Autumnal Equinox

Have a Swirly first day of Autumn!

 

It is the summer's great last heat,
It is the fall's first chill: They meet.
–Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

Happy 4th of July!

 Wishing everyone a Swirly Star Spangled Fourth of July!!

 With all this crazy weather here on the East coast. 

We don't know if we will see fireworks this year, so instead we decided to create our own.

God Bless America!

Happy Easter

Be Our Swirly Valentine

Happy Valentine's Day to all of our Swirly friends. 

xoxo

Feeling the LOVE....

Feeling the Love today. 

You guys truly amaze us with your continued enthusiasm towards our work and for that we want to say a heartfelt thank you. 

xoxo Lianne & Paul

Merry Christmas!

Valentine's Collection Update!

Happy Tuesday everyone! It's been a busy few weeks here at the studio as we work on our new  Winter Mini Love Collection which we hope to have ready and online this Monday Jan 28th (crossing our fingers!). We'll share more as the week goes on, but for now here is a little peek at what we are working on today.

Craft show LOVE!

Images from the our craft show at the Wellesley Marketplace Nov 17, 2012

Well we surivied our craft show over the weekend. Hooray!! We kicked off the start of our Craft show appearences this past Saturday and ending on Dec 8 and 9th at the SOWA holiday show. I know it doesn't seem like a lot shows, but for us these shows take a lot out of us. It seems like we are always scrambling up to the last minute, making sure we have everything we need and constantly second guessing every decision we make. We were working on only three hours of sleep and then we were on our feet for seven hours.

You might ask "Then why do you do it??" ... well the answers is so simple...
We do this because of YOU, our Swirly fans! You guys are the best! When those doors opened at 9am and the people came flowing in you always make sure your first stop is our booth. WOW! It   reassures us how truly blessed we are to be able to create what we love and have you treasure and enjoy them as much as we do. We loved hearing the stories from many of you on why you were buying an ornament. One woman was buying a patriotic ornament for her son-in-law who just became a US citizen and a Dad and his kids came by and let them each pick out a special ornament - it was great to see them choose an Easter and Halloween ornament! Someone even told us they drove two hours, then got lost, just to come see us. In the spirit of Thanksgiving this week, we just wanted to say THANK YOU for appreciating us and what we create here at Swirly.

Here are a few shots we were able to take during that crazy day for anyone who wasn't able to make it. Don't fret if you missed it, our Christmas collection we be launched online Monday, December 3rd.

Have a great Monday!

Happy Fourth of July!

Wishing everyone a spectacular Fourth of July celebration!

Happy Easter!

We want to wish all you a very Happy Easter weekend!
xo
Lianne & Paul

Happy first day of Spring!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Valentine's Greeting

Happy Valentine's Day!
xo Lianne & Paul

Looking back and planning ahead

Happy New Year everyone!
We have finally recovered from another crazy good Christmas season. We hope everyone enjoyed giving and getting their new Swirly Designs this year.
The week between Christmas and New Years is our down time where we try to do very little (which seems never to be the case). We spent it cleaning and organizing the studio, some bookkeeping and making goals for 2012, personal and business related.

While making the goals for the 2012 we found us looking back at what Swirly has accomplished in 2011 and we thought we would share a few highlights. And also share our hopes for the New Year.

Our Studio...
was profiled in Studios magazine, which was a big thrill for us. Lianne especially enjoyed this because it was the perfect excuse she needed to tackle the studio closet and make it over. (you can sneak a peek at the closet at the bottom of this post. (Maybe later this year we will do a whole post on the studio closet). In 2012 we are actually gathering more shots of the studio for another profile that will be coming out this Spring.

Our Collections...
Starting last year off with a clean and organized studio, we were able to free our minds and create A LOT! This lead to a record 6 holiday collection for us. New additions were our Patriotic Collection as well as a mini Thanksgiving treat. In 2012 we hope to continue creating new and fun designs for 2012. You can be sure that we will be adding our mini's into each launch. Everyone really seemed to enjoy the mini winter wonderland collection we had online as well as at the two craft shows we did.

Promotion...
was big for us in 2011 not just for our studio but for us as well. Swirly was profiled in Christmas Ideas magazine, Celebrate 365 magazine, Simply the Sweet life eZine, plus an artist Sketchbook Stories interview. In 2012 we are hoping to continue this run. We are always very excited to be chosen to have our work profiled and it really helps us get our ornaments and name to a larger audience. But we must admit, out of everything we do for the business, this is by far the hardest and most time consuming task. With the press we got this year there were months of planning, researching companies submission deadlines, coming up with new project ideas to meet their deadlines, emails and waiting. Then racing to photograph and writing copy. So when it does work out you feel all that crazy work you did all year was not for nothing and the other half dozen or so non responses don't seem to matter that much any more (at least that what's we keep saying to ourselves... who are we kidding it matters!)

Social Media...
Facebook was a nice surprise for us this year. Not only for promoting Swirly Designs but also in connecting with our customers. We loved sharing our thoughts and work in progress to our wall. We have a nice following of over 700+ likes in 2011 (our goal this year to reach 7,000 likes ha ha:) We also forged a nice working collaboration with Polyform Products, the company that makes all the clay we use for our ornaments. Together, we created three seasonal how-to projects for their website: Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In 2012 we agreed to create 5 more projects through out the year. The first one being a Valentine’s project. Keep an eye out for that!

As we are writing this and reflecting on all that happened in 2011 for Swirly Designs it was a pretty good year after all and it's going to be a challenge to top it in 2012...but we are really going to try and hopefully you all will come along for the ride.

We always remind ourselves, as we are designing new collections, how lucky we are to have such wonderful support from all of you!

Happy New Year!
~Lianne & Paul

Have a Swirly Christmas!

Holiday season wrap up!

As the Christmas craziness settles down here at the studio, we both can finally let out a BIG sigh of relief for getting all our holiday orders out in the mail and finishing up our last craft show for the season.

Both were a big success for Swirly. We had a record breaking first day sales on the Friday launch day of our Christmas collection. And the SOWA Holiday marketplace show last week had a line of people wrapped around the building waiting for hours just to shop the show.

We are so thrilled and happy people appreciate and look for handmade goods to celebrate the season. It is always nice to read the kind emails about our ornaments and being able to chat in person with everyone who stopped by our booth to see our swirly ornament designs. We thank you for that.

There was so much fun stuff we wanted to share with you this month but never had the time, so we hope to post a lot of them all this week.

Happy Halloween

Halloween greetings to our Bat~eautiful friends!
Enjoy the treats!
~Lianne & Paul

Back to business.

What a whirl wind these last few weeks. Last week our computer crashed and we were without for close to 10 loooong days. We only had a very old laptop computer so we could monitor our emails but we couldn't access our photos, etc.

It couldn't have happened at the worst time. We were right in the middle of working on a project for a company and working on a photo shoot. Thankfully everyone was very understanding and were very patient with us.

When we finally got our computer back and up and running we were bracing ourselves for hurricane Irene. Thank goodness we were only hit with rain and a few small tree branches around our yard.

So this week we are getting back on schedule. The project is complete, the photo shoot is done, and we are working like crazy coming up with new Christmas sketches (we are soooo behind on those!!) and soon we will need to varnish, embellish and glitter our new Autumn collection coming out later next month

Speaking of Autumn.... In today's mail we got our issue of Autumn with Matthew Mead.
What are looking forward to taking a little time to explore the beauty of this magazine.
If you love seasonal magazines and want to get inspired we would highly recommend checking out Matthew's site and ordering your own issue before they are gone.

Have a good week everyone!
Lianne & Paul

What we are working on

Happy Friday everyone! It's such a beautiful day here. Nice breeze coming through the studio window, and we're listening to some soothing music ahhhh. But really it's the calm before the storm as they say....

This will be an extra busy weekend for us here. The kids are away (Yipee!) for the weekend so we really need to work extra hard and accomplish as much as we can in a short time. The studio is full of fall ornaments waiting to be painted and tiles full of ornaments waiting to be swirled so we can can bake them. We are the thick of creating our new Halloween/Autumn 2011 collection.

We are also working with Scupley (the material we use to make our ornaments) on a fun spooky how-to project that will come out in September. So we have to make the project in many stages so we can photograph it. Hopefully we will have nice weather for the pictures sake:)

And after all that we will be transforming our studio into a winter wonderland for an upcoming photoshoot. Crazy we know, but we still wouldn't trade it for anything.


Our growing pile of new designs waiting to be sanded so we can start painting.


Our swirly turkey is making another appearance this season.


We are trying something a little different with a few of our ornaments.
Can you tell what (or should we say who?) these are going to be?

Here is a closer look. If all goes as planned you will see them in this years Halloween collection.

Happy Mommies Day!

To all the mommies out there.
Smile and enjoy your day!
xo
The Swirly gang!