Our American Made story

Hello!
Happy August! Can't believe how fast summer is flying by!

We received an email this week about Martha Stewart honoring 10 American Makers at an upcoming event they are hosting this fall.

If you are Creative Entrepreneurs who is making products that are innovative, inspiring and beautiful you should enter! We thought we would enter our little Swirlies into the mix and see what happens.  We will let you know how it goes. There might be some kind of voting come September that we might need some help on as well. 

Here is our page on the Martha Stewart site. We did notice that some of our profile text was cut off as well as weird cropping with some of our photos... so we thought we would re-post them again here:

Here is the full text that we uploaded:
Our American made story:

Welcome to Swirly Designs studio where we create holiday cheer all year!

We are Lianne & Paul Stoddard the artist and creators behind Swirly Designs where our passion for decorating for the holidays inspired us to combine our artistic skills to create our own collection of original handmade polymer clay ornaments.

Our story began in art school in Boston. I studied graphic design, while Paul majored in Illustration. In school, I dabbled in polymer clay. I made jewelry and pins for family and friends. I loved the way the clay was easy to use and I could create unique pieces.

After graduating, we both pursued work in our field but we were always drawn back to working with our hands. Going back to the medium that I discovered in school, we started to experiment with creating pieces in polymer clay.

We launched Swirly Designs right around the time we got married, in 2000. Being artists and designers we tend to be a little picky when searching for holiday ornaments for our own tree. Not finding exactly what were we looking, we decided to create our own ornaments using polymer clay.

Combining my graphic design sensibility and Paul’s illustrative talent we created whimsical pieces and started giving them as gifts to family and friends who then encouraged us to start selling them. We produced a small catalog one holiday season, taking our own pictures and designing the catalog ourselves. That proved to be a success, and the following year we got a booth at a local holiday craft show here in Boston. The response to our ornaments was so great! We sold lots of ornaments during that show plus heard lots of positive feedback from customers. This was enough encouragement for to us do this full time.

Each and every ornament is hand-sculpted, hand-painted and beautifully embellished by us as we interpret traditional holiday images through a contemporary lens all while juggling our growing family.

Our studio is always swirling with new and interesting holiday festivities and we are so blessed our ornaments have become part of so many people’s holiday traditions.  

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 Wish us luck!

Swirly Studio Spotlight!

Happy summer.... or is it still spring? The time is flying by this year (can you believe we are approaching the half-year mark already?) In the studio here we are juggling many hats... with designing new collections, creating how-to projects and working on getting more attention for our company.
We are happy to share some fun news:

Our swirly studio was profiled in a two page spread (above) entitled: Cool Spaces: A peek into The Artist's Studio of the spring 2012 issue of The Polymer Arts magazine. The magazine is targeted to professional and aspiring polymer clay artists and we were so happy to be asked to share our work space with our peers.

Since we took some many shots...hundreds I think (thank goodness for digital) and they only used a few in the piece, we thought we would share some more detail shots of our Swirly work space. Enjoy!

Now we are sure you are wondering if this is how the studio looks all the time and we say to that....

Of course it is.......Kidding! When we are in the middle of designing a collection the studio is one BIG organized MESS. Thank goodness getting into a magazine made us clean and clean some more to make it look so pretty.

Here are a few silly shots we did took after a long day shooting! 

It's hard to keep it serious sometimes. 

Enjoy the week!

Our Easter designs

Is everyone getting ready for Easter? We've been busy playing catch up here at the studio, making sure we post everything we wanted too for this season like these beauty shots of this years 2012 Easter designs.

We all know the early timing of Easter made everything feel rushed. We weren't able to take a lot of extra photos of the Easter collection. Even though the majority of the designs are sold out, we still wanted to share a few favorite shots that we captured of some of the designs.


















Happy Easter!

Our Valentine Collection photos

With our 2012 Valentine's collection up and available online today. We wanted to share with everyone some of the lovey images we took today since the photos we shot yesterday turned out so yellow from not having any sunlight in the studio. Thanks goodness the sun was a shining and the picture came out so nice. Take a look.



























Happy Valentine's!
~Lianne & Paul

A Peek Inside Our Swirly Studio

Do you want to know the best way to clean your studio or craft room?
Have it profiled in magazine about Studios! As excited as we were to have our studio in the pages of the new winter 2011 issue of Cloth Paper scissors studios magazine our mood went from cheers to fear really quick! How on earth were we ever going to clean and organize our studio plus photograph it right in the middle of designing our fall collection. It's still a big blur but we did it and the story came out great.

In the article, we share how we transformed one of our rooms in our 150 year old house, into a winter wonderland workshop where we create our Swirly Designs all year long. Also how we work together in the space and some of our favorite storage pieces we have for our materials.

Be sure to check out the issue next time you are out and about at your bookstore or craft store.


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*** What didn't make it into the issue is how we reworked our studio closet from just a place to store boxes of materials, to creating almost an extra room where everything has it's place now. We had a local builder come in and help us design a closet that works for our needs. He did a great job listening to what we wanted and the craftsmanship is top notch!

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