I ran out of business cards the other day and I wanted to do a little something fun before I reprinted them. I don’t know how much people use business cards these days, but I do! I always include one in Etsy orders and people often pick them up when I do in-person shows. The back of my cards has always been blank.
Back when I did more shows where I was selling wearable pieces, I used to put a sticker on the back with care instructions for a piece and I pinned the business card to each one to act as a tag. I always used a sticker because I had so many different fabrics, it made sense to just stick on the right sticker versus printing many different versions.
But I don’t tag everything like that anymore because I realize that the tags just get beat up and tangled between shows and handling and was making a lot of trash replacing them. So it was time to put something else on the back of the cards. I have one from a sequin shop that I have stuck on my file cabinet because it has a chart of sequin sizes with little circles so I can see the size at a glance. That’s a handy tool! I couldn’t think of a handy tool to use for my cards. A ruler seemed too generic and nothing else seemed to really relate to what I do. So instead I decided that the most “on brand” thing for me was to add a project!
I decided to make a charted pattern of Stanley, my labrador. If you follow me on social media, you know that he shows up in about half of my feed. He’s a studio mascot for sure. I played around and came up with a version of him that I liked and then charted it out in Illustrator. As I was working on it, I was thinking cross stitch, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are tons of crafts you can do with a charted grid pattern: knitting, cross stitch, embroidery, tapestry crochet, perler beads, mosaics, diamond painting… So it’s a choose your own craft pattern! I’m hoping that people will maybe want to hang on to the card because it’s a fun thing rather than just putting it right into the recycling.
I stitched up a version to try it out and I love it.