Verdant Packaging

I get so excited every time I get an email alerting me to the fact that someone has purchased one of my pendants from Etsy. Up I get, gathering my materials to send the package on its way to its new home. The name of my pendant shop is Verdance. To me, this is a double entendre, alluding to both my love of dance, and my passion for environmental care (verdant=green, leafy, lush. In my head=healthy, ecologically sound). So of course, the packaging I use to send the pendants in must be as environmentally friendly as possible. There are so many cute ways to package things, but I pride myself on not purchasing more stuff just for packaging. In fact, packaging was my main disgust factor when I worked in retail. I couldn't stand how much packaging each item took! So, I re-use little ziplock bags from Worlds Apart (where I was working in retail...I stockpiled those ziplocks with each shipment of jewelry that came in), then pack them with some business cards (and a thank you!) in a home-made pouch. The pouches are made from old cereal box-type cardboard.

Anything that comes into my house of that thickness gets torn open/flat, the edges snipped off (and recycled), folded and sewn into a little pouch. Sewing the edges means that I don't have to use plastic tape.

Sometimes if I'm in a hurry, I'll staple the edges instead of sewing, but I've been warned by our post man to be careful with that since these packages are delivered by hand and we don't want to injure our mail carriers! As a philatelic nerd, I prefer to use real stamps instead of the post-office print-outs.

A few doodles make it a tad more special.

The cats, of course, always offer their input.