Introducing: Lisa-Marie Watling, Design Team Member 2017

Dear Paper Lovers

We are happy to introduce to you our final Design Team member for 2017.

Bio

She has been scrapping since 2007/8 She cannot remember exactly when.  Her love of photography and the multitude of photographs she had just sitting on her PC led her to wanting to do more with them!  

She's ALWAYS been creative and have many memories as a child of making things, painting, drawing, etc. 

Her grandfather was a self-taught artist and taught her most of what she knows now.  She is really completely passionate about scrapbooking! 

She also LOVES writing, so her scrapping pieces often have a story / journaling that comes with it (mostly hidden, because she's a bit embarrassed about how very messy her handwriting can get!). A typical creative!  

Her daughter might not be so happy one day when she has to have miles of shelves built to house all the albums Lisa-Marie has created for her.  (We think that's a good thing)

Lisa-Marie says she cannot imagine her life without this wonderful art form; it also serves as her therapy witch we strongly believe in at Ivytree Studie!  

Current & Past DT's:

She is currently serving on the Design Teams for:

CSI: Color Stories Inspiration,

Fabscraps,

Let's Scrap and

Feeling Sketchy

(she served on this for a little over 2 years for each)

Aside from the fact that she adores our paper and loves working with it. Lisa's Review regarding our paper: "Their finish and quality is so unlike any I've worked with!"  She also really wants to be in a position to promote a product that is made, designed and manufactured locally and that's why she is the right girl for us! 

She is such a proudly SA chick she is determined to go all the way to promote our beautiful country and our products.

​You can connect with Lisa-Marie on Social Media or read her personal blog here. 

  Click here to visit our Design Team Page. 

- visit our website today - 

Introducing: Margaret Kieser, Design Team Member 2017

Dear Paper Lovers

We are happy to introduce to you our second Design Team member for 2017.

Bio

She is also a Christian, widow, mom to 3 beautiful daughters, and granny to 6 absolutely delightful, grandchildren. She was born in the UK in a small town called Tunstall, one of the 5 “pottery” towns in Staffordshire. Her dad made a bold decision just after she was born, to emigrate to South Africa, and she therefore considers herself a South African, with British and Dutch blood lines. 

She grew up on a farm just outside of Johannesburg, where she spent more time ‘outside’ than she did in the house. Because of the distance of the farm to the nearest city, she was unable to attend any formal art classes, but can vividly remember always scribbling and watching her dad draw. All her senior class geography books were decorated with detailed, coloured pencil drawings, of geological formations! 

Her crafting life really took off just after she was married, and she suspects she that she has probably tried every new craft that has hit the SA scene! However it was only after she turned 55, that she attended oil painting classes. Apart from painting, scrapbooking, her other hobbies are genealogy (already traced family lines back to the 1600’s), mosaic, card making, and digistamp designing.

She also owns and manage the only South African online store for digistamps –http://www.digistamps4joy.co.za/eshop, run the blog for this, as well as the Facebook page and a large global Design team.

 

Current & Past DT's:

She served on Pattie’s Creations cardmaking blog as a team member. She has also managed her own DT since 2010, arranged blog hops, and run many challenges.

She loves our products after having been introduced to them in September 2016.

She is an avid supporter of South African company design teams as we have so few of them.

You can connect with Margaret on Social Media or read her personal blog here.

                                    Click here to visit our Design Team Page.

- visit our website today - 

Introducing: Wilna Cremer, Design Team Member 2017

Dear Paper Lovers

We are happy to introduce to you our first Design Team member for 2017.

Bio
She is a child of God, wife, mother of two grown-up children and works as a PA.

She has a heart for high quality hand crafts and she is very creative. 

Her greatest passion is sparking creativity in others.

She hasn't scrapped ‘professionally’  in a few years for various reasons, and she said the moment she saw the "Friendship Begins in the Heart" Collection, she just knew she had to scrap again.  It inspired her and she has so much fun playing with it.

She has also been fortunate in gaining experience in a variety of fields throughout her crafty journey. Her knowledge and know-how is best utilized through sharing her talent and assisting others.

She is a creative in her own right and has collaborated with a variety of clients and fellow crafters to showcase their creative dreams. 

She has taught as well as designed within the scrapbooking industry for over 10 years. She loves capturing special moments and turning them into perfect papery memories and we just know she will be a great ambassador for Ivytree Studio.

Past DT’s:
Lets Scrap
Enmarc
Scrap-a-doodles
Guest designer at Scrap Collections


You can connect with Wilna on Social Media or read her personal blog here. 

Click here to visit our Design Team Page.

- visit our website today - 

Lazy days, New Beginnings and Creative Teams

Dear Paper Lovers,

We just love December in South Africa and we can't believe it's over! So a last post for this year before we embark on new adventures again and it is going to be a bit of a recap and update to what we are still up to. :) Enjoy!

Lazy days, a slower pace, rest, sunshine and peachy showers of lovely rain falling in Pretoria, thunder storms and Christmas time. What a joy to be with family and spending time just breathing.  It is exactly what you need after a hard year of starting new things, hoping hard and living your dream job.

We have learned so much, and in this coming new year we hope to implement those lessons. You may just see some changes over at our website again as growth is our aim. We might just surprise you with what we have planned for this year and the years to come.

On a more personal note, we believe that Faith is the foundation of anything and everything we do and our Hope is squarely placed in God, the One who is our Foundation. He is our CEO and with His guidance we hope to bring you more inspirational and beautiful products. We hope it will touch the lives of all our clients in a positive way and continue to do so in the years to come. We are not afraid to say who we are. We are Artists, Believers, Creative Designers, Teachers, Encouragers and Entrepreneurs and we hope that what we do and how we do it, will inspire other women to also live out their calling and gifts to the full. If you want to tell your story, you must believe that it can make a difference or not tell it at all. So, give things another go this year and work hard at whatever it is you know you are good at. Do not let anyone deter you from it. Stay committed. Keep trying, working and believing. Take chances and aim high.

From our family "team" to yours, we wish you all a blessed holiday season, a happy and hopeful new year and lots and lots of creativity. Do that thing you are so afraid of, live out load and show the world how BIG your BRAVE is!

and while we are ending things off for this year, here is what we have learned:

1. Never ever give up! Just keep moving forward one step at a time as that is the Light God gives.
2. Don't follow anyone else's way of doing things. Follow Christ and the Holy Spirit. Father knows best.
3. Work hard.
4.  Rest when you are tired.
5. Make time for God and family first.
6. Always try to give the best service you can for any client. Their loyalty is your reward and you never know who will become your best client.
7. Don't disregard small beginnings. You don't know where you will end up.
8. Don't let stress take over your life. Manage it.
9. Remember God is King and clients and service providers are not. Keep your perspective.
10. Don't let other people's bad attitudes become your focus or influence you to the point of giving up. The best thing you can do is to live your life well and to know that you are loved, blessed and favored by a God who cannot wait to see what you do next with the gifts He gave you. Keep looking up and keep moving forward.
11. Dream big because your God is big. He brings solutions to the table you didn't even think about.
12. Change is part of life. Growth is a process. Comparison kills creativity. Be a trend setter.
13. The challenges and resistance you face are actually part of the learning curve you need to become the person God wants you to be, to grow your business the way God wants you to grow it and nothing, no lesson is in vain. You were meant to experience the things you did, so you would know how to proceed, what pitfalls to sidestep and which directions to take and which not to take. Take note of every experience. It is valuable.

and last but not least....
Always always always trust God for every step.  If you build your life on anything else, it is shaking sand. The accolades of men will not give you the life you dream of or the life you need to be happy. What will give you true happiness and contentment is to know that you lived the life God intended for you. Don't follow your heart, lead your heart. Guard it, for it is the wellspring of Life.

With all of that, we look forward to a full and blessed 2017.

DESIGN TEAM 2017 ANNOUNCEMENT:
Since we put out a Design Team call for 2017 a couple of months ago, we received some fabulous entries and the following three Paper Lovers will grace our pages with their creations in the coming year. Keep a look out for them. Congrats ladies, and we are looking forward to working with you on the first creative projects soon.

We will be setting things up in the next few weeks to link to their blogs and pages so you can access their creative projects, so keep a look out for that.

HOLIDAY PROJECTS:
December holidays are card-making season! Most of our family birthdays start in September and doesn't stop until February with most of them in November and December including or Mom's birthday on the 15th of December. So as mom turned 77 this year, I went all out with this little pink number. She was doing some sewing in the days leading up to her birthday so I thought a sewing theme would be appropriate.  We inherited our love of florals from our mom so naturally I included some flowers from our latest "Wild&Free" collection and some rolled roses I made with the Hadeda Garden Collection. I also included small elements from the Friendship begins in the Heart collection so all in all I used paper from all three our 2016 collections in one card. Such fun!

This project took me about 6-8 hours in total from conception to completion. I was so excited to give it to my Mom that I couldn't wait until the morning and had to give it to here the night before her birthday. She loved it so I was a happy puppy. :) She wants to frame this one in a box frame.

Then I decided to see how the new Wild&Free collection would behave with Christmas cards and I just couldn't stop. These cards were so quick and easy. The paper lends itself to a multitude of possibilities in English or Afrikaans. I had to stop at 5 or I would still be making cards. Here are just a couple of pics to give you some idea of what you can do with it. 

Products used:
Birthday Card
Paper: Hadeda Garden, Friendship begins in the Heart and Wild&Free Collections
Adhesives
Anita's 3D Glue
Metal photo corners and other little embellishments:
Diamante
Various beads and pins
Ribbon and gold string
Pearls
Button, Wood heart, flower trinket, small paper roses in various colors,
Gold acrylic paint
Silhouette cuts: lace, sewing machine
** Anyone interested in a tutorial and kit for this card, email us here for more info.

Christmas Cards
Paper: Wild&Free Collection
Adhesives
Anita's 3D glue
Diamante
Silhouette Cuts: Wreath

IVYTREE STUDIO KIT CLUB:

We launched our very first Kit a while ago and it was well received. If you are interested in joining our Kit Club, drop us a line here so we can add you to our mailing list and keep you posted.

Don't forget that our store is also open 24/7 and stocked with lots of pretty paper. We deliver anywhere in South Africa right to your door!

Click here to visit our store.

Enjoy the last moments of this year with family and friends.

PS: As "Design Team" now means something else, we will update our signature for the new year too.

Whild & Free in our New Wholesale Store!

Hi there Paper Lovers,

As the summer is upon us, we have been inspired with our local weather and thinking about holidays and happy times with family and friends. Christmas is looming in the near future and summer rainstorms are cooling us in our little studio as we create up a storm.

For months now we have been working on our next collection and the two to follow. We are opening pre-ordering for Retailers/Wholesaler today (1 November 2016) and launching this new collection mid November. We are not clear on the official date yet but it will be between the 16th and the 22nd of the month. Contact us if you are interested in this new collection.

We will be uploading the individual item images during the coming week, so keep an eye out for it on our Facebook page, our Website and our Wholesale Store.

Note that the new collection will only be made available to the general public on the official launch date in mid November. 

This collection was totally done from scratch. Surita Brink, our Artist in Residence, hand painted and designed this entire collection. We are very proud of her and the lovely art she creates. Her touch gives our paper a unique thumbprint that you won't be able to find anywhere else. 

NEW RETAIL/WHOLESALE TERMS&CONDITIONS: 

We have updated the way we sell our products on our general online store. (See Announcement on our Website's homepage here) 

We have now moved the Retail/Wholesale section in our general store, to a separate store called "Ivytree Wholesale".  If you have registered with us during the past year as Retailer/Wholesaler, please read our updated Terms&Conditions to see how it will affect your account with us. If you have any questions, read the FAQ section of the new Terms&Conditions and contact us if you need any help. 

The major point to notice is that to qualify for our Wholesale store (which is not automatic), you must place a bulk order to activate the account. When we receive your next/bulk order, we will create an account for you in the Wholesale Store and you are eligible for the pricing in the Wholesale store. 

If you are not able to purchase the products in the Wholesale store, you can still shop in the general store at any time. 

To keep things simple, your login for the general store will be the same as the login for the Wholesale store. (We will create an account for you in the Wholesale store as soon as you qualify for it)

What about the General store?:

Yes, we have some updates here too. No more Retail/Wholesale section. From today, all our products on our general store will have the option for you to order either a single sheet or any number of sheets available in stock. We added two check-boxes where you can choose to order 5 sheets @ R10 per sheet or 10 sheets (our previous retail packs) @ R8,50 per sheet. 

Our retail price for our paper still ranges between R10 and R14 per sheet. 

We are confident that our paper is of excellent quality and that our prices are within the range that the local market can handle. 

Recent comments from clients: 

"...if you haven't used the Ivytree Studio papers yet, you are missing something. The paper has a special "feel" to it, a lovely firmness and the more basic designs are lovely for backgrounds on cards." - Marie Smith from purple Magnolia, Gauteng 

"Thank you very much for the beautiful product and great service! " - Svetlana Austin, Polokwane

Retail/Wholesale Registration:

First you have to read our Terms&Conditions, then complete an online form over on our website. We do ask that you don't register until you are ready to place an order as your registration will only be activated with an order. Registration gives you automatic entrance to the general store but only a bulk order gives you entrance to the Wholesale store. You do have to place an order at least once every two months to keep your Wholesale account active. For more on registration, read the Terms&Conditions.

DESIGN TEAM CALL:

Just a little reminder of our Design Team call for 2017. The deadline for entering your audition is end of November.