I don't know which I'm prouder of, the product or the name!? It was the spiky little off-snips of string that would amass whilst working on other projects that got me thinking about tinsel.

As a child, Christmas for me was NOT a time for tasteful hygge charm—it was a time for twinkling lights and sparkly things, and tinsel was very much a part of that. Those Christmases were in the 80s and 90s, when decorations were cheap enough to be disposable and for which we all feel terrible now, but still secretly lust after. So, after the success of the Simple Star Christmas Tree Topper, I guess it had been at the back of my mind that there might be other classic Christmas staples that could be part of a #plasticfreechristmas.

I played about with some of the off-snips, seeing if I could sew them together and if so, did they look like the kind of thing that would sit proudly on a Christmas tree or did it look like scraps of string on a thread. Fortunately, the effect was more 'festive garland' than 'old mop', so I started developing a technique that would make it a feasible product and experimenting with which type of string worked best.

The name just sort of… followed? At first it was going to be Stringsel but that ended up being a bit of a mouthful, so I contracted it to Strinsel and that's what seemed to stick. I could tell from the chuckles and comments at Strinsel's first market that the name was a hit, so with the proceeds from Strinsel's first season I trademarked the name and set about developing it as a product.

Colour and Sustainability

I love the hygge charm of natural fibres, but there's still a part of me that yearns for the uncoordinated colour-clashes that screamed Christmas when I was little. How excited was I when I realised how well the sustainable wonder-crop that is jute holds colour? Well… very. And whilst jute doesn't exactly sparkle, it certainly has a lustre that catches and reflects the light in a way cotton never will.

It's not shiny, nor is it metallic, and for some it may not be quite 'gold' enough—this is Strinsel at its most rustic—but I stand by my decision to call it Golden Strinsel because jute's credentials as far as sustainability is concerned ARE golden. Not only is jute biodegradable, it also has a very low carbon footprint and trumps cotton in terms of environmental impact as it requires much less intervention to cultivate. It thrives in the deluge of water brought by the monsoon rains and requires very little, if any, fertilizer as the unused roots are left to mulch down and re-fertilize the soil for the next crop.