Beatrice: The Fairy with Attitude

Hopefully, by now, many of you  will have come across our new character "Beatrice" The fairy with attitude". We've spent a fair bit of time this week launching her first set of papers. This set contained just about everything we could think of, Decoupage, Frames, Pyramid paper, backing papers, inserts, even a Cross Stitch Chart and digital stamps. All free to download of course. The only thing we have left to do it a set of scrap-booking papers.

This is the 2nd character in our "family", Brewster being the first. They will soon be joined by two more who are already under development.

We've been asked a few times why we have developed our own characters rather than using  ones which already exist. Well there are a few reason:

• Just about every character which already exists is covered by copyright, it would cost us more to use an existing character than it does to work with an artist to develop our own.
• People identify a character, or set of characters with a particular company. We want people to identify these characters with Free Craft Downloads.
• Even if you pay the license to use an existing character there are lots of restrictions as to what you can do with them. e.g. if we paid to use an image of Winnie the Pooh we still wouldn't be allowed to show him propped up against a bar with a pint in one hand and cigar in the other!  As these are our own character we'll be able to do what we want with them.
• We may choose, at some point in the future, to let other crafters have ago at developing some papers using our characters. You can't do that unless you control the copyright.

So these are some of the reason we choose to develop our own characters.

At the moment we are running a competition which will run until the end of October. We are asking for people to suggestions ideas/situations for a set of Beatrice papers. The original idea was to pick a winner, make their idea into a set of papers and give them a prize. Having seen to quality of the suggests which have already coming in it looks as if we will be awarding several prizes and making quite a few sets of papers!

Finally we thought you might like to see the early sketches for Bea. It will give you an idea of how rhe character was developed and just how talented the artist we work with is!