Earring packets

An invite to a craft retreat in the middle of June set me thinking. I am excited that I will get to see some of the friends I made at the Bridlington craft retreat run by Leonie Pujol (from Create and Craft TV), and that I’ll be travelling down to Bicester and spending a weekend learning new papercrafting techniques. But it was the note from the organiser that there will be a sale table for each of us to bring a few things that got me into a frenzy of activity. I had to make some new earrings to take but then I also need to display them.

A few years ago I tried setting up some 99p Ebay auctions. Quite a few pairs sold and some sold for more than £1 but it was a very ‘when I feel like it’ effort. Now I have a definite goal in mind and I want to raise money to make a difference to the help that Marie Curie nurses can give to people at the end of their lives.

And if I am to sell to discerning crafters, I need to think about presentation.

Pinterest has given me a few ideas over the last few months but although I had been thinking about earring packaging I hadn’t got round to it. Last weekend I needed to get on with it and wanted to combine my papercrafting and stamping skills learned at the last workshop to match in with my blog design and colours.

Stamping with Inkadinkado

At last, an opportunity to use this stamping system, purchased at Bridlington. It is simple to use and very effective, creating lovely circular patterns. I went for a blue and red design and printed this on plain white paper. The inks are Tim Holtz distress inks – I don’t remember the colours exact names now but its something like faded denim and raspberry.

A3 paper would have given me the chance to do a full circle design but I only had A4 so I stamped with some extra sheets behind so that I could fill the paper with part of a large circular design. Lining up the stamps is easy, because the stamp holder fits into a groove in either the circular centre or the ring. It looks complicated and as if it takes a lot of skill but actually it doesn’t. Real stampers would probably say it was cheating!

After a few attempts I turned out something that I was pleased with. It has the colours I was after and has a lacy, mandala-like style.

Computer wizardry

Once the design was dry I scanned it and used Photoscape, a free piece of software that allows you to manipulate photos and images. I turned the the image through 90 degrees, cropped it and then faded it so that it would act as a background not a foreground.

The fiddly part was then to design an A4 page with four strips that would become my packets. Getting the margins right and the size of the background image correct took several hours and quite a bit of swearing.

I created a template in Pages, a free Mac programme and set up text boxes so that I had a design for a stand-up packet with space for the earrings at the front, a couple of lines on the back to say I was fundraising for Marie Curie, a place for a price, the Crafternoon Treats blog address and a small description of each pair. This meant I had to create a separate file for four pairs of earrings at a time, but I decided that was easier than trying to add the description as a stick on label or a tag.

The final packets

Once printed on card and folded, the earring packets stand up quite well, although they do topple if the earrings have particularly large stones. I still need to improve that but, overall, I was quite pleased. For the retreat in June, these will do fine.