A look back at some of the year's commisions - part 1

Seeing as I haven't managed to update this much through the year I thought I'd do some posts looking back at a few of the personalised items and commissions from over the course of 2012. For part 1 some hooded tops and t-shirts made for company and club uniforms.

From left to right the companies and clubs featured above are Girevoy Sports Union, Manchester Kettlebell Club, both sport kettlebell organisations. Toon Speak (a community Theatre company, Scottish Kettlebell Club, McCarthy School of Dance, Metafit with Meg, Sense and Serenity and Hillington Park Gym . Click on the pictures themselves or the names to visit them. Next time...part 2 with some personal designs.

Week 8 - Custom birthday card

Just a short one this week, thought I'd show a few pictures of a card I made recently for the birthday of one of the children in my martial arts school. I thought I'd have a go at making a spinning card i.e. I wanted the figure to spin when taken out the envelope.

To do this the cutout black silhouette is in two identical layers, between which is sandwiched a thread. The ends of the thread are secured to the front of the card above and below the cutout window (the front is doubled layered too to give a neater final appearance with no loose ends being visible). The figure could then be "wound up" before being put in the envelope so that when it was taken out it would spin within the window.

 

 The design itself I did in illustrator and cut out using my vinyl cutting machine, it takes a few passes to cut through heavy card and usually needs me to finish it off by hand too. I'm trying to think of other designs I could use for the spinning insert now, any suggestions welcome!

Week 6 - Personalised gift tags

I offer a free personalised gift tag service with my items, so far not too many people have taken me up on this offer, maybe as it's not something I've promoted too much, just detailing it in the item's description where it could be easily overlooked. I've had great feedback from the ones I have made so I thought I'd share with you some pictures of the process of making the tags and an example of the finished item.

I didn't want to just do simple paper tags as I wanted something a bit more substantial so I use a special type of plastic that you shrinks when heated to give a nice, solid tag. You can draw or print on the plastic and as the material shrinks so does the applied design, the hard part is working out how large to make the original print so it gives you the right size when it's been shrunk down. I use this same material to make other things like name badges, zipper pulls for hoodies and bags and small charms. It's pretty versatile.

This particular order was for a lady who wanted a couple of sets of cufflinks to give as a gift to her husband and his brother as they were opening up a pizzeria. She wanted the gifts tags to have the new restaurant's logo on. After preparing the logo to make it suitable for the printing & shrinking it is printed out onto the plastic, then cut to size. I always round the corners when using this plastic as if they are left square then once shrunk they can be quite sharp. I also make sure to make any hole I need before shrinking as it's a pretty tough material to cut afterwards.

Once printed and trimmed the next part of the process is the shrinking, I usually do this in the oven but you can also use a heat gun. Watching the plastic shrink can be a bit nerve-wracking as it curls up and jumps around, as long as the pieces aren't to big them they will eventually even out and flatten themselves again. Below you can see the pieces before and after shrinking, note the difference in thickness and how the shrinking process makes the printed colours more vivid:

 The print on one of the larger tags ran a little, the smaller tags were better suited in size for this job anyway (I'd made two sizes to have a choice as you can't always predict how much the plastic will shrink).All that's left is packaging up the cufflinks and stringing the tags on the ribbon ready to send out. The completed packages can be seen below:

The great thing with the shrink plastic is you can also cut it to make simple shapes; for example, in the past I've done heart shaped tags for an anniversary present. Anyone who'd like personalised gift tags with an item simply add details in the comment to seller box when placing your order and if I need any further details I'll get in touch.

Week 2 - Mousemats

Second week of Challenge 52 and this week the focus is a new product. I have made several items for Anne of Anne Reeves Jewellery personalised with her logo in the past, including an apron for her workshops and a phone cover, so when she contacted me about making her a personalised mousemat I agreed to add these to my product range.

I make these items in the same way I do my t-shirts - with contour cut vinyl. Vinyl is an extremely thin sheet of highly coloured material that is heat activated to form a permanent bond with material. The manufacturers say that the bond it forms should outlast the life of the garment/item itself so it is a great alternative to screen printing, especially when one-offs are needed or when special effects like chromes, glitters etc are desired.

The first step in making something is to make sure the design itself can be cut. There are two main type of image files - vector and raster. Raster images are made up of pixels (like most "picture" and photo files) so the shapes and colours are made up of variations in colour of these pixels. As automated cutting machines need a shape or edge to cut these files are no use to them  and have to be converted to the second type of file, a vector file, before they're ready for cutting. Vector files contain mathematical information that describes the colours, shapes, lines etc within the image, essentially you can think of them being made up of actual shapes instead of a collection of dots. These my cutting machine understands as it gives it the shapes it's required to cut.

So my first task in making a personalised item for someone is usually vectorising their logo if they can't supply me a vector version (NB if you get your logo made up professionally they should supply you with this version as it's also the best version for print, it will usually be an eps, ai, or vectorised pdf file). Luckily in this case i had aldready done this the first time Anne ordered something from me. You can see her original logo and the vectorised version below.

Original raster image

Vectorised image

Once I have the vector version of the image I can then cut it in the vinyls I've selected to match the colours. In this instance Anne had told me previously she liked the metallic colours I used in her phone cover (I'd made one side with metallic vinyls and the other in a different process with her original logo printed full colour), so I used the same colours in this job - shimmery mettalic purple and shimmery baby pink. Once cut i then "weed" the logo and apply it using my heat press. I'll go further into this process in a future post I have planned where I'll take you through the steps I go through in making a t-shirt.

So the end result is I have a personalised mousemat ready to send out to Anne. I've added some pictures of the finished article below, the camera's not great at picking out the simmer of the colours!

 

Before Anne asked me about this I hadn't thought about making mousemats as I assumed that most people didn't use them anymore but I've been inspired to add them to my range in my online store.  I mocked up some pictures of mousemates with different logos on (including mine!) for the listing. If anyone's interested you can see the listing here. 

 Another Challenge 52 participant Louise from Nanuk Jewellery has posted up Week 2 as well, you can find her post here.

Hooded top colours

See the picture below for the colours I can offer hooded tops in (click to see a larger version). I can apply your design in a choice of colour(s) too, including plain, metallic and glittery colours.

I take orders for one-offs (without any set-up fees) or for larger quantities, each can be a different colour/design colour too. Perfect for sports teams, company promotion, staff uniforms or even just casual wear.

For more information just get in touch: birdcagecreative@hotmail.co.uk

 

Custom lampshade

I recently got commisioned to make a martial arts themed lampshade for a baby boy's bedroom. The boy's dad is the head martial arts instructor at Kuk Sool Won Glasgow and uses a sillhouette of a kick as part of his promotional material. I'd been asked to make some wall transfers for the room first with the child's name and the kick sillhouette and so I thought it'd be good to try to incorporate the same theme into the lampshade.

Another custom order

I got an email the other week asking me to make a necklace similar to my greyhound one but instead using a sillhouette of India (for the customer's friend who is living out there). You can see the final necklace below. I also included a heart shaped keyring in the same design as a wee free gift.

This uses the last of my green and gold necklaces (the other is on the greyhound necklace) and I've searched high and low to source these, even getting someone to go to the shop I bought them in (in Toronto) to ask but they claimed to never having seen them! I like the colour combo in them and they're also soft compared to the usual ones you find. Hopefully I'll come across a supplier at some point again...

A recent custom order

I recently got contacted by someone who wanted me to make a custom piece of jewellery as a gift for his wife for her birthday, his plan was to have a necklace that incorporated her birthstone and also birthflower (her birthday was in April so these were diamond and daisies). He'd seen my daffodil necklace and wanted the daisy included in a similar way.

In this case as it was to be a special item I made it using sterling silver chain and findings and decided the nicest way to incorporate the diamond was to use two small heart shaped swarovski crystals. To include real flowers in resin you have to ensure they're totally dehydrated as any moisture left will affect the resin and also could mean the flower can decay inside. This is usually done by burying the flowers in silica crystals abut a side effect is that the colours are also muted. So I decided instead to make the daisy, roughly full scale, out of polymer clay to keep it as realistic looking as possible.

You can see the pictures of the finished piece below, I'm happy to say the customer was really pleased with the piece and hopefully his wife was too!

Resin and painting pendant

I had the idea to make a necklace for a Christmas present for a friend of mine. She is an illustrator and paints horse and dog portraits (you can see her work on her website here) so I thought it would be nice to embed one of her works in a pendant. After finding an image I thought would go well I had to print and seal it before embedding it inside a pewter pendant bezel and once it had fully cured I hung it on a purpley-aubergine ribbon necklace.

The first picture shows the whole necklace (with a small pink star on the extension chain) And the second is a close up of the pendant itself. I hope she liked it!