Having for many years been an ardent card crafter I had always had difficulty sourcing repeatable card and card making products.
As many of you will know having to travel round for miles and miles just to find a piece of card or a topper to match one previously used can be a soul destroying experience. Even though cardmaking is meant to mean that each card is individual I tend to find that myself and many other cardmakers prefer to use the same type of card as a base for our designs be it hammer embossed white, linen embossed cream etc.
This has become quite difficult to achieve with the closure of many small local craft shops and the appearance of many craft chains that like most big companies just shepherd people in take their money and shepherd them out again I mean a sign of the times is that even Tescos do craft items now.
Having seen my own local craft store close and vowing never to use one of the big chains again I got into contact with some of the big paper and card manufacturers. I then with great difficulty opened an online craft store that will be able to supply quality repeatable products at what I hope are reasonable prices.
However this is not a blatant plug for my store. As Napoleon once said the united kingdom is a nation of shopkeepers. Well yes it was but now look at it, it's full of out of town retail parks and supermarkets bigger than 3 football fields.
I'm not saying don't go to the supermarket or to the retail park, everything has it's use. But before you do drive all that way to do your shopping in “one" place think about your local shops or small shops you can access on the internet, possibly slightly more expensive but when you think about the cost of petrol nowadays will it work out to be more expensive? Plus you get to keep your local economy booming and will most probably get a wealth of advice and tips be it face to face or by e-mail. And next time you do go to one of the big stores try and compare the sincerity of the service there to the sincerity of the service you would receive at your local store or small internet store
http://ideasinpaper.co.uk
