Wedding Anniversary: Paper

Wedding anniversary celebrations, disclosed to the world on Facebook, have always annoyed me slightly. Given so many of my friends are single or divorced, having other smug married friends rub it into their faces with outpourings of emotion over their soulmates is a little mawkish, in my view.

That said, Mr Mermaid and I do love to celebrate our wedding anniversary (and keep it on the down-low). True, we have been married just three years but it is fun to mark the anniversary of the day we both became tax-incentivised adults with the full legal and financial – I mean, the day we celebrated our love publicly in the honourable institution of marriage. Ahem.

Apart from the smug satisfaction of having outlasted the Kardashians in their various marital endeavours, it is good to be able to use the nearest weekend as an excuse to get away from everything and everyone else and focus on our gratitude to God and each other.

That said, finding appropriate gifts can sometimes be problematic. If one follows the traditional rules around giving - paper, cotton, leather, etc, then getting something good for a reasonable price is not easy. Correction: it is easier for men to buy for women than the other way around.

For our first year, paper, I wanted to get Mr Mermaid some bespoke, quality stationery. I explored some of the high-end options from boutiques he appreciates, such as Smythson, Aspinall and Liberty.

But the price tags for what I wanted were phenomenal. No discounts - and a starting price of at least £100. By the time all the bespokery (is there such a word? There is now) would have been completed, I would be looking at a bill of nearly £300.

Now I love my husband greatly but there is no way I would spend £300 on paper. The very idea was ridiculous. Notwithstanding the fact we had just got married and were, therefore, broke, I have always laboured under the principle that if you can feasibly make something yourself, then do not pay for it. I am a card crafter. I am artistic. Therefore branching out into stationery did not seem too high a leap for me.

Cue Amazon. I had seen in various high-end stores boxes of luxury cards from a certain company, retailing for about £40 for blank notelet cards (not folded). I figured I could get the same blank cards for less on Amazon. I did. 50 cream Crown Mill luxury cards with matching lined envelopes, for £26.99 plus P&P. 

Crown Mill laid paper in Cream

I also bought one tiny wooden-handled rubber stamper of a star, and a square inkpad in military green. On a different site I paid just under £5 for a personalised black-ink stamp with my husband’s details on it. A few day later, all my materials had arrived - for less than £50.

It took a few practice runs on scrap paper to get the right pressure and, having carefully marked in faint pencil straight lines on each card front, created a bespoke set of stationery that looked professional, felt professional and cost barely anything. I have had to remove our address from the below, of course.. so you can only get a rough idea of how nice this looked. 

What's inside the box? Personalised Stationery, of course!

As I had some money left over from my original budget of £70 for gifts for George, I meandered to my local picture framing store, which has won many awards for its creative framing. I spent £24 getting five hearts cut out of the stiff card by their laser cutter (I got to keep the bits of heart-shaped card), and printed out in colour five Google maps: where we both grew up, where we met, where we married, where we live (this bit was free).

Wedding Anniversary gift idea: personalised maps

This now adorns my husband's study wall, and he loved his stationery. And all for a bargain, whereas if I had opted for ordering all these things from another artisan, I could have spent between 300-400 smackers.

So I am now in the business of making bespoke stationery, as well as cards and jewellery! Oh and with those cut-out hearts, I made several Valentine's Day cards in various styles, which I sold for approximately £2 each.

Beating the business card blues

Recently, my employer was taken over by another firm, which necessitated the destruction of thousands of business cards.

I had only recently been given reprints of my previous ones - which meant I had 200 cards sitting unused on my desk. My colleagues, likewise, had more than 100, as did my husband (we work for the same company).

It does grieve me to see waste. Even though most people in my immediate vicinity dutifully put their unused old business cards into the recycling bin, I thought there had to be another way to put these to good use, rather than simply relying on a very energy-intensive industry to process them and probably turn them into new business cards. Or a shirt. Either way.

At the same time that I trundled home with five heavy plastic boxes filled with old business cards, my husband managed to buy me: 20 sheets of Mr Men stickers for £1, one 20m reel of orange ribbon and one 20m reel of turquoise ribbon for 50p each.

I had a long weekend planned - ie, one without additional freelance work, hosting Sunday lunches for family or friends, and without anything at all to do. So I ensconced myself in my teeny-tiny 'office' (aka craft room) and began to make batches of cards.

I experimented first of all with the Mr Men and Little Miss notelet series, on pale cream card and using scraps of orange card that someone had given me several years earlier.

Close-up of card front Image: SimoneySunday via Instagram

The work in progress. Image: SimoneySunday via Instagram

Having made about 40 of these cards, I batched them up into sets of six (with some left over) and started to sell these on my Original Shimmering Designs Facebook page as notelets - ideal gifts for people who live a long way away. Light, unusual, original and using recycled/repurposed materials.

It should be stated that I used liquid paper (Tippex for the Brits, Copydex for Americans) to blot out the details on the backs (fronts?) of the business cards before sticking them onto the card fronts. 

I then received in the post some gorgeous little doggy buttons in painted wood. I'd ordered these way before Christmas but they took a while to arrive. Again, using the backs of old business cards, and coloured card which had once been marketing material from my office and I found in the recycling bin (yeah, sorry, I went bin-raking like a tramp), I experimented a week or so later with the darling doggy cards. These are also for sale via my Facebook page. 

The work in progress Image: SimoneySunday via Instagram

I also used up some other wooden buttons that I had lying around, as well as some of the pages of an old book about British Woodlands. This book had been left outside someone's house, in the rain, without any covers. When I asked about it, the lady had left this, along with other cover-less books, for anyone to take to use for craft. I jumped at the chance!

Close-up of the doggy card. Image: SimoneySunday via Instagram

Two of the finished products. I think they are really cute (but then I would, I made them). People say I am a cat-lover but I hope this tribute to our Scottie Dog friends might make people realise I love ALL animals (except spiders but then they do not count as an animal as they are arachnids).

Two of the finished products. Image: Simoney Sunday via Instagram

Who knew that old business cards, leftover pieces of scrap marketing material and discarded books could make such beautiful things? Well, it beats buying cards for £4.50 from an 'artisan' shop when you can get them from £1.50 upwards from the Mermaid of Moorgate!