Busyness crept up along side laziness and left my little blog unattended. But in my defense, I would say busyness did take up majority of my time!

Many things have been happening in the pass few months. For Cubid, I reached 100 sales and more! Reaching my goal I set a while back. I guess I have only Etsy to thank for randomly featuring one of my products in their newsletter. Personally, I’ve been swamped with wedding preparations! Now that card making is over, I’ve found time, or at least got out of my laziness to write something on cubid.sg.

My fiancée, who runs serenie.etsy.com, and I have been slogging at least the pass 2 weeks on cards alone. Me and my bright idea of doing the cards ourselves. But in all the trouble, I think we’ve got some great cards and a great sense of fulfillment too.

But what surprised me most was how cubid.etsy.com continued to get orders! I decided that I would stop making new listings, so as to give myself more time to dedicate to wedding things, and yet, orders just came in! Slower than usual, but at a rather comfortable rate. A friend remarked once how she thought my “job” is a real luxury. Get to take time off as and when I want or needed. I guess these are the perks to running your own business, but there’s lots more discipline and irregular hours to coupe with on the other hand. Ah well, all in all, it’s a wonderful idea of growing a business, making plans and looking forward to seeing it grow. Really looking forward to the new year when I can implement the plans I have for Cubid!

So if you’re reading this, and wondering why I’m slow with your order, or not super responsive on Etsy, I’m kinda busy with my wedding happening in January! Hope you understand! Yup, so I’ll leave this as it is for now, will, try to get some pictures of our cards on here and in the mean time… Blessed Christmas!

Here’s a feedback image sent by one of my latest customers!

Here is a photo of IkonsAndInk’s CD cases with stickers made by yours truly. She was so happy with them, she came back to me to do another 35 sets! Really awesome! It’s great to see how my products are being put to use too.

Do check out her website here at www.dailyikon.com. I just took a look and her photography wowed me!

Thank you so much for the support Anna!

The newsletter can be found here.

Just really excited! I woke up to email activity I heard on my phone and I went to check. Looked up Google Analytics and the views had spiked! 2nd time this week, but even higher! Had no idea where the first came from. The traffic sources had a significant increase from the category of “Others” with “etsy_success(email)” flashing a larger number than expected.

I really thank God, because He is in control of everything. Now just praying I can cope with the orders that are about to come! At least I hope they come!

It’s really great to see your own work on blogs and other etsy shops!

A big thank you to Felicity for trusting in my work and design for her personalised packaging. Do check out her stuff at her shop here!

I’m clearing out my some Stickerbooks I made a while back! I previously dropped the price from $7.99 to $4.99 and now I’m letting them go for 6 for the price of 4!

I’ve got 26 left, so grab them while you can!
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=27235942
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=27235945
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=30058512
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=27850149
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=27850125
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=27850187

Here was a fun order where I was asked to do a custom graphic for a minicard. So together with an order of 150 minicards, she bought the graphic and has used it on her blog.

Thanks Karen!

Always Have No Money (Parody) – Power Cruisin Sarabat Boys

To the tune of “Always be my Baby”. Enjoy!

Well, I don’t know if I’ll call it a review, because it was written by my dearest!! :) But I thank her for letting me do these packaging, tags, stickers and cards for her which has helped me spur on to make cubid into a where it is now, and where it will be.

Do check out her stuff!
Blog: http://serenitedesigns.blogspot.com/
Shop: http://serenie.etsy.com/

Heading slowly to my next goal of 100 sales. The pass week has been busy busy busy with so many convos that sometimes I feel bad for not being friendly enough! But I thank all of you for your recent purchases, convos, views, hearts and interest in my work!

I really feel this is something that God has blessed me with and I really want to grow it and make it work, in the end for His purposes!

Many blessings to you,
Linus

For a while, I’ve been thinking of how to advice my customers better when they receive their boxes. Recently, there’s been some interest in my Pillow Packs too. So I decided to put them together and provide a very simple tip, which I hope you will find useful!

So here it goes!

Pillow packs have been a very useful and unique packaging idea for a long time. They have an interesting look, holds small things well, the curves provide some structure, easily stored flat, and can be easily made!

Printing and cutting is no problem, but what happens to the fold lines!? How do I score curve lines accurately? Here’s my little tip for you!

First of, cut out your pillow packs. Cut out an extra identical piece too! I’ll tell you why later. I had mine cut out with my digital cutter, so that I wouldn’t need to print any “cutting” lines, for a clean box.

Next score the straight lines first.
The center:

The adhesive flap:

Next, the cover flaps. These are curved so what do you do to make it an accurate score line? I tried using a curve ruler and even did it slowly by hand, but all I got were crooked lines.
Here’s the trick – take the 2nd piece and align them as such:

Have the 2 center corners meet, and align the top and bottom corners so that the curved surface of the 2nd pillow pack cover the area that will be your flaps!

Score this part firmly but gently as you can easily slip and make lines where you don’t want to.

Now if you have many boxes to score, you would want to switch around using different pieces to do this. This helps you get an accurate hand score, but it also weakens the paper fibers of the 2nd piece. You will find that it won’t serve as a good stencil after a repeated scorings. So switch between other pieces and keep each one still usable as a box!

The next parts are pretty straightforward.
When folding the 2 center lines, always fold outside first before folding as intended. Origami instructions would say “do a valley fold first.”

So once that is done for both straight lines, next is the glueing.

Apply a generous amount of white/PVC glue. White glue is transparent when dry, so it won’t look ugly if any spill over.
Next, spread it evenly, especially to the corners.

Then press together and you will have a flat-packed pillow pack! Yay!
Leave for 5mins or more to dry and then proceed to fold.

Always start in the corner and make your way downwards following the score line to get the fold as close as possible. Since it is a curve, the paper will be a bit resistant and move into straight lines. But if you have scored it hard enough, it should fold easily into place.

Here’s a half completed one. I wasn’t careful to check which side should be the top and did it the other way around. So the surface facing you, is meant to be the top, but the flaps have been folded wrongly. When this happens, you are likely to face this problem:

The corner breaks open, also when there is not enough glue in the corner or if not dry. Having the flaps done in the correct way helps prevent this as well.

Here’s the back of the pillow pack, with the flaps done correctly:

You can see the adhesive flap should be visible only to the bottom side.

And with this, your pillow pack is done!

Before I end my blog-torial, here’s a few stationery you would want to prepare beforehand:

Starting from the top:
• Bone scorers
• Or if you don’t have one, use a thin embossing tool
• If those are not available, use the back of a butter knife! I learnt this trick from a book on pop-up cards I was browsing through once.
• Glue
• Ruler
• And lastly a cutting/protective mat, so you don’t damage your table.

So there it is! My first blog-torial! Hope it’s been helpful!

Update:
Here are 3 free templates (in PDF) for your use! If you ever need them printed and scored for you, do let me know! Click here to find out more.

Size 1: 8 x 6 x 2.5cm (3 x 2.25 x 1in)
Size 2: 10.2 x 6 x 2.5cm (4 x 2.25 x 1in)
Size 3: 10.2 x 7.5 x 2.5cm (4 x 3 x 1in)