Moving on up!

It's been a crazy summer to say the least for Swirly Designs both personally and professionally. Between welcoming a new addition to the family and planning the upcoming holiday season we have been quite busy with no sign of slowing down. Now to add to it all...as of this past week we have sold our condo and now are in process of finding a new home/studio. Hopefully we will be settled in a new place before the holiday season.

Here is a picture (click to enlarge)showing our work space. We had to declutter and clean up the studio for the open house. Believe us, it never looks this clean.

Upcoming Craft Shows

We decided this year to cut back on the number of craft shows we exhibit at. We feel really bad because doing the craft shows are one of the only few times we actually get a chance to meet and greet all our customers of Swirly Designs. We absolutely love meeting everyone and chit chatting! So, as soon as we get confirmation on the few shows that we are doing, we will let you know.







This first booking that came in last week is:
Wellesley Marketplace at the Wellesley Middle School
on Saturday, November 21, 2009 9-4 pm

See you there!

A gift from Martha

Who doesn't love a free gift. A few months back the Martha Stewart website did a holiday workshops on their website. They have done Halloween workshops in the past and this year they did an Easter workshop. It's a great place to share holiday decorating ideas and pictures. They were also running a contest "Share Us your best Easter projects and Win", so we submitted a couple of our "how-to" projects. We weren't necessarily submitting to win but more for sharing our fun how-to projects. We entered our Springtime Swirly Carrot and the Mini Swirly Bunny

....well a few weeks ago we were notified that we were chosen as one of the winners. YEAH!!!
We were very excited to have been picked and our prize arrived today in the mail:



a 320GB Seagate FreeAgent® Go portable hard drive with docking station to store our favorite photos, videos, music, and more.

Thank you very much Martha & MSLO :)

Our "Southern Lady" magazine ad

Here is a sneak peek at our new
Halloween ad that will be
in the upcoming Sept/Oct issue
of Southern Lady magazine.

Are you a subscriber to this magazine?
Have you seen it at your favorite
magazine/book store?

We will let you know how the ad
does for us this season.

Happy Fourth of July

We would like to take this time to wish everyone a wonderful and safe Independence Day...
hopefully the weather will cooperate with everyone's fireworks and BBQs.
God Bless America!
~Lianne & Paul

June gloom brings Halloween fun

Hello everyone!
Let's all give a great big wave good-bye to June. This month should go down in history as one of the rainiest, coldest and gloomiest (is that even a word?) on record here in New England. Lets hope July will bring some warm sun our way.

The one ounce of good that came out of this miserable month was us staying inside and working in the studio more. The weather was fitting to create some new Halloween designs. Here are some of the new pieces we have been working on this week. They are a series of mini ornaments that we have dubbed "Windcatchers". We are trying to incorporate crepe paper into our designs which we think is a very Halloween-y (again, is that a word?) material.













Have a great rest of the week and hope that we see the sun soon!

All images, text, and content on this site are the sole property of Swirly Designs and may not be used, copied without the express consent by Lianne and Paul.

Swirly Designs: How it all started

Since we have been decluttering the studio the last couple of weeks we came across a box sitting high on top of our bookcase that was filled with some of our early test ornaments. We thought we would share with you the stories behind some of the earlier Swirly Designs.

This was one of Lianne's first commission pieces from 1997. She created a pin with a leaf motif for a charity auction that, at the time, Paul was a part of. She had to create approx 150 pins in less than two weeks. She pulled it off and the the pins were a huge success for the charity.




These two ornaments were really the spark that started whole company. Lianne created these for her personal Christmas cards. As a designer she always designed her own card every year but now she added a little something extra with the cards...an original ornament!


As we both began doing more and more designs we also got requests for commission pieces. A friend of ours approached us about creating favors for a bridal shower with an ocean/water theme. We came up with this cute magnet showing a boy and girl fish kissing in a fish bowl. The magnets turned out great and the bride thought they were a great remembrance of the day.




With this earlier ornament above, we were experimenting a bit more. We were trying different kinds of swirls in the background and the 3D snake texture for the tree etc.




We have also created larger pieces like this door plaque. We have one for every season and we have done a few for kids rooms as well. We also tried experimenting with different types of ribbon, shown above, embellished with a colored bead before we settled on shear chiffon ribbon for our ornaments.


One of our earlier retail accounts was a local garden center. They carried our ornaments in their gift shop during the holiday season. This "Eggplant Seeds" ornament was a part of our garden seed package collection. We thought it would be nice to tie in these garden designs to better target their clientele. We started to then realize that our designs didn't have to be strictly Christmas themed.


This Swirly Dove Wreath was one of our biggest sellers when we launched our catalog back in 2002.

The interesting story behind this is since we usually create small quantities of our designs, this one was an early sell out. For the next year we decided to double or we might have even tripled the amount we made and unfortunately we never did sell the same amount as in the past.
The lesson learned is that you can never predict what your customers are going to like. Plus we would rather have them wanting more than having too many leftovers.

As you can see, our ornaments are constantly evolving and we are always reworking them to keep them fresh. We love trying new and different things with them and we like to see what our customers will respond too.