New Project: Fun Gift Ideas for Food and Wine Lovers

It started a few weeks ago, when I heard our neighbour’s daughter was going to move out. Now, as it happens, she is not only a great person to have around, but also by far the best cat sitter in the universe. She loves our ‘kads’ at least as much as we do, to the extent where I suspect Alex(ander the Great) and Spook (the Adorable Nutcase) are immensely happy every time we’re out of the country, so they get her undevoted attention. But I digress…

To cut a long story short: I decided to make her a couple of presents that would come in handy in her new apartment. With photos of our cats on them so she wouldn’t miss them too much. In my search for a good print-on-demand site, I stumbled on an old Redbubble account I made years ago but never did anything with. Turns out they also print face masks with your own photos or designs on them, so I decided to create a few for myself. In these ‘interesting’ times, I’ve developed a mild infatuation with personalised and wine-themed face masks, and it wasn’t easy to find some I’d actually be happy to wear. 😉

And then something happened that occurs in my life over and over again: in the busiest of times, when I’m swamped with work at the university and I barely have time to breathe, my brain bubbles over with ideas and the old insomnia reappears.

So instead of sleeping properly, I do projects. As a result, a few weeks in, I’ve selected, made and uploaded just over 130 photos and designs. Apart from face masks, I’ve adapted the prints for notebooks, kitchen aprons, coasters, T-shirts, mugs, water bottles, smartphone cases, clocks, throw pillows, laptop sleeves and backpacks. Or even bath mats, shower curtains and cute baby outfits.

Topics and themes of these designs are the usual suspects in my life: wine, words, champagne, food, herbs, nature, cats and (wine) travel. So if you’re looking for fun, quirky and unique gifts for the wine lovers, foodies, champagne aficionados, plant geeks and crazy cat people in your life, check out my Redbubble shop. I’ll showcase a bunch of my personal favourites below, and many more will be added before the holiday season, I’m sure. 😉

Personal Favourites

The Photos It All Started With

Meet our rescues Alex and Spook. We adopted them as semi-feral kittens after our former neighbours moved and left behind their pregnant cat. As you can tell from the photos, they’re reasonably domesticated now, but there’s still a hint of the wild, especially in Spook (the tortoiseshell cutie).

Wine Quotes / Wine Sayings

The first wine saying that really rang true for me was ‘Not all girls are made of sugar and spice. Some girls are made of sarcasm, wine and everything fine’. For obvious reasons…

In this collection you’ll find some of the well-known wine sayings, together with a bunch of unique ones. I’m happy to customise if you have any specific requests.

Wine and Vine Photos

Gifts for Garden, Food and Herb Lovers

Gifts For Mums, Dads and Grandparents

Would you Like to See More?

Go check out https://www.redbubble.com/people/wineandwords/shop.

Footnote

A footnote for anyone concerned about environmental and social sustainability: this is something I have looked into when choosing a platform and before I decided to go through with this project.
First of all: this is print-on-demand, so the blank products don’t get individualised / printed until someone actually orders one. Which greatly reduces stock and waste overall.
Redbubble also claims to work with partners in different parts of the world, to ensure shorter shipping distances. From what I’ve seen so far, this seems to be true: the products I have ordered myself (to be shipped to Belgium) were produced in Germany, and others that were ordered by US customers were produced there locally. They also aim to be carbon neutral and you can find more information about their philosophy, approach and the code of conduct for their partners here.