas on paper, and then I use those sketches as a base to create the artwork in Procreate. Once the motifs are drawn, I open up the file in Photoshop to create the final pattern. Then I drop it into a print-ready CMYK-formatted Photoshop file in the right size for our papers, and export it as a PDF ready to print!
Printing process
Our papers are printed locally to us in Newbury which has the triple advantage of 1. supporting another small local business, 2. meaning we have no delivery costs and 3. keeping our carbon footprint as small as possible as the papers are not being shipped long distance.
The paper stock we use is FSC certified and part of the Woodland Trust’s Carbon Capture scheme, which ensures trees are planted here in the UK to capture carbon and therefore offset the carbon produced from manufacturing and distributing the paper.
It’s important to me that our products are as eco-friendly as we can make them while offering something beautiful and tactile for crafters to work with. It is definitely possible to create wonderful products without detriment to the environment.
I also have chosen biodegradable and fully compostable eco PLA (cornstarch-based) packaging for the paper packs and ephemera packs so that they are completely plastic-free!
Bold Floral paper pack
The paper packs are 150x150mm in size which is just about 6×6″ (a tiny little bit smaller as this is what works for UK print sizes with minimal wastage).
In each pack there are 30 sheets of gorgeous craft paper, three each of ten designs. I’ve found that this offers a good mix of designs while ensuring there’s enough of each design to use over multiple cards (or keep a few sheets if you’re more of a collector!).
The paper is 170gsm which is a gorgeous thickness for papercraft. It will cut and die cut easily but is sturdy enough for matting and layering, and even using to create card blanks themselves (I use one piece for the outside and one piece for the inside, folded in half and glued back to back to create a mini slimline card).
Bold Floral ephemera
Do you also love the beautiful feeling of little paper pieces in your hands? Gorgeous colours and designs, perfectly cut and ready to arrange on your card or scrapbook page? Ephemera is just about one of my favourite things (so hard to choose between stickers and paper too!).
The Bold Floral collection comes with four different ephemera packs, each designed to work with and perfectly complement the paper pack. Included in the Bold Floral Papercraft Bundle we have 1. Floral Ephemera pack, 2. Bugs Ephemera pack, 3. Sentiments Ephemera pack and 4. Butterflies ephemera pack.
I’ve designed each pack carefully so that it includes beautiful toppers as well as sentiments so it’s super fast to create gorgeous cards when you just want a super chill five or ten minutes to create something satisfyingly pretty.
All the ephemera is printed by us and lovingly packaged in eco-friendly recyclable and compostable packaging so you can have allllll the gorgeous things without worrying about an excess of plastic!
Card ideas
Whether you’re using the floral, bugs, sentiment or butterflies ephemera pack with your papers, it’s so simple to create gorgeous cards! Here’s one of my favourite layouts that I go to again and again.
The Bold Floral range colour-matches perfectly with our Pretty Stitches range so make sure to grab one of the Pretty Stitches paper packs too. Use this for backgrounds and accent pieces, like the red background panel and layered blue and green pennant pieces on this card.
To create this design:
1. Add the background panel to the card blank and the patterned paper on top, trimmed slightly smaller.
2. Cut a larger and smaller pennant shape and lightly adhere top left, leaving loose at the bottom and fastening with a staple.
3. Die cut or punch a circle and adhere to the right of the pennants. Add the flower ephemera pieces on top with foam squares.
4. Add the sentiment below and some silver gems to finish.
Happy crafting!
