Our History

At Christina's Crafts we are dedicated, passionate Paper Crafters

Birth Of Christina's Crafts

2002 We opened our Doors

2009 update

I (Christina) have an unusual obsession with paper & arty embellishments that adorn my paper creations, when you love paper as much as I do, you just have to hunt down all that you love & adore. Thanks to the world wide web my searches have taken me literally around world and back again, I've even jumped on a plane or 2 to have a look for myself & choose the very best treasure to share with you all.

So this is how Christina's Crafts was conceived.

To start at the beginning, Christina's Crafts was actually birthed in my loungeroom @ home, although the whole concept of a papercrafting store has been in my heart for many more years than I would like to recall.

After a very looooong time of pestering my husband, he finally relented & gave me a few dollars & challenged me to "go try & sell a few bits of paper!" (he thought it all a bit of a joke & what harm could come from encouraging his wife with a few dollars) ? little did he know that he was staring into the mouth of a monster!

I enlisted the help of one of my friends & we loaded the van up with a few supplies & started taking our paper to the local markets 2 days a week. We had many an early morning, frost bitten fingers & toes (we even brought a little heater to put under our trestle table to keep us warm). I am sure we spent more money browsing all the stalls than we actually made in those days.

I was an avid Stamper & Card Maker so this is the stock I started out with, but a few weeks into selling @ the markets we found another person selling square 12in paper for a craft called Scrapbooking, so curiosity got the better of me  & I thought, Oh well I'm cutting my own paper anyway, why not try a new size? We found out that you could buy an album to fit 12in paper so got one of those & put a few sheets in an album to see how they would go,  I guess you could say the rest is history. Not only have we designed our own wire paper racks to display our 12in  paper (& are very proud to see other stores using the stands we designed to store their paper) but we have had to create an entire Paper Room in our store! My Upwey store had over 60 paper stands displaying more than 3000 different papers & I love almost every one of them!

I did the markets for about 12 months & also exhibited at a few country shows & events & made our real launch in the industry with a little stand @ Melbourne Paper Arts (MPA; now known as Paperific) in the St Kilda Town hall in 2001. It was a true eye opener. Back in those days we didn't have any displays so we hired trestle tables to put all our products on. We had a tiny 3 x 3 stand & filled it with tables, what we forgot to leave room for was customers! Of course we took soooo much stuff that we had more stock under the tables than we had on the top & we had back up stuff in the van, so my husband spent the weekend running back & forward from the carpark! You know we still have customers calling into the store reminding us of this show, so we must have made an impression. Not sure if it was a good one?

We've learnt a lot of lessons from those days & have continued to grow & expand in many different ways. My husband spent many weekends putting together display stands that we could move around in the shop & take to shows, which is what we are still using today.

Now back to our lounge room ? well the lack of I should say! my husband was having trouble getting in the front door! I had purchased so much stock, there was very little room left for us to live - the monster had grown a head! he admitted defeat & we set off to find a shop to house it all so we could reclaim our home.

We found this quaint rundown shop just around the corner in Upwey & snapped it up. My husband took a couple of months off work & fitted it all out (mostly to my requirements!) We renovated the shop room by room & opened each room as it was completed. We had enough stock initially to fill the front room without having to make many purchases, I must admit I did look around in those days & wonder if I would ever have enough stock to fill the whole shop! But for those who have been there lately you can see for yourself that it didn't take me long to overflow it with yummy stuff. I'm now looking in corners just to see if there is another bit of room that we can use!

We then officially opened our doors for the first time just before Christmas in 2002.

We were just about to renovate & open the second front shop when we were hit by a devastating flood in Dec 2003! We were overflowing with stock for Christmas & had lots of things on the floor that just floated to the front door in a muddy mess.

Amidst the mouldy smell of muddy paper & loss of our newly laid carpet there was an upside - we made the front page of the newspaper & it gave us an opportunity to clear out a lot of old stock (not necessarily by choice though!)

We still don't have any carpet in the shop, my husband decided that a better investment than carpet would be a truck that we could use for transporting stock to our shows. I am sure that it is just an extension of himself! I have to say that he is slowly learning how to park the truck without taking out a building or a car! (I am sure that he would exaggerate his driving skills & damage reports!) you may find evidence reports in the archives of the St Kilda Town Hall, but don't say I said so!

So that is where we have come from. What lies ahead for us is in God's hands but I am certainly up for the challenge of keeping in touch with the ever changing papercraft world & excited at the prospect of tracking down many more treasures for you all to add to your collections.

You will occasionally find my husband in the shop, but mostly on Saturday's. I have friends working, & every now & again you will see Ashley breeze in the store stopping briefly to help a customer, but mainly just checking up on mum.

We have many new things planned for Christina's Crafts & hope that you will join us on the journey of discovery as we take this wonderful winding highway that God has put us on.

Blessings, Christina

2009 Update

Well doesn't the time just fly when you blink & all those years have flown by!

Many changes have swept across the path of Christina's Crafts but we are as strong as ever planted firmly in God's grounding, So as we start a new year I thought I would give you all a lasting update.

Unfortunately in 2007 I parted ways with my husband. This has been a challenging & weary exercise for us both.

2008 saw the closure of my beloved store in Upwey, I truly believe in the saying that if you love something you should set it free & if it returns to you it is yours & if it doesn't then it never was! well I did this with Christina's Crafts, always praying for the best out come of course under my breath!

2008 was a struggle for me in so many ways & on so many different levels, but what it has enabled me to be is a more refined person than the person who entered the fire the year before. And with Christina's Crafts it was like God was giving me a whole new business to start all over again it has been an amazing journey.

As I say a heart felt thank you & farewell & good bye don't come visit my doorstep again to 2008, I stand at the open door of 2009 & am truly excited by all the amazing things that are laying just at my doorstep, blessings that have piled up over the last year, but I didn't poke my head out of the wintery house to take a peek & now I can sit in the spring breeze & start opening & appreciating all the wonderful gifts, many I can hardly imagine what they even contain, but all incredibly beautiful & each one more so than the last, I can see that this will be a long summer.

I invite you to journey with me, enjoy the fruits of my labour, take little pieces of me & share them with your friends, walk the creative life as if it were your very last day on this earth.

Much Blessings Christina