Playtime at the House of Beads
With the uptick in sales at The Ears Have It, I’ve had some time to play with packaging lately. A customer recently made a note on their order to mark their package fragile because their post office apparently is pretty brutal. So when I picked up some heavy-duty mailers, I also thought, “Why not look into some other unique gift packaging for the holidays?”
I found some net bags in a variety of pretty autumn colors at my bead store and that got me thinking, what else can I do to give – as my husband puts it – some devil in the details and make my package something unique on the outside as well as what’s on the inside?
As some of you already know, I am going to be the Guest of Honor at Loscon, our local literary science fiction convention over Thanksgiving weekend. I’m going all out on plans to do cosplay for the characters in my series of novels, The Dragonfly Temple Chronicles. To this end, I have been ordering several props for a book trailer/music video and one of these things is a sealing wax kit.
I’ve been fascinated with the art of letter-writing since I was a child, from the first time I got a letter done in calligraphy from my beloved sister Leslie. I taught myself calligraphy and gathered together a small collection of sealing wax impressions as well as a variety of colors of wax. The art seemed to wane with the advent of emails, but you wouldn’t know that on Etsy. There are many sellers of sealing wax in a rainbow of colors never before available when I was a kid, packaged in beautiful, personalized wooden boxes, along with a new way to melt the wax using a tea light over a spoon housed in a metal and/or wooden casing – like a mini furnace.
Seeing this got me really excited about the possibility of ordering a customized wax seal impression of the emblem of my character’s house – a triple dragonfly set against a Celtic knot backdrop. While I am awaiting my order, I have been playing with various wax colors I already have, and a simple dragonfly wax impression I bought on Etsy last year and using this as a finishing touch on the packaging on my orders.
So what do you think? Is this something that would get you excited about getting your order, seeing this on the outside of a plain, ordinary mailer? I’d love to know and if you have any other ideas to spruce up packaging. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
