Selling, Branding, Advertising

Hello, all!  In between a LOT of exciting things going on behind the scenes (watch this space on 30th June!) I found a bit more playtime with the fabulous new vintage advertising Flea Market Finds collection by Cathe Holden.  Spellbinders kindly invited me to create with some of the new ephemera, stickers, stamps and papers, and I've been having a lovely time making another batch of teabag sachets with them.

These travelling salesmen are some of the legion of men and boys who made their way around the country hawking, peddling, selling any goods, provisions, inventions and ideas they could to make a living. 

With so many of them all trying to make a buck, it all came down to how you could compete in the market - how could you convince someone to buy your product rather than someone else's?  

Patents, branding and advertising became the lifeblood of the travelling salesman, and this collection captures that feverish excitement and those endeavours so well with all the labels, stamps, seals, posters, cigarette cards and other gimmickry used to catch the eye and promote whatever was on sale.

In the recent catch-up post, you saw a number of these little series... the tiny collage space is such fun to work with.  Mind you, when my mother has mostly been drinking fennel tea, they do smell quite a lot!

I started out by gessoing the sachets and then covering them (I've always just painted them before) with some of the papers from the Neutrals Palette Sampler. 

That also got a wash of gesso to give it a more weathered look, and a little splatter of what was left on the craft mat.  

Then I got to work picking out some labels and other ephemera from the Home Arts Miscellany and Happy Thought Miscellany packs.   

I particularly love the elegant glove-shaped advertisement...

... the wonderful photo someone is carrying with them on their travels (maybe that's Pa who stayed at home on the farmstead?)...

... and the house as the logo for the manufacturer and dealer in turpentine (amongst other things).

Over on the reverse, there are some of the Etiquettes Stickers and some stamps and seals from the Circle Labels Icons Stamps.

I then realised that it was all very well having all these leaflets and logos and advertising cards... what the collages needed now was the travelling salesmen to do the hawking and promoting.

Time to get out the Paper Dolls Minis - just the right size for a tiny collage space like these teabag sachets.

It didn't take long to track down my peddlers, hawkers, hucksters and vendors, each of them ready to wear out his shoe leather in search of more customers.

Some of them are clearly right at the start of their endeavours.

Others are considerably more experienced and/or more prosperous.   (Don't judge me - I'm a little bit smitten with this guy and his smouldering gaze.  Whatever he's selling, I'm buying!)

Maybe they've even settled down with an emporium of their own now, with no need to go on the road any longer.

But the commercial travellers are as vital a part of the American story as any rancher or railway builder.  In a way, their values are the ones that have prevailed most strongly in today's society.

Certainly the advertising industry that grew out of these humble beginnings has become a huge part of the way we live now.  Buying and selling, promoting and branding, they're central to how the economy ticks over.

And these guys were there at the start of it all...  That's the journey these great little pieces of historical ephemera took me on today, anyway!  

I hope you like this little collection of teabag sachet collages.  If you click on any of the links in this post, you can take a closer look at the products I've used.  And if you make any purchases while you're there, I'll get a small commission, without you having to pay anything extra.  See, I'm at it now too!

Happy weekend all!  I'll see you on Monday for the last of my weeks in the Simon Says Stamp Designer Spotlight... watch out - it's a scary one!!

He could sell snow to an Eskimo.

Overheard in a real estate office.

Bright and Cheerful

Hello all!  I'm thrilled to be the guest designer for June at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge and here's my project for their new Bright and Cheerful theme this week.

It's always such an honour to feature alongside the phenomenal design team there, and I'm really looking forward to the month ahead.

The new challenge theme this week is Bright and Cheerful...  regular followers of mine will know that's not exactly my usual mode, but it's always great to step outside your comfort zone.

In some ways I stayed very much in my current comfort zone.  I've been really enjoying altering these teabag sachets lately, and I figured if I stayed small, I should be able to find at least a little bit of brightness and cheeriness!  

Recycling too... and that's definitely something to be cheerful about.  I should just say that I'm generally pretty bright and cheerful myself - it's just not my usual crafting style!

Let's take a quick look at the process, and then there are plenty of close-ups later on in the post.  Here are the not-very-attractive naked sachets.  (I'm a coffee drinker apart from the occasional spiced chai, but Cestina of Small Worlds, is helpfully a drinker of many kinds of teas - she's on a Rooibos kick just now!)

The first step is to give the sachets a rough coat of gesso to create a blank canvas.

I then used Wow Bright White embossing powder to emboss a fabulous Katzelkraft collage stamp.  (It's not in stock in the Simon Says Stamp shop yet, but they have it on order - and they do have lots of other great Katzelkraft designs.)

You can't really see it from a distance at this point, but if you look a bit more closely you can see the spiralling clock face and distressed harlequins which are just a couple of elements within the stamp.

Next up are the Distress Spray Stains - Broken China and Twisted Citron.  Together, they create lots of interesting shades as they blend and flow, so I stuck to just these two (not sure what went on with the lighting here - the colours in the main photos above are much truer to life).

And now that amazing stamp comes into its own, of course...

Then it's time for one of my favourite parts... working out what's going to go on top of the backgrounds.  I've now folded the flaps back into place which gives me a squarer format to work with.

The teabag sachets are just the right size for the new Paper Dolls Minis... tiny versions of the Paper Dolls, perfect for ATCs, or other tiny crafting like teabag art.

There are old favourites here and new characters to fall in love with, and as always, I had a lovely time listening in to see who really wanted to be part of this teabag alteration.

And I'm deeply in love with the tiny Snippets Ephemera labels.  I picked out the brightest and most colourful ones I possibly could from the pack.  

For the most part, I tend to favour the neutral ones (big surprise!) so all these pink and red tones were still going begging.

I added strips of Design Tape Trim for the dolls to stand on if they needed it.  I also selected some Snippets Number Strips to add an extra element to each collage.

The final layer of the Small Chat stickers has a little bit of pen doodling around it, and I added some more to frame each sachet collage.  It draws the eye in nicely, I think.

I quite often work with bright blues and greens, but the real hop out of kin here is for me to add red/pink.  It's really not a colour you see around here very much, unless I've been painting some berries or some roses.

Over on the reverse, I kept it simple to let that white-embossed stamping and the vivid Distress Sprays continue to take centre stage.

There's just a tiny bit of Trim to add a dark contrast to those bright colours and glossy white embossing.  I think it really adds visual interest, as does the movement and dimension of the flap of the sachet envelope.  There's nothing inside these yet, but I can think of lots of ephemera, gift voucher or cash surprises which could slot right in... 

And that's it! I hope that's given you some inspiration to go and create something Bright and Cheerful for yourselves.  

If you need a bit more of a nudge, you'll find glorious inspiration aplenty from the Design Team over at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge.

Do come and join in.  As always, there's a $25 gift certificate, generously sponsored by Simon Says Stamp...

... so you could get to go shopping for supplies - always a bright idea; or you might get picked by the team to go in the Spotlight which is guaranteed to make you cheerful.

Have a great week everyone, and even a bright and cheerful one!  Happy crafting, all.

Bright reds - scarlet, pillar-box red, crimson or cherry - are very cheerful and youthful. There is certainly a red for everyone.
Christian Dior

If more of us valued cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
J.R.R. Tolkien

Long time, no see...

I know, I know... I'm sorry, it's been a shamefully long time since I posted here.  Life has been overwhelmingly busy, mostly in a good way.  There's so much to deal with when you move to a new country, try to build new income streams, and also start tackling gardening full scale.  I have been creating, but - cards on table - the speed of posting on Instagram as opposed to creating a blogpost (I've never really come to terms with the Blogger changes) has meant that has become my platform of choice while I've been so busy.

I love my blog though, and Craftyblogland will always be a special place to me - so I'm going to try really hard to put in an appearance at least once a week, and there are various things coming up which will kick me into keeping that resolution, so fingers crossed!

For now, let me catch you up with just some pictures of what's been going on creatively in the meantime... mostly tags rather than bigger creations (that busy-ness problem again), though I hope you'll like the Easter nest of eggs, and I've just (literally) dusted off my watercolour brushes and started doing some painting again.

I've also been doing quite a few tiny pieces in series - altered cash envelopes, altered teabag sachets and so on.  Keeping it small means I'm more likely to get finished!  And there are some pieces responding to the dark news from Ukraine (all too immediate here in the Czech Republic, where the Russian tanks were still a presence only thirty years ago).

Take a look...

So that's a taster of what's been going on... (and you're getting a debut with that second rose painting - it hasn't appeared on IG yet!).  I hope you've all been doing okay and that, wherever you are, you are enjoying some sunshine (either spring or autumn).  I'll aim to do some visiting soon too, but June is going to be a very busy month in a number of ways, so it make take a while to get round to everyone.

Stay safe, stay well, and I'll see you again here soon.  Happy crafting, all!

Time is the longest distance between two places.    It's good to be back after all this time.

From The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth.

Robert Southey