If you’ve been following me for a while you might remember that back in the mists of time (2022) I designed a small range of Halloween themed studs: a bat, a skull and a pumpkin. It was a popular range, and was even featured in local arts and culture magazine I Choose Birmingham in 2022. Fast forward to this year and I’ve added two more creepy themed designs to the range: a ghost and a spider’s web. I particularly like the ghost, which I modelled on a child’s home-made Halloween costume: a white sheet with circles cut out for eyes!

Why these specific designs?

I did a very unscientific straw poll of friends and customers, asking for their design suggestions. I settled on bats, skulls and pumpkins initially as I wasn’t sure how popular they would be. You have to remember that prior to this range, I had only made abstracted, decorative designs, so I had no way of knowing if my customers would appreciate ‘cute’ earrings. Nonetheless, I decided to try and I’m glad I did because this range has been so well received that I extended it to include tiny ghosts and spider webs for 2023.

How I approached affordable design.

My main focus when I was designing this range was on affordability (and cuteness, obviously) as I suspected that the main interest would come from teenagers and students (I was wrong: people of all ages have bought these!). This meant thinking about material costs and time costs:

• My first decision was to make them small. Why? Because small earrings require less acrylic and take less time to cut out, saving money.

• This led to another obvious decision - to keep them simple. As the pieces would be small they couldn’t include lots of fiddly components that would need gluing together. So each stud would need to be one piece of acrylic.

• I could have easily designed silhouettes to really keep costs low, but I thought they would look too simple and I really enjoy hand painting my pieces when possible. I decided to include etched surface designs instead, but opted to finish them in a single paint colour to speed up the process.

Most makers will tell you that the biggest cost involved in a (properly priced) hand made product is their time. Why? Because it takes time to make things by hand and time has value - the design, the production, the finishing and packaging all take time. The decisions I made about keeping my material costs low also helped keep my time costs low because small, simple pieces take less time to finish than large, complex pieces.

For the entire month of October I’m giving 20% off orders over £20 with the code: SPOOKY20 at the checkout. So you can afford to trick-or-treat yourself to even more pairs of Halloween studs this year!