Wooden 3D Christmas Tree

I know, I know, its only the first of October and Christmas is months away, however, for us October means the busy season as well and truly begun. Only 38 days until the Dalkey Winter Fair means that I'm pretty much out of time to design anything new for this year. Fortunately I have been beavering away at a few ideas over the summer and here is the first of them.

This tree is an expansion on the acrylic 3D tree from last year. By making these ones in wood instead of acrylic we cut down on a huge number of headaches with the manufacturing, they can be larger, and I think the contrast of the baubles with the wood is nicer too.

I like the natural wood look but I'm going to see what happens as well if I stain the wood green and also play around with only having one colour of bauble per tree (I have a feeling that a blonde- wood tree covered in red acrylic baubles will look amazing)

Anyway, I promise to try to keep the Christmas stuff to a minimum until at least after Hallowe'en!

Personalised toy for Hugo

A few months ago I bought a wonderful toy from Designist (www.designist.ie). It was a wooden elephant that connected to a trailer filled with wooden blocks. I had been looking for something to give to my 1 year old nephew who was just about to move to Boston. I wanted him to have a way to play with all of us despite living so far away. So I did some illustrations for him of the family to engrave on the bricks. (This is where the ever-popular illustration of Me and Mike came from)


In addition to having family members I also drew him a few vehicles and then popped on the animals form the woodlands series.

When I gave it to him recently he really seemed to relish the opportunity to really drool all over us without us protesting!

This little project was also a great way to observe how different woods give such different results when engraved, the more I work with wood the more I like it.

The wonderful toy was made by Soopsori http://soopsori.eu/

It's our birthday - competition and discount!

So, today is our birthday here at SNOW, we have reached the grand old age of 1!

The last year has been fantastic, I couldn't in my wildest dreams have expected such a positive reaction to work that we do and the service that we offer. This year has been a very positive story from many angles, and I think I have most enjoyed meeting so many other people and companies just like us - people who care about what they do, who take pride in their work and who are making a huge contribution to the vibrant creative class in Ireland.

To celebrate our birthday we are offering 15% off in our online shop for the month of September, just enter the code "bday" at the checkout.

We are also running a competition this week, the prize will be the 7 original woodlands cards that I made this morning and were featured in the blog post below this. There will be 4 runners up who will each receive one of the woodlands characters in wood.

To enter the competition simply submit a photo of one of our products that you own. You can either post to our facebook page, send me a tweet or email it to mike@snowed.ie

The competition will end on Thursday the 6th of September at 17:00 we will then have a random draw to pick the winners.

Oh, and we will also do something nice for any of our wholesale/corporate customers who have orders with us this month because you guys are great too - so you can expect a nice little personalised item in with any orders during September.

We are so very grateful to have had such fantastic customers over the last year, to have had opportunities to meet so many talented people and also to have had a reason to stay in Ireland and forge our own future. Thank you all very much.

- Fiona & Mike

Woodlands Card

I'm very excited to unveil the first finished product from the Woodlands range - the card.

I have had this design floating around in my head since January - after Christmas I realised that our pop-up card was hugely popular but was far too work intensive, I have been working on trying to get the impact of a 3 layered pop-up card without the cost involved with making it. If you were in the studio right now you would see a gigantic pile of coloured papers with different iterations of this designs with different animals, gradients, colours and methods of contrast - I think i have finally cracked it though.

The characters in the card will hopefully all feature in other products which I will release over the next few weeks. So this card is the heart of the range, tying all of the characters together and showing a scene that gives a little insight into the personalities of the characters.

I almost gave up on this whole card last week when I just couldn't get the colours right, fortunately, on Saturday I decided to try gluing a sheet of kraft paper to some mi-teintes and suddenly, all of my problems were solved.

I have done my usual trick and gorged on colour options but I love seeing them all together with different colours and I also love being able to give people a choice because that is the great luxury of small-scale manufacturing with a laser cutter.

Below are some photos, we'll have them on the shop on the website by the end of the day and hopefully we'll have them in some shops in time for the weather to turn a bit autumnal.

 

Carve Cases

We had a visit in the studio today from Carve Cases. The cases look amazing when lasered and Dónal very generously gave me a case when he was leaving.

I'm going to give it to my dad and have engraved it with an illustration of his Land Rover. Check out the photos.

If you want to find out more about Carve, they are a young Irish Business using a mix of cutting edge-machining and hand-finished quality just like us, and they can be found here - http://carvecases.com/