Wedding fair notebooks

A blog post mostly made up of pictures today.  Recently I have been producing small notebooks to go in goody bags at the Glemham Hall Wedding Fair this weekend (at Little Glemham, Suffolk).  I've made bulk quantities of notebooks before, but never 200 at a time so I thought it would be interesting to document each stage.

Firstly I designed and printed the covers.  The covers feature several different wedding related images all drawn in Illustrator and in black (because it's quicker to print than colour) and printed on to coloured covers.  

Next the paper was folded for the inside, having been trimmed slightly in the guillotine.  Each book had 6 sheets of paper stacked one inside the other, making 12 pages or 24 sides.

Holes were then punched in both the covers and inside papers.  Here they are ready for sewing.  Each notebook was sewn in a different colour thread to the cover.  The sewing probably took about 4 hours (and was done while I was watching TV!).

Finally an wedding invitation sample (the object of the exercise for me!) was attached to each notebook with thread and a tag.

Here they are boxed and ready to go ...

Hope the brides-to-be at Glemham Hall this weekend like them!

Today’s blog post focuses on a great new campaign – Support Handmade However It’s Made (#SHHIM for short!). 

This has come about primarily as a response to changes by Folksy, who from November are only going to allow items to be sold if they are the seller’s own design or are made from only handcrafted components.  I don’t think any of my books or stationery will be affected but I’m struggling to work out who these changes are good for.  Yes, some items on Folksy are made of mass produced components and some products clearly involve more work than others but this is usually reflected in both the description and price and surely it only benefits the consumer.  People have different tastes and budgets, especially in the current economic climate.  

Up until now I’ve always been relatively satisfied with the service offered by Folksy, with the exception of the fact that certain sellers/items are repeatedly promoted via their ‘featured sellers’ and ‘top picks’ while a far greater proportion never feature, which seems a bit cliquey.  Create.net, who I have my main website with, seem to have a more equitable system (by inviting sellers to be featured) and, as a result, showcase a wider variety of sites. 

So back to SHHIM, this is an initiative by the creator of the Diddybears™ site which sells adorable hand-crafted and collectable mini teddy bears.  Until the end of December she is offering free advertising for anyone affected by the Folksy situation.  Details can be found here http://www.diddybears.com/handmade.html and you can also visit the wonderful shops on this page.  I’m very big on inclusivity and am proud to display the SHHIM badge on my blog!