factory

I promise this will be the last post on my card-making escapedes for a long, long time. Over this past week, I have churned out a grand total of TWELVE homemade cards (and written and stuck notes into every single one).

Now I don't feel anywhere near as bad as I did for buying a stack of craft stickers to tide me over. I can see that without those, I would have probably needed double the amount of hours, made triple the amount of mess and been ten times as creatively exhausted. Bear in mind that even with the assistance of these stickers, I still spent many hours, made a lot of mess and got very tired. Stick-on pearls, flowers and birds will only go so far.

Anyway, I seem to have deleted the original photo I took of all the materials I amassed to assemble the cards. Instead, here, I give you the final product:


The huge quantity which I needed to produce meant that I really couldn't afford to spend hours sewing on sequins and beads and fabric as I have done in the past. So I instead kept boredom at bay by experimenting with an A5 format (even A6 for those two little black cards) which has very different design results from my usual A4 cards. I also looked for all the scraps of coloured card I could, as changing up the colours really is a fantastic way to not get bored when you need to incorporate a beige background into 12 very similar colour schemes.

So from a distance, they all look quite different don't they? But you'll notice that I have cut out card to contruct a thank-you message three times. There are two cards which are essentially pretty pieces of paper stuck on the front of a piece of card. And see how many bird stickers you can spot.

Oh well, I suppose all that is an inevitability when you are essentially being a card-making factory. The whole process led me to think about how designers of clothes or other products go about design/production. Do they use all the same tricks to make their wares appear different when really they're all much the same? Thinking about it, you can certainly find much more individuality in smaller brands and designers than large scale production companies. Maybe that's why.