Look who Swirled by the Studio

It's always nice to have visitors come to the Swirly Studio. It's a great way for us to really get the studio clean and organized. (Don't mind the vacuum cleaner, trying to get it spotless!)

Plus it give us another reason to decorate the studio with seasonal flowers.

The visitor we had the pleasure of finally meeting, after working with her only threw social media for the a few years now, is Iris Weiss from Polyform Products. Which makes our all-time favorite crafting material!

Even though there is two of us working here most of the time, it's always nice to exchange stories and ideas with other creative professionals. It was so nice of Iris to visit our little Swirly studio. We had a wonderful time talking shop, sharing marketing ideas and giving her a peak into our new Sculpey & Swirly Halloween and Christmas Holiday how-to projects coming soon!

Be sure to follow Polyform Products on Facebook and Swirly Designs to stay updated on our upcoming how-to projects.
Also, are you on Instagram? We would love for you to follow us.

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.


click image to see larger






*** 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!

click image to see larger

Studio clean up continues... Holiday idea binders

There is something about the last week of the year that we really get hit with the organizing and cleaning bug.

We are still waiting for the quote to come back for the shelving in the studio closet, which will be a much larger project, so in the meantime we have been taking on smaller projects like organizing our holiday inspirational binders.

We love having a place where we can flip through pages of inspiring images of holiday "stuff" like interesting tree displays, ornaments, color trends and articles. Anything that inspires us to get our creative juices flowing

So we needed to come up with a system to gather all our holiday images/articles etc we acquire through the years.

As you know we love collecting holidays magazines. Our rule of thumb is, if the magazine has at least 75% of it's content dedicated to the holiday we'll keep it whole, but all the other the magazines that only have a few pages of holiday images are perfect for the binders.


A few years ago we stocked up on these Russell Hazel binders to hold our holiday inspirations. The white binder is everything Christmas and the green has Valentine's , Easter, Halloween and other holidays.


We picked up a box of clear sheet protectors (we got this box at staples 200 sheets for $10.00) and if we wanted more sections in our binder we can add dividers.


a label maker makes everything look neat and professional




Tip: for all your small pictures or swatches use a 8.5 x 11 white copy paper and tape your images to so they don't slid in the protectors. Kinda of like a scrapbook but with a whole lot less planning and layout.


Yes we are already thinking of Valentine's and a few flips through this section helps us feel the love and to get our minds thinking Valentine's. These pages have catalog images, paint swatches, ads, stickers etc.


here is a sample of our Easter section


Halloween: we have everything from treat bags to scrapbook paper any items that are 3D we store in another bin that we blogged about here.


Here are some of the Christmas pages






I hope that we have inspired you to create inspirational binders of your own!

Happy New Year!

Holiday wrap up = Studio clean up

What a whirl wind of a season it's been here at the studio. Juggling everything from our craft shows (we will blog about that soon) to fufilling our holiday ornament orders. We hope everyone who was able to order this year has received their ornaments by now. For anyone who missed out this year, one of our goals for 2011 is to start production earlier so we can have more ornaments available. Cross your fingers!

Now that the holiday season has ended here at the studio we sure could use some much needed RR ... but since we are crazy, that will just have to wait. Because these next few weeks our goal is to totally clean up and reorganize our studio....especially the studio closet (see above image). It's quite embarrassing actually to show you this picture. When we moved last Sept. we didn't have time to unpack everything so it just got shoved into the closet, and we only took out what was essential to creating our ornaments. What the closet really needs are functional shelving to handle all our materials and stuff. Granted we have only been in this house for a little over a year but still it's a major eye sore. Slowly we have been cleaning and organizing everything so eventually everything will have it's own place.


This bookshelf unit was the first thing we tackled. We really want to make this functional but also pleasing to look at, so we thought we would...


remove a few shelves and create holiday displays with the 13+ trees we have here in the studio all year round. Here is our red feather tree displaying some of our patriotic mini wind catchers.
(please excuse The Elf on the Shelf in the upper left corner...he's here for the holiday season keeping our 5 year old on his toes!)


This cool little egg tree was purchased last year and holds a few of our new and old Easter designs. We used a sheet of wrapping paper to line the back of the bookshelf to give it some color. On the pedestal is an early Christmas gift we picked up for ourselves at the SOWA Holiday Market we did a few weeks ago. It's an original Vintage by Crystal little Easter bunny figure.


This corner of the studio is our glitter/ paper puncher station. Everything is displayed so we can see it from across the room.


This section we still haven't cleaned up yet. We still have a lot of our Halloween pieces out and a lot of paper work to go through.

So that's a quick look at what we have been up to these last few days before Christmas. Our goal is to get this all done as soon as we can so we can photograph it before we have to take everything out again and start designing for Valentine's Day!!

Yes I know we are crazy!

Hope you all have a wonderfully crazy Holiday!

~Lianne & Paul