papermakin'

This is one of those interesting projects, it starts as something small then morphs into something else all together. Often you don't know where the next opportunity is coming from until you are knee-deep in grinder plates on a Saturday afternoon!

As Colin Harmon recently prepared for the WBC in Melbourne I was working on a few props for him to use in his routine. We make lots of bits and pieces for 3FE and it is always fun because what we are asked to do is so diverse (it also involves having to go to 3FE for essential meetings/brainstorming/deliveries which means I just HAVE to get a coffee while there) This project was the most diverse yet, it involved a variety of pieces and parts. The core piece were serving boxes made in wood with acrylic lids. These served as both the table setting and an interactive frame. I also made some blank, custom-sized beer boxes. These came in two sizes, one for beer bottles that would hold Colin’s signature drink, as well as a mini size to hold some mini glass serving jugs. On top of the beer bottles were red lids that had a coffee bean engraved in them. This was a bit of an experiment and worked out really well. Customised beer bottle caps could be a great memento for special occasions. Engraved on the boxes and stuck on the beer bottles were a range of very cute and very appropriate icons designed by Shane Kenna. These told the story of the coffee beans Colin was using in his presentation. They were laser-engraved into the sliding lids and I applied them to the beer bottles using my trusty old vinyl cutter and a steady hand. I wanted to give Colin and Pete a small memento of the trip to wish them well so I ran up a coupe of personalised soft-cover Moleskine notebooks for them. Shane’s logos look great engraved on the front and I love any chance to engrave notebooks. Colin did an amazing job and placed 4th returning to Dublin with yet another World Trophy to sit on the shelves of 3FE. For more information about the very talented Shane Kenna, click here shanekenna.com Below you can see some photos of all of the elements as well as some screen grabs of Colin and the props in action in Melbourne.

So last year I made all those mini Smock Alley models, well they were actually wedding invitations. The couple, Eddie and Leisha, came to me with a fantastically open brief and from that they ended up with wedding invitations/christmas decorations for their December wedding - they got married in Smock Alley. (you can check out that blog post again here http://papermakin.blogspot.ie/2012/10/mini-smock-alleys.html) In the new year Eddie and Leisha got back in touch with me, this time with the mission of creating Thank You cards for the wedding. The first time around one of my ideas had been to to a tri-fold card featuring them and their dog. The mini models seemed much more special for the actual invites, but the thank yous seemed like a great time to work out the tri-fold. In the card you can see the two of them cycling (on their much-loved bikes) trailing their Thank You message with them. This was a great chance to push the technique used in the Santa's Visit and Woodlands cards another step further. Because this was a limited run I was able to put a lot more fine detail into the card - like the frame of the bikes. Normally I have to bulk things up just to make sure we don't have too much waste and too much finishing to do on big production runs. These kind of personalised jobs are so rewarding to do, and having clients come to you and trust you to make something so important is always a real honour.

There is a brand-new coffee roastery in Dublin - Cloud Picker Coffee are up and running in the Docklands. To mark their launch they wanted some special business cards - as I've said before, laser-cut cards don't come cheap but they do give impact. When a new company wants to make a mark, a memorable card can go down very well. For these cards the Cloud Picker team chose engraved greyboard. Laser-engraved greyboard always look fab, you have this intersection of a utilitarian and oft-overlooked paper product with cutting edge lasering creating an unexpectedly luxe product. This project was also a great example of using the laser to facilitate the design process. Frank was able to work through a few different style options and get real, physical samples made for very little effort before committing to the final design. If you want to find out more about Cloud Picker you can find them on twitter @CloudPickerCoff and taste the coffee in the Science Gallery Café.

First things first, my apologies for the long wait for a new post around here. The first few month of 2013 have been going really well for us here in Snow HQ, which is brilliant, but leave little time for the fun things that make it into blog posts. This little project has been really fun. I wanted to make some retail props for the letter rack and pencil pot from The Woodlands range. I could have just used real envelopes and pencils, but where's the creativity in that? First I worked on a few paper pencils. These are made up of a piece of 4mm ply in the shape of the pencil and then thin strips of paper hand-glued to the ply in various colours. I'm pretty happy with how they worked out. I just used some scrap paper from around the studio, I think more could be done creating the illustion of 3D object with better tonal choices. Next time I get an afternoon to myself I hope to experiment a bit more with this technique. The envelopes are very simple pieces of .6mm brown card with branded snail-mail stamps. A very quick piece but hopefully effective. They are also quite sturdy which will really give them an edge over real envelopes when used as retail props. These pieces are going straight to the Design Corner shop in Dun Laoghaire this afternoon. The Woodlands range has made its debut in the shop and the response has been really great. To see the full woodlands range you can check them out on our online store here (scroll to the end of the page) http://www.snoweventdesign.com/store To find out more about the Design Corner in Dun Laoghaire you can check out their Facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/thedesigncorner

- Cost. Laser cutting is expensive, and doesn't scale very well. I try very hard to keep my costs fair and reasonable for my clients, but a multi-layered, personalised, fancy-looking wedding invitation can quickly spiral out of control. Having said that I have done a few really great wedding jobs recently here are a few process photos of one in particular. For this Sarah was very open to suggestions, she had a few examples of laser-cut invites that she really liked and a few leads for me in terms of colour and theme. I'll follow up next week with some photos of the final product, but these photos show the beginning.

Mike was doing some high-powered slate tests today and with the power really high we got this amazing result. The slate turned into glass! That's how hot the laser burns. Unfortunately the glass just chips off, but still, amazing result!

Here we have some plywood necklace and earring display stands, sanded and stained. We have stained wood for laser cutting before, but never on pieces as large as these necklace stands. For a while I was convinced I had ruined 6 pieces of plywood, but lucky for me they looked better once the stain had dried. After we cut them we added simple collapsable stands to the back. The stands are currently showing off the jewelry of Judith Ritchie at Showcase Ireland. See Judith's work at http://www.etsy.com/shop/aboxformytreasure Showcase is on at the RDS in Dublin until the 23rd of January.

This is a slightly cryptic post because I can't yet reveal what these are for, however, I couldn't wait to show them to you all. I was asked a few weeks ago to make 70 mini models of the newly-reopened Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin. Delighted to get a new mission I went for it. They are essentially made the same way as the mini houses but the scale is much smaller so there was a challenge when it came to standardising the features like the window bars and the crucifix. At this kind of scale any architectural model quickly goes from being a perfect representation of the subject to being a trick. A skillful assessment of the features that will have the most impact leaves you with a model that looks pretty complicated and comprehensive but that can be made quickly. My client for this project has the same love for chipboard and red as I do so trying to figure out the materials and finish wasn't a problem at all. I hope to reveal the function of these in a few weeks, in the mean time enjoy the photos.

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!

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/

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 [email protected] 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

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.

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/

Someone left some growth serum lying around the studio and the mini houses have grown! A bit of thick ribbon and hanging or sitting in a foyer/mantelpiece and these will look great at Christmas