When brainstorming ideas for fundraising, we began to think of crafts or a product we could make, as a fair few of our team members are arty and creative. Given the time of year we were planning to fundraise, we landed on the idea of hand-making a set of holiday greetings cards.
We bought a few packs of plain craft cards and decided on having three cards per package. Then three team members came forward for designing the cards and other members suggested themes, ideas and ways of wishing well over the festive season. We set a goal for ourselves to avoid ‘Merry Christmas’ being part of our designs as we didn’t want to exclude anyone from buying our cards and helping our hoggy friends.
Heloisa
Heloisa found some gold wiring she used for jewellery making and shaped it to make hedgehog spines! She then illustrated a cute face and the two hogs toasting over some bubbly! Using a holepunch she created colourful confetti out of recycled paper, making a cheerful hedgehog party scene.
Beth L
Beth L is one of our team members studying graphic design and at the time of creating, Beth’s area was in lockdown, so we planned that due to Beth’s situation and her digital skills she would create a digital design, so it could be sent via email to the other members who had the blank cards and her design could be put together by another member. Beth created a very sweet holiday hog, peaking from behind a big present, sending out some well needed hedgehugs!
Isla
Isla is our other graphic designer! For her card she used a lino printing set she had. Her hog design was cut into a rubber mat and then she inked up the mat and printed them onto the cards by pressing very hard. This created a stamp of a balled-up hedgehog all snuggled-in for winter with a border of flora and red love heart at the top!
We all enjoyed making our cards and seeing the end result and they were all slightly unique.
We originally planned to include a pin in our package provided by the BHPS, but we enjoyed creating the cards so much that we then decided we wanted to make the pin too. Isla designed a little hedgehog outline, and was going to use the laser cutter at the uni to make said pin. However using the festive theme, we developed the pin into being a decoration instead. So, using scraps laying around the studio we had enough to make our hedgehogs. They are cut from MDF, the laser basically burns the lines into the MDF, meaning you are then left with whatever shape you set up from the computer.
Now that all of our packages were made, it was just a case of creating promotions on our social media pages and creating a donation link to the BHPS through Just Giving. As a team we all decided that we wanted all proceeds to go to the charity, as we wanted to help as much as possible, so we all chipped in to cover postage, to ensure no costs would need to be taken away from our total!
We created 20 packs and sold 12 and as we had extra decorations some people just bought a set of those, and others donated just for the sake of giving. We are so proud and thankful to all those that bought from us so that we were able to raise £95 for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society!
