Packaging, Art, and Cameos

I've been doing a lot of work giving my shop a little bit of a makeover. I'm trying to work on packaging and what I guess you could call advertising. It's a lot of hard work, but it's sort of fun! I honestly feel a bit like I did when I was little, coloring and cutting out fake coupons or circus tickets in preparation for for a game of pretend. But this time my shop is actually a real one, selling things I've hand made. I'm actually trying to keep as much of my packaging hand made as possible. I've got a nice printer, a paper cutter, a big stack of cardstock, and a hole puncher that makes tiny little holes! What can I do with that? Well, I've found that I can do a lot of things with it that create a, hopefully, professional look to the things I make and sell.

For my line of sweet stuff, I've made fancy little cards to clip some jewelry onto. They then go into little 4x6 ziplocks that I found in the craft section. My more classical or gothic jewelry will be packaged up a bit differently, I'm not quite sure how yet, but I have printed up some tags with a pretty engraved style design on it.

I've also been working on some postcard sized prints for my shop, and just for fun. I will be getting these printed for me, one at a time, because it would kill my printer and it's just cheaper to do these in bulk. A whole lot of tags can be made from a couple sheets of paper, but these are a bit bigger!

Click either for a larger picture.

I plan on doing one for each style my shop caters to, Classic Lolita, Sweet Lolita, and Gothic Lolita. The Gothic Lolita one is still in progress! I plan on giving these away with orders from my shop as a little thank you. I drew and colored them myself, and it's been quite some time since I did very much art, but I hope that these are nice enough for people to want to keep and tack up somewhere, and not crumple them up and throw them away XD You can also check these out, and any other Lolita art I might do, on my Deviantart account.

One final project is to make all these cameos into something pretty! I've had the bare cameos hanging around for a very long time and finally found a place selling the fancy backs in the size I need. The next step is to fancy them up a bit with chain and beads and maybe some rhinestones, then put some on pin backs and others on necklace chains. Maybe even make a hair clip or two!

A Little Lolita Dolly

I have had a craving to make dolls for a few months now! Every time I see a really great cloth doll or art doll my fingers get itching to try it myself. The kind I usually like, and am familiar with (although I haven't made anything in years!) is the kind that involves clay, but despite my itchy fingers I've been a bit too lazy to bust out some clay. But, while browsing around the other day I was lead, once again to tanpopo0118's DeviantArt page. Now, I've been to her gallery before and admired her work, but this time it really inspired me to bust out some material scraps and get to sewing! So, inspired by her little Lolita dolls with painted faces and real hair, I made my own sort-of-version of her dolls. I ended up going with a blobby chibi body because that looks more like the big eyed, big headed, Lolitas that I like to draw. In comparison to her dolls, mine looks like a really lame copy XD But, really, I wasn't trying to copy her dolls, and I hope it doesn't look like I was.

She has a stray thread on her face!

Some changes I will do when I next attempt to make little Lolita dolls? Because oh yes I do plan on it! First, I will pick a different fabric. This little girl is about 3" inches tall, so I made her out of felt, which is a pain to paint, and impossible to paint smoothly on. So, next time, I'll probably try flannel. Next time I'll also nix the mohair hair. I haven't used mohair since I got into BJDs several years ago and I forgot how much of a pain it is! It gets everywhere and sticks to the felt like crazy, next time I will probably use felt, embroidery floss, or maybe even hair wefts like tanpopo0118. I'll also probably make her a bit bigger and make her some simple clothes out of something that isn't lace scraps! But overall, I'm pretty happy with this little dolly, mostly because it felt really good to finally get around to making a doll!