Something for the weekend...

Well it's been a long week, but it's the weekend now! Seemed like would never get here! In a week thats been clouded by politics and policy, added to the weather getting colder and the nights drawing again once more I've been keeping myself focused by tinkering about with ideas for jewellery.

I've got a couple of things in the pipeline at the moment, the first of which is earrings. I've worn my own designs for years now, especially skulls. I'll be making stud skull earrings and the skull drop style earrings I wear alot myself.

Along with earrings I have also been painting beads to make into necklaces. Some of the beads I have been painting at the moment are decorated with flowers which is a bit of a departure from the skulls which dominate my current collection, but I have strung them alongside beads coloured with the shades of the rainbow in keeping with my bright, fun aesthetic.

I think these bead necklaces will be a softer, more feminine side of Deviant Panda that people haven't seen so far! I'll keep you posted with these new items and any other ideas other the next few weeks, maybe sooner, and I'm going to be posting the concluding part of my inspirations for the current jewellery collection I have in my shop very soon!

Have a good weekend!

DP

Skull Mobile Charm - special offer!

Evening all!

This is just a quick post to draw attention to a special offer I'm currently running. As you may know from one of my previous posts I made 30 skull mobile charms to put into LBOC's Christmas sample bags. Afterwards I decided to make up a load to sell in my shop as they are so cute!

They are quite competitively priced at £3.60 each (I price using Chris Parry's amazing spreadsheet! I'd be lost without it and recommend it to any fellow crafters/sellers) but best of all I'm giving one charm away FREE with every order over £10. Just click on the picture to go to the link.

You can choose from 10 different colours: Emerald Green, Leaf Green, Sunny Yellow, Mandarin Orange, Cherry Red, Deep Purple, Royal Blue, Aqua, Black & White!

Enjoy!

DP

Little Book of Crafters Christmas Edition

Two posts in (nearly) two days?! I'm a blogging demon! :)

I wanted to tell you about the Little Book of Crafters today.
I found out about LBOC via Folksy and I decided to submit some free samples to the LBOC Christmas Edition. Mimi @ LBOC puts together sample bags to give away at her stall at craft fairs and this year is her first Christmas edition.

I decided to submit 30 mobile skull phone charms as they are quite small and lightweight, perfect for a little goodie bag. I have loads of skull charms made ready to go on my charm bracelets so I took 30 aside and started to paint them.

After painting them I varnished them with a glossy glaze to make them durable. They looked like jelly beans! Yum!

Once they were dry I attached each charm to a mobile phone strap - very, very fiddly but they looked very cute once I was done. Then I tied each one to one of my mini business cards which doubled as a label. Job done! I was pretty chuffed with the results.

I've sent them off to Mimi @ LBOC and I'll keep you posted with the results.

You can join LBOC's facebook page here!

DP

Busy Sunday afternoon...

It's been a busy day today, not of making, but of promoting and marketing. I recently won a free advert in Creative Crafting Magazine's Christmas issue! I was absolutely over the moon, I've never won anything before so it was a lovely surprise when I opened up my inbox and I saw the message from Avril and Anna at the magazine.


To get my advert in there I had to send them a 250x250 pixel sized graphic and the website address of my choice. I spent a few hours choosing images and figuring out how I wanted the finished item to look. I used Gimp 2.0 to manipulate the image (Gimp is amazing, a totally free, alternative to Photoshop). In the end I choose this image to link to my folksy page:

I really enjoy graphic design; I studied basic computer aided design briefly at Uni but I'm mainly self taught. I like experimenting and manipulating images, but I find it easy to get sucked into it! I could sit for hours using Gimp!

After finishing my advert I decided to overhaul the front of my folksy shop. When I first started there I didn't realise that the order of the items was dependant on the order that I uploaded them. Apparently Folksy are working on a way to be able to drop and drag your items around, but for now I had to relist them. I don't mind doing that too much and I'm much happier with the way it all looks now. :) Feel free to have a look at the shop and let me know what you think. Now I'm off to bed (it's Monday morning already....oops! :) )

DP