Christmas Theme Party

Make the most of Christmas craft sales by holding a Christmas theme party - particularly if you still need to get some more Christmas parties booked.

This is obviously the biggie! Every crafter's sales rise dramatically at Christmas time, but you can make it even more fun and profitable by having a Christmas theme party to sell your crafts. Here are some tips:

• Invitations - add some pictures of your most Christmassy crafts or use some Christmas themed clipart to make it more festive. Last year I just glued some little holly punchouts into the corners and dotted some red berries on with paint. It didn't take long but looked very effective.
• Decoration - use traditional Christmas decorations to show off your crafts to best effect, e.g. Christmas trees hung with small items like jewellery. Lots of fairy lights put everyone in a festive mood too.
• Crafts - if you don't have crafts geared specifically towards Christmas, you need to start designing some! If you do woodwork, small wooden Christmas decorations are a must, and candle makers should be focusing on Christmas colours and themes as well. Jewellery makers need to make sure they have plenty of sparkly party pieces available, and teddy bear crafters can dress their teddies in Christmas outfits.

Tip: For papercrafters - don't try to compete with the ultra cheap value packs of Christmas cards. Instead, create special cards for specific family members that you can sell at a good price. People are more than happy to pay for special cards for "Grandma" or "Mom & Dad", so this should be your focus.

• Food - you don't really need my advice for this one. It's too easy... mulled wine, eggnog, mince pies or whatever your Christmas speciality is!
• Gift wrap - having festive wrapping paper or gift bags makes it so easy for your customers to envisage giving your crafts as gifts to anyone and everyone! We all appreciate it if things are made simpler for us, so make life easy for your customers and solve their gift buying and wrapping problems all at the same time!? You can decide whether to charge extra for this. Buy a bulk pack of craft paper or tissue paper and some festive coloured ribbon - it won't cost you much but it's a really effective way of wrapping handmade items and will round off your Christmas theme party nicely. If you already have labels printed you can seal the packages with these, like upmarket jewelry and chocolate stores do.

You'll be really busy, but don't forget to pour yourself a glass of wine too... and have fun!

Please let me know about your Christmas theme party successes and tips by clicking here.