31 Mar 2011

New Supplies from the US



My friend Orla just went to San Francisco for a well deserved holiday. The fantastic thing about it was that I gave her €100 before she left to buy as much paper as possible. I am able to buy American paper here but it costs between €20-€30 per 12" x 12" pad, it's also possible to ship it in from the US but the import tax and shipping makes it just as expensive. I knew I would get value for money but what I failed to factor in is that Orla is the best bargain hunter I've ever met!

She bought some beautiful sheets from Graphic 45 which is very pricey here, which is exactly what I asked for. Where she really excelled was getting pads that were $20 reduced to $5, and a few of them! The most impressive paper was a pad of 360 sheets for $20, and it's really beautiful paper. She really paid attention to the paper and patterns that I love, and shopped accordingly. We estimated that she got €260 worth of paper for about €100. I'm delighted with my stash, but now I'm daydreaming of winning money and flying over to buy paper, stamps, embellishments, dies.....sorry I got lost there.


Now that I'm making way more cards these days I've had to speed up my system. Firstly I pick out loads of paper I want to work on and then guillotine them into 5" wide strips(the width of my cards), I get 2 of these per sheet with some leftover. I then cover a large amount of blank cards with this paper using my glue gun, cropping off the leftover piece. When I have a stack of about 50 covered I then use the left over scraps to embellish the cards, going through them in themes of colour so I'm working with the same papers all the time. When I get new stamps I stamp them out on blank paper and keep them in a box, so that at this stage of the card making process I just have to go to the box rather that spend time inking up. This method of production line working has really helped speed me up, and also saves on wastage as all my scraps are used up on the cards.

6 comments:

  1. you have a really great system worked out - well done

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  2. Wow does your friend Orla want to go bargain shopping for my biz next time she is going on hols

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  3. Those pretty photos make me want to go and buy paper, even though I have no use for it!

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  4. nice haul, Ruth! beautiful cards, too!

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  5. Wow, how wonderful! Still reeling from having had to pay VAT on buying sth from the US, so yes, I am hoping somebody visits America so that I can give them my yarn orders :)

    This is beautiful paper, Ruth, well done!!!

    Speeding up the working process sounds great, alas, can't do it with knitting (I tried, but I get confuzzled and mess up my designs...)

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  6. Thanks everyone!

    Paul-yeah I want her to go back next week and spend €500 and she what she can do for me, just after I go to the magical money orchard!

    Purls-yeah it's really nice to be able to cut down on the time, it's nearly like I'm paying myself to make them now :)

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