Pack it up

As you know we like things au naturel here at Wychbury and generally use lovely muslin bags from Celestial Gifts on Etsy with our Wychbury stamp on them. However, in these dark times of unpredictable sales and fluctuating exchange rates we have been a bit, well *short* recently! This has led to me making do and mending with whatever white fabric I can find and dunking it in tea! There is something satisfying about making the packaging part of the creation. It's also nice to take stuff that would normally be binned and make use of it.

Our backing cards are made from misprinted and rejected card from Kanban in Shipley where their factory shop lets you fill up a box with whatever you like - my kids absolutely love it! We use used teabags to stain them and a combination of new and vintage rubber stamps to embellish them.

Ok, so I have a dilemma. I am now making a range of fascinator/headbands featuring my flower corsages, including a new range for bridalwear. My dilemma is that the only thing I can find to package them in is acetate boxes - which just isn't going to work with my aesthetic at all I'm afraid!

I've had a couple of ideas so far, one was to make a drawstring bag like the ones we use already but in a rounded shape with a stiffened and padded gusset to protect the fascinator - I've not tried that one yet. I have had a go at making origami boxes out of stiffened fabric. They are absolutely gorgeous but aren't really stiff enough for shipping and use a large amount of fabric - obviously putting paid to any thriftiness whatsoever. However, I'm thinking that they may work as a small jewellery box and be a perfect use for small scraps of fabric and recycled paper. There are loads of tutorial videos online on how to make them from paper and I just followed the same principle but with fabric that already has a layer of fusible backing on it - dyed in tea of course! Waaaaay too faffy to be practical but I think I'll just keep buttons in them for now!

I've just added an 'Our Packaging' set to our Flickr page for our packaging creations which I will hopefully be adding a design for fascinators to very soon. In the meantime, check out the 'Etsy Packaging' Flickr group for lots of gorgeous Etsy sellers packing their work up just right and PLEASE send me any ideas for packaging for my fascinators :)

Paula x

Necessity is the Mother....

A little more on the idea of lovely creative spaces today. I set about tidying up my loft after a couple of weeks' intensive making and was reminded of a tale my husband told me about a school friend of his who once took two hours to clear up his Lego. Rather than place the bricks straight into the box he had painstakingly built a digger with which to shovel the bricks away!

I always thought that this was fairly typical of the person in question who is known for eccentricity, however, I had a similar moment when tidying up my desk yesterday and it dawned on me with some shame that I do this quite often! I too tidy up by making things and in hindsight always have done. When I was a child I would often dismantle cardboard boxes and remake them in different sizes to fit into specific places, I'd also used yards of sellotape trying to create divisions in things so that I could 'organise' stuff. I have used bricks and planks to make bookshelves in my bedroom and converted things into other things so often that I forget what they were in the first place!

Having a space in my house that is all my own as an adult is giving me so much scope to indulge this side of me that I am suprising myself with what I can come up with now I can use a drill! I have had these cheap drawers for ages (I think they were from Focus or B&Q etc) and gradually each drawer has become redundant as I have developed habits of keeping its contents elsewhere.

Previously I had stamped the title of the contents of each drawer on in ink but they have now been changed so often there is just a smudge on each. I had the brainwave of turning the drawers around and using a drawer pull instead of the semicircular cutout there is at the moment. I resisted the temptation to buy knobs on ebay and rooted out some utilarian buttons instead - suspender buttons etc. A quick rub with some danish oil and a few labels and this is the result! I am going to use them to organise my work into our various shops and stockists - when a drawer is empty, make more stuff.

It is prettier than a lego digger I think!

Paula xxx

Snowdrops

Well despite the hideous weather here in Yorkshire, there are signs that spring is on the way. My 4 year old son came charging in from the garden the other day, very intrigued by the green spikes sticking out of the ground. Yay! the snowdrops are on their way in a multitude that will have no doubt doubled again from last year!

So, forcing myself out of the January doldrums, I started work on some snowdrop hair clips. I found these beautiful pictures on flickr and loved how the petals curved. http://www.flickr.com/photos/57309108@N00/398003162/in/photostream/.



First I had to find some white flowers so I unceremoniously destroyed some velvet roses to see what they were made of. They had a nice threefold petal in already so I just had to construct the centre.

I started with machine stitch like my pansies but the effect was way too heavy for what I had in mind. I also tried several versions with multiple beads in the middle but that didn't do it for me either. So less seems to be more and I've gone for a single, seed bead on a hand embroidered centre.

I'm getting a bridal vibe for these!

Paula x