How To's

Friday, 5 June 2020

Books & Postcards


This week hasn't seen a lot of stitching happening. There has, however, been quite a lot of things happening with digital products and projects as that's an area that's been ignored for quite a while. You may remember when I first started out selling Stitchscapes and related items that I invested quite a lot in mounted prints and greetings cards. The cards sold fairly well at craft fairs but not online, and the prints (in two sizes) didn't really sell at all! I have lots of them left over that are trickling out slower than a snail with no foot.
With the pandemic, greetings card packs and postcards stepped up a notch as people wanted to stay in contact with their loved ones and send them a bit of a hug in an envelope but it's not a massive area for me. I do like to keep on top of the postcards though and have just switched up my range to a very limited eight designs, all focusing on textured areas of my most recent embroideries.


I love the quality of these postcards - they are ordered through a company called Moo who are fairly expensive (costs me 52p per postcard - not a huge amount left for any sort of profit whilst still being affordable for my customers) but do have a beautiful print quality. It's hard to describe but the colours of these cards is sort of luminous, especially the Bluebell Garden card, and the shells card is so beautifully detailed.


I've also designed a paper wrap to collate these postcards into a set. Previously they were put into cellophane sleeves but I'm trying to do more to go plastic-free. The only plasticy thing with these cards is my clear sticker circle but that's a by-product of my thread card labels where there are gaps at the side that are wasteful to just throw away. I put a load of circles down the edges and have collected a fair few now!


Hopefully you'll like these postcards too, they'd look great in a skinny frame as a colour set! If you fancy a pack for yourself, click here to go to my Etsy shop.


I've also updated my Little Book of Stitchscapes with a new fresh look. There are only a few left of the previous volume and I try not to reprint the same book twice (only about 10 editions of each are printed) unless one is immediately snapped up. These are printed through an online company called Snapfish and I only print them when they are having an offer on as again they are quite pricey and don't offer me much of a mark up to actually earn anything from them. It's a lovely product to have though and I think well worth it.


The pages are sort of a chunky postcard quality, nice and thick, and it includes 20 pages with different Stitchscapes in. This one has lots of close up images as well as more stylised photos and some shots of the reverse of the embroidery so you can see the mess behind!


If you've had previous Stitchscape books there may be some cross over as I probably won't have produced enough Stitchscapes between times to have a completely fresh set of photos, but this has quite a few new ones as I've been fairly productive on the stitching side of things this year. The nice thing for me is that this book matches my new postcards so they are almost a set in themselves.
If you'd like a little book then click here to go to that Etsy page.


I'm trying to boost my Instagram page as well so my Insta tag is now appearing everywhere - including on the back of my new books! If you don't follow me, please do and share with your friends! I'm sure they'd also love Stitchscape spam popping up on their Instagram feed. Click here, or find me under @power.beth


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