I've been trying not to spam Twitter with posts about my sticker making, especially since the character limit there makes it where I can't talk about much, so this blog is the perfect place to talk about it! I've been wanting for a long time to make some kind of sellable Stuff with my art on it. I remember talking last year I think about wishing I could design cute enamel pins like other creators have. While I would still love manufactured merch like that, I feel like this is a nice personal place to start! However, it definitely hasn't been as simple as I expected it to be. Size limits make it where I can't have the stickers be as large as I initially hoped without wasting a Ton of sticker paper. Originally my designs were drawn and printed at about 3.6" tall but I've moved them down to 3" so that I can use the Cricut's print and cut. Three inches is still decent enough even if it's a little disappointing. But that 3/5ths of an inch makes the difference between only fitting four stickers on a page and wasting paper or fitting nine stickers on a page with relatively efficient spacing. I wish the recycling program was still in practice for all this paper I'm trimming and using, made worse by all the technical difficulties at the beginning. But I finally have things figured out. Knowing these size limitations will make designing the next sets a lot easier. I'm planning on demon and angel pinup girls next so I'll try to keep their dimensions to where I can fit a lot of them on each sheet. I also found my printer can handle 110 lbs cardstock at the 4x6 borderless printing size so postcards are a go! I cancelled and re-planned them several times while buying equipment since the Epson printer didn't guarantee it could print on cardstock. At this point I really just have to figure out whether I could laminate the front of the cards or not. I'm not sure exactly how people would display them. Or if they'd try to use them like actual postcards? At any rate, I plan to have three designs on offer. Right now I'm testing using my existing art. I have designs in mind for future releases as well, and hope to expend to perhaps larger scale art prints as well, but for now I'm well prepped for keeping my packages small. You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find chipboard inserts of the size I needed. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of shipping without some sort of solid backing to keep my packages from bending and rigid mailers were very expensive so I hunted and hunted for these things. I saw lots of people saying to use "Do Not Bend" stickers or stamps or what not but alas, I know that's not how this works. These things go through a machine and that machine can't read. I'm still anxious about investing so much in this idea but I'm feeling good about it. The past couple weeks of making progress have been giving me a real boost even with all of the problems along the way. I'm hoping to have my shop open at the beginning of May, maybe a little sooner if I can really pump out these last designs in a timely manner. Fingers crossed it goes well!
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