It’s been a while!

Wow, I had really hoped to be able to keep up with the blog a bit better than I have been since I returned to my day job back in July. One thing to add to the list of resolutions for 2015!

I’ve been pretty busy over the past five months, balancing the day job with my other job; researching family trees for clients as well as sorting out orders from the Etsy shop, not to mention the general day to day life – housework and the like!

I haven’t been sewing much in these past few months, other than for custom orders – like this set of three blue kangaroo finger puppets…

 

I’ve also managed to go over the 500 mark of likers on my Facebook page, had my most popular pin on Pinterest be repinned over 1100 times and been getting some lovely feedback from sales in the shop.

At work we got a new boss – a great guy who already worked in the office who was promoted. I made a few things for him – firstly a Mini-Me of him (much like the others I have made for people at work that you can see in a couple of other posts here and here.)

A mini boss complete with awesome Kokka robot fabric back, a laptop with “Very Important PMO work” on it and a tin of biscuits.

He then got his own office – and after a random conversation about cowboy films and saloons, a colleague and I decided to decorate his new office…

So along with a felt sheriff’s badge and a wanted poster of me and a saloon piano, I made a cactus, a tombstone and a desk tumbleweed. Thankfully he has a great sense of humour!

I also won second prize in the poetry section of the local arts festival this year. The theme was WWI – you can read the poem on my other blog here – Dear Mrs Sage.

My husband and I have also had a few nights out going to see some shows, like The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and comedian Dave Gorman and we have more planned in 2015. We also went away for a nice romantic spa weekend away at the end of October to this lovely place – Tortworth Court in Gloucestershire.

And we finally got round to developing the disposable cameras from the tables at our wedding reception over three years ago. The majority of the shots were black or white nothingness, or dark and grainy, but there were some good ones like this one…

And I got a new tattoo – something I’ve been wanting to do for some time now and finally decided on a design and booked myself in to my local tattooist (who has a three/four month waiting list!) It is based on an Alphonse Mucha painting which was modified to fit in the area I wanted it on my left arm. It took two hours and hardly hurt at all – and I love it!

Then Christmas approached – with my work Christmas party which involved nice food, wine, a quiz (in which my table got disqualified in the first round…) and me laughing till I almost wet myself.

 

Sadly we lost my husband’s step-grandmother two weeks before Christmas, so we have her funeral to go to tomorrow. She was 91 and had been in hospital for about a month, so while it was not unexpected, we had hoped she would be around for one last Christmas, but sadly it was not to be. Despite this, we carried on with our Christmas preparations and had plenty of gifts under the tree. We managed to fit in a trip to my parents the weekend before Christmas and enjoyed spending some time with them. We had a quiet Christmas Day together, with Mini C being with his Mum before spending Boxing Day with us and opening his presents including a new bike. I realised that I needed to make Mini C a bigger stocking as the old one I made him was just too small, and out of the material that was left over I made a cat stocking for Sam!

My best present this year has been my new sewing machine – which I got to use today making a wrist rest. It works like a dream and is soooo much better than “The Beast” my old machine. Smooth and quiet and just so nice to work with!

So there we have it – pretty much the last five months or so wrapped up! I hope that you all had a great festive season and I wish you all the best for a great 2015!

Me & My Style…

This is me –

Hello!

I suppose I have a sort of style, I like quirky prints and patterns and a perhaps unhealthy hankering for mock wrap tops and Wonder Woman related things.

I am often drawn to stripes and polka dots, purples, teals and reds and just lately mustard yellows.

To give you a bit of an idea about the sorts of things I like to wear, I’ll give you a run down of what I have been wearing today.

I have been sporting this rather nice simple black wrap top from Boden. I like their tops as they are long line so aren’t skimming on the waist of my trousers and me feeling like I have to constantly pull it down. The only downside is that for all their wrap tops, the wrap crosses over quite low so I stitched them all up so that they sit right on me without revealing too much of myself to the world!

Image from the Boden website

And this pair of maroon jeans with black polka dots I got in the sale from H by Henry Holland for £10.50 last month (via Debenhams). I like these because they are quite different to most trousers I have. I love the colour and they fit perfectly – and I wasn’t quite expecting that from a ‘designer’ brand. I am not a skinny stick girl so I do get annoyed at the variation between brands with sizes, so I was all prepared for sending these back or keeping them under my bed until I’d lost some weight, but nope – they were just right!

Image from the Debenhams Ebay page

And a pair of these funky little mustard flats from Clarks (from the local outlet store for £19.00.) I’d been hunting down a pair of these that weren’t going to cost me a lot, I ended up getting them in the next size up from my usual size, but I wear them with inner soles, but if I was to get another pair I’d probably get them in the half size up from my usual size. They are nice and comfy and since I am having to stick to flat shoes these days after my ankle incident last year, they are great for wearing around the office and going out around town.

Image from eBay

I also recently got myself a new handbag. I prefer bags that have cross-body straps as I get annoyed having short straps that hold bags just under your armpit and always keep slipping off the shoulder. This one I picked up from the Nicky James collection – the grown up offerings of Tyrrel Katz London. I love fox prints on things and this was right up my street so I just had to have it. And likewise from the same collection I have a squirrel print purse. I got complimented on it at the bank today, I often get a lot of admiring comments about it.

Images from the Tyrrel Katz website

My hair today was left over curls from having my hair in a loose bun overnight. Usually my hair is ramrod straight, it’s ability to hold a style is pathetic. Most attempts to curl my hair tend to fall out after about an hour or less. Of course as someone with straight hair I have always wanted curly hair. When I was younger my hair was quite thick, but these days it is a bit thinner. At the moment I am trying out the Loreal Elvive thickening shampoo and conditioner, and it seems to be working with making it look a bit more fuller without feeling too gacked up with product. As usual I was wearing my red framed glasses, (and shush – Wonder Woman underpants.)

I’m also now on the hunt for a decent pair of Wellington boots, as of this week Mr C and I have become the proud tenants of an allotment down the road from us! It’s a bit overgrown and needs some work – but looking forward to getting it up to scratch and starting to grow things! We don’t have a garden so it will be nice to have a little place to go! It is within cycling distance of our house, so once we’ve taken all our tools down there it can be a nice thing to head down there in the evenings & weekends to get our own little bit of The Good Life! Of course I am currently perusing selections of polka dot wellies…

Like these from http://www.jileon.com

 

 

To pin or not to pin…

I, like many fellow crafters, have a Pinterest account and curate a few boards. I am not an avid pinner like some people. I’ve seen some boards with hundreds of pins, some pinners who have hundreds of boards with hundreds of pins… how do they find the time? I have about three public boards and one private board. The main one is the one I use to showcase items from my Etsy shop. Every time I upload a new listing I pin it to the board.

The other board I have is one of the first boards I started, pinning a few cute craft ideas, some I tried, others I adapted and the rest I just smile at. The third board is one called ‘My Talented Friends’. My idea was for the friends I have (and family members) who are crafty and creative that I would pin their stuff to get their work seen by more people. However as some of my friends work mainly off Facebook and not via sites like Etsy or have their own website I’ve not been able to pin as many things as I had hoped.

Initially I had pinned a few woodwork creations by an old school friend, but he seems to have now stopped selling on Etsy, which is a shame as his work was lovely and I was sorely tempted to get a lovely new chopping board from him! (Maybe I still can – I’ll just have to ask!) A while back we did a crafty swap with each other. I made him an iPad sleeve out of some thick grey felt and he did me some mdf cut outs to simulate the sizes of different techno-gadgets for me to use to make pouches and holders out of. I have been pretty lame and not actually used any of them – but do plan to at some point (before the technology becomes obsolete!) I also pinned some items from a lovely lady I met at a Christmas craft fair last year.

I also had pinned some of my favourite photographs my Dad had up for sale when he created his own Etsy shop last year. However, sadly he became discouraged after four months had passed with no interest. I was a bit sad that he hadn’t given it more of go, with more networking and marketing – considering his career background is marketing, but who knows, maybe he’ll try again one day. He is a very talented photographer and has done some great shots over the years, and specialises in candid shots, the kind when people don’t know their photograph is being taken. He has some great ones from his travels around the world during his working life: weathered faces of Japanese men, a row of elderly people on a bench taken from the back in black and white and several topless ladies which I won’t go into too much detail about…

But recently an old friend of mine who has been running a children’s clothes making business through Facebook has opened a new website – so I can eagerly pin some of her lovely items to share with people too – for those of you who love gorgeous handmade children’s clothes head on over to Vintage Verity – you won’t be disappointed!

My fourth board is my secret board, the one I use to pin things that inspire me to create new items. Why do I keep it secret? I suppose so that if I did decide to make anything similar to them that people wouldn’t look from one board to the other and go ‘oooh, I see…’ I don’t know really. Is there any benefit to me pinning items from my shop to Pinterest? Does it not lead to people just potentially copying my items rather than buying anything from me? Maybe. I don’t get masses of re-pins or likes of my pins, but I do have one very popular pin that gets re-pinned or liked pretty much everyday and it is one of my most simple items – a set of felt heart decorations. I have no doubt that it is mainly re-pinned in order for people to copy it, and I’m OK with that. It is a simple thing, it’s not highly designed or very individual to me. And the item that has brought more people to my shop from Pinterest? That will be this simple set of Christmas Tree decorations. It is interesting that both of them are simple designs that I suppose are things people might want to make for themselves or get their kids to make.

As for whether I get any sales out of it, well I don’t know really. I see in my shop stats where people have been referred to my shop from, so I can see if someone has clicked on a link from my blog, or from my Facebook page or via Pinterest. Most of the time people have clicked on items that have since sold out. I don’t have enough hours in the day to curate the kinds of Pinterest boards I have seen out there. Fabulous collections of hundreds of beautiful things, but perhaps I spend more time doing and making and working than thinking and musing over stuff. Plus every time I dip into other boards on Pinterest I seem to lose whole chunks of my day, so I am too scared to do it too often in case I don’t resurface for a week. Plus there is the thing that if I pinned all the things I saw that I liked, would I ever go back to the board to look at them? What would I do with it all?

Yep… (Drawn by me – you can copy it if you really want to – or pin it, whatever.)

How about you? Do you use Pinterest? What do you use it for? Are you a crafter who sells – do you think Pinterest has garnered you more sales? Please do comment and let me know!

Juggling

OK – I can’t juggle. I can just about catch one thing, let alone two or three or more. But at the moment I am sort of juggling.

Last week I went back to my old job doing project coordinating. That in itself is like juggling, assisting on several projects, working on updates to company documentation whilst problem solving the amazing timesheet system that I am a super user for. I left last year and spent the first few months just getting back on my feet, literally, after having torn several ligaments in my ankle a week or two before I left. I focused on craft fairs, on following a crafty dream whilst also running my genealogy research business Root to Tip.

And just as things were beginning to really lift off with them, I got a call. Was I available? A former colleague of mine was leaving soon and they needed someone in ASAP. I couldn’t say no, I loved working there and had been hoping I would be asked back at some point.

So I am back in my day job, seeing my old friends and even being back at my old desk. It doesn’t feel like it has been almost a year. As a consequence of this it means I won’t be ironing and sewing during the daytime, that will have to wait for evenings and weekends. As will the family tree research work – I still have work to do for two clients at the moment, so there is plenty to be getting on with.

Just call me SuperAlex….

This weekend just gone I worked on an order for custom cushion covers off the back of another cushion order. Last week I felt a bit busy and a bit stressed, almost every night had something doing. On Monday night my husband and I went to see the band Reel Big Fish in Bath, then Tuesday and Wednesday were busy nights for my husband, get in, get dinner, head off, then Thursday I was meeting up with a Root to Tip client at the pub in the middle of Avebury Stone Circle. So come Friday evening it was nice to just collapse and do not much.

What do you mean? A pub in the middle of an ancient stone circle? Yep – right there where the arrow is!

This week is less hectic. I am hoping to get some time to make a set of cushion covers from some delightful fabric I’ve had for a little while, but I also need to get on with some research work, find a couple of hours to natter to my Mum on the phone and also bake some cakes to take into work for my birthday…

Mmm juggling. Maybe one day I will learn how to do it!

Juggling beanbags anyone?

The thrift factor

The thrift factor is not some low budget TV game show, it is more really something I do or engage in almost every day.

I suppose I’ve always been pretty thrifty. My Mum remembers me as a small child, counting out my pocket money and working out what I could afford to buy and seeing how much change I would have and making it last. We were brought up to understand the value of money, to work for what you want and how to make our money work for us.

My Dad is usually pretty surprised whenever I tell him about the latest bargain or deal I have managed to get, whether it is on clothes, a new phone package or rearranging my mortgage all by myself when I was 24 lol. He often calls me a cheap date but I take it as a compliment.

While I try to save money on most things, be it groceries, a good broadband deal or books, I suppose a good example of my thriftiness was my wedding.

Now, I’m not the kind of girl who has been planning her wedding in her head since she was five. I was engaged once before and got as far as making a guest list and thinking about having dodgems at the reception, but got no further than that with any planning. I looked at some dresses in a magazine and the internet and that was about it. After 6 years of engagement I called it a day. When I met my husband we were just good friends for about 9 months before we thought about seeing whether it might work between us, and thankfully it did. We were very much on the same wavelength (and still are) and when we got engaged we already had a venue in mind – Westonbirt Arboretum. It is a lovely park filled with amazing trees and at the end of September going into October, the maple trees are in full amazing autumnal colours. We decided to go for the last day that weddings were allowed to be held there before the facility had to make way for it’s busiest time – which was the 30th September. We picked a weekday – because it was cheaper.

The Great Oak Hall at Westonbirt Arboretum

An inside view!

(Shortly after our wedding, BBC’s Autumnwatch used the hall as their studio for the first week of the show.)

At that time our finances were chugging along at a semi-pathetic pace. I was contracting somewhere horrible and being treated like rubbish and struggling with insomnia and anxiety and ended up leaving. He was paying out a lot of money every month to his ex, but we had plenty in the savings account but it was going to be tough. I spent a year out of work, applying for about 15 jobs a week, having interviews and getting sick of people telling me they didn’t select me because they thought I would get bored too quickly and leave. But the wedding planning had to carry on through this time.

I made the most of eBay – I decided to get a dress made for me by someone on there – it was a bit nerve racking but I was pleased with the end result. It was a fraction of the cost of most wedding dresses but still looked good. I also decided to make my own bouquet, the flower girls posies and buttonholes, and an arrangement for the table in the venue. Nothing fancy, I wanted it to be pretty simple. I ordered different artificial flowers – like hellebore, ranunculus, rose, hydrangea and some foliage and incorporated autumnal maple leaves, and made my arrangements several months in advance. I also got the flower girls dresses from eBay – all Monsoon dresses. We used Quidco when making most of our purchases for anything, so we started racking up some serious money to go into the savings. From switching our energy supplier to cancelling our Sky account and starting up a new Sky+ account and getting £s in cashback, not to mention Marks & Spencer’s vouchers that we used to buy a case of champagne!

My bouquet. The flower arrangements came home with me and are a nice reminder of the day.

We hired a village hall not far from Westonbirt for our reception and had a sort of afternoon tea themed do. It was a mixture of food I had made, food I had ordered from Waitrose (using a voucher my brother sent me for my birthday) and food my Mum and her friends had made. My Mum made our cake, her friend and a helper helped with sorting out all the food and clearing up.

Our very pretty (and yummy) cake

My Dad ended up using CDs from his car for our music when it turned out, that despite the hall custodian telling me that a music CD created by iTunes would definitely play on their sound system – they didn’t. That was the only hiccup of the day. A nice surprise was finding that my Mum had made little pots of jam and marmalade for all the guests. Not to mention knitted a quirky little set of dolls!

We got my stepson’s suit in the Debenham’s sale – and then sold it on eBay some months later when he was too big for it. My husband’s outfit came from M&S and he still wears the tie and trousers for work and the jacket for important things every now and then. We used Vistaprint for our invites that I designed and a family friend took photos for us as well as my Dad and father in law. Our rings came from eBay and glasses hire for the day was free with our Waitrose food order. In all I think it cost us around £2,500.

I’m the one in the white dress…

Our honeymoon was a few days away in a self catering cottage in the Wye Valley – which was paid for by my in-laws who all clubbed together to pay for it. And my lovely sister paid for our hotel room on our wedding night – and upgraded us to a balcony room.

Our gorgeous cottage

We had a lovely day, and it was nice not to feel stressed, and to not be in some sort of financial pit at the end of it all – which wouldn’t be a good way to start a marriage! I still make the most of sites like Quidco and eBay and will certainly shop around and look out for offers or voucher codes when making a large purchase.

So when I am making things I do like to think about the thrift factor. I think about making the most out of the fabric I order, how much wastage there might be and what I could make using the scraps. I am always looking for the best deal, checking out fabric prices, special offers while ensuring I am not compromising on quality. I’m not saying I’ve never made any expensive mistakes, but I learn from them and make sure I do better next time. I get books from the library instead of buying them to scour for ideas and tips and to learn a bit more about sewing. And there is always my Mum for some great free advice (which I got this morning about sewing with zips!)

Fabric scraps – nothing is wasted!

Are you thrifty? Do you make things instead of buy them? Did you have a DIY wedding? Care to share?

The Family Button Tin

Back in 2012 when I first started to decide to give sewing another go, my Mum gave me something pretty special – the family button tin.

Ever since I was little I adored this tin. Full of interesting buttons of all colours, sizes, shapes, things that weren’t buttons at all. I love the patterns on it and whenever Mum had it out for anything I would tip them all out and look through them – hunting out my favourite ones before putting them all back again. Many years ago Mum had it out after a meal on the dining table and had tipped them all out, we decided that the best way to get them back in the tin was to flick them in like Tiddlywinks. A sublime hilarious chaos ensued as buttons flew everywhere, pinging off the window, the dresser, our faces… The hardest one was an oval wooden bead – its shape meant its flight path was pretty unpredictable. It was the last to end up back in the tin.

These days it is a little worse for wear, the design on the back is wearing away and the hinges aren’t so great, but it’s not doing too bad considering it was made in the 1930s. It was a biscuit tin originally – with CWS Biscuits is embossed on the bottom of it. Back when biscuit tins were a thing of beauty! It had belonged to my Dad’s maternal grandmother, then her daughter and then my Mum. The majority of the buttons in it were from the 1970s, perhaps when the tin actually started to be used for buttons. When I got it, I tipped them all out and sorted through them. I reminisced about my old favourite buttons and did my best to sort through them properly as I had other buttons and wanted to have them organised into colours to make it a bit easier if I wanted to find something. So these days the tin is mainly full of black and brown and the odd blue and green and white buttons with the rest residing in my soap drawer box and other nice little tins.

Maybe the tin will last to be passed down to someone else in the family. I hope so.

 

Why social media and feedback is vital to small businesses

Mmm, the title of this post sounds pretty heavy and serious compared to my usual posts of cushions for sale and Wonder Woman Converse trainers but I’ve been thinking recently about my Fudge & Poppy business. I love making things, yeah it doesn’t always go right, yes sometimes I come very close to throwing my sewing machine out of the window sometimes when it decides that it wants to break the thread every time I back stitch but on the whole I love making things.

Selling the things you have made yourself to other people is a nerve racking thing. You are putting yourself out there, putting something YOU made yourself, into the hands of someone else who wants to part company with their hard earned cash to buy YOUR product. It means a lot when you are a small business, especially in the arts and crafts world.

In the early days I really doubted myself, I hardly knew how to thread a sewing machine let alone make a cushion cover. I had some great encouragement from my husband and a couple of close friends to get my stuff out there. Initially I created a Facebook group and sold some items through there, in preparation to see if it was worth opening an Etsy shop. I then created a Facebook page to link to the Etsy shop and spent some money in advertising it to help get it seen by more people than just my group of friends.

After doing this a few times I felt uneasy, I was buying ‘likes’ and not earning them how I wanted to. These days my Facebook page is ticking along with 195 likes, it’s not a lot and I’d like to get more, but only if people genuinely like my stuff, otherwise it just doesn’t feel right.

I am not the sort of person to fill up peoples news feeds with banal posts, I like to concentrate on posts to do with what I do, and I don’t always post something every day. But I can’t help but feel a little jealous sometimes when I see other craft related pages with hundreds if not thousands of likes, but they are posting little titbits about their day, what the kids are up to, how bad their day is. The question is – does that really get you more likes? Maybe. As a stepmother I don’t feel comfortable with posting much stuff about my stepson on my Facebook page. I feel like a pretend Mum and it makes me feel pretty uncomfortable so I tend to only do it rarely.

I’ve done the rounds of liking and sharing other craft and local businesses pages – getting involved with networking. Generally the etiquette is that if you like another business page, promote their page on yours, that they should do the same. But I’ve been disappointed that only one or two pages have done this, the rest come to my page – say thanks and ‘a new like from me’ but sometimes I don’t actually get a new like. When you only have 195 page likes you know when you get more or lose some, they don’t get lost in the mire of the hundreds and thousands. Sometimes you start to doubt whether your stuff is good enough and whether you should carry on, it’s not a nice feeling.

Keep calm and try not to go loopy… (Me made using Bitstrips)

I’ve done give-aways, some have been good and others haven’t garnered so much as 1 more page like. I have a select group of followers who like and share things and sharing really is so important. Especially with the recent changes to Facebook’s news feed, if you don’t interact with a page very often you soon stop seeing their posts in your feed. Even though I have almost 200 likes, my posts are mainly only seen by about 30 people on average, but when someone shares something from my page – those views sky-rocket.

Below is an example of two posts from my page – one with no shares and the other with three shares – the numbers of views are pretty different.

I’ve done several craft fairs over the past couple of years and I’ve had some really great comments from people about my creations. People come over to the stall, they touch and feel and their eyes light up, some might even talk to me about how amazing they are, do I make them myself etc. And then they walk away because they’ve only brought a couple of pounds with them, expecting it to only be the sort of place they can maybe spend 10p on something. So I hand cards out so people can find my shop online and maybe make some sales that way instead.

After last Christmas I felt a bit disheartened, people would coo over my things and then turn around and spend their money on a more expensive thing like a log, covered in glitter with a candle in it and some naff fairy ornament on top. I polled some people as to my prices, wondering if I was perhaps charging too much, but in general the feedback was that it was just right or at times not enough for the quality. I’ve since decided not to do any more school based fairs, they just aren’t working for me. The table prices can be quite high and if you don’t do well you just end up out of pocket.

So what about feedback? Before I’d even heard of Etsy I was very familiar with eBay and the feedback system there. Buyers could leave feedback for sellers and vice versa. As both a buyer and a seller on eBay I knew the importance of a. being a good seller – being truthful about what I was selling (usually clothes) so that the buyer could make an informed decision and hopefully be happy with their purchase, b. leaving feedback for sellers so that other buyers had an idea of what it might be like to purchase something from that seller and c. leaving feedback for buyers – so that other sellers knew they paid quickly and had no problems.

When I joined Etsy I was pleased to see that a similar set up was in place. As things progressed and I started to make more sales I was pleased that I was getting good feedback. Then the set up changed, Etsy stopped allowing sellers to leave feedback for buyers and set a special time limit for buyers to leave feedback for sellers. This was to try and stop knee-jerk reactions when people weren’t happy – to give people a cooling off period or time to make contact with a seller if they weren’t 100% happy. That is great, but it meant that because people often couldn’t leave feedback the day they received their purchase, they forgot to come back and do it a few days later. After a certain period of time they then can’t leave feedback for their purchase at all.

So I went from getting feedback from about 8 out of every 10 transactions to more like 3 in every 10. That’s not so good.

Whenever I send a buyer a confirmation note to let them know I have dispatched their order I always ask them to let me know when it has arrived safe and sound. Perhaps 1 in every 10 does. I appreciate that people have busy lives and in the grand scheme of things I’m not so very important, I get that. But it doesn’t stop me sitting at home worrying, thinking they aren’t happy with the item I made because of their silence. It’s silly, of course if they weren’t happy they would be straight on to me to let me know. But it niggles and pokes at me – ‘they don’t like it, they’re not happy, if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all…’ It’s nonsense though. Every so often I send a follow up message to make sure it arrived and mostly this prompts them to leave feedback for the transaction or just reply to let me know it was all great and they love it. Phew.

I love getting sent photos of the things I have made taking up residence in their new homes. It really gives me such a great sense of satisfaction and validation that I am good at this.

Getting feedback is so important, not only to let the seller know that they are doing a good job and to keep it up, but also for other buyers to whom a sale might just hinge on how happy past customers have been. It is tough buying things online when you can’t touch and poke at things, you are buying based on a few photographs and hopefully a good description. We take feedback into account to help us to make that final decision before we press that button to purchase.

For a small business every bit of feedback counts as another little push up the ladder. For a small business every single ‘Like’ on a Facebook page means that one more person is interested. For a small business every ‘share’ and having someone spread their experience via word of mouth is priceless.

So if you’ve ever bought something from an artist or crafter who sits and works at home, amongst the ins and outs of a daily routine, between the household chores, the wiping of children’s faces, the cooking of family meals, take the time to let them know you got your order OK, leave them some feedback, share a photograph or a link from their Facebook page – it only takes a moment.

And for all those people who have already liked and shared my page, or favourited my items or shop on Etsy, left me feedback – thank you, thank you, thank you!

A very happy me (made using Bitstrips)

 

 

Happy Mother’s Day!

From my other blog – a little post about Mother’s Day. She really liked the brooches I made!

Root To Tip

Today is Mothering Sunday in the UK and so as a little nod to my lovely Mum and my Grandma here is one of my favourite photographs of the three of us together. I put this one into a nice frame for my Mum some years ago for Mother’s Day.

I got some lovely tulips and a card today and we spent some time in B&Q and Sainsburys lol – it was almost as good as our first ever date – B&Q, Mothercare, Cinema & Chiquitos.

My Mum was quite pleased today as for the first time since we were kids she actually got three cards on the same day. She even got one from my Dad (said “I always knew I really had four children”.) She loved the brooches I made for her (which you can see on my other blog.)

Incidentally in the background of the pic…

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Clothing and Patrick

I’ve been really enjoying watching the latest series of The Great British Sewing Bee, although strangely enough I am not at all interested in making clothing. I don’t know if it is because I lack the confidence to make something for someone that has to fit right and not make a right hash of it, but I’ve just never looked at clothing patterns and gone ‘oooh I’d love to make that!’

(Image from http://www.theguardian.com)

My Mum is a really great sewer, she has been doing it pretty much all of her life. Back when she was at school in the 1950s girls just did sewing as part of their normal lessons. Mum did dressmaking and often made her own clothes, she made her own wedding dress – purposefully made a short dress to annoy her future father in law who kept going on about her having a long floor length dress. She then some years later chopped up her wedding dress to make a little dress for a doll to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. (A doll I later had and promptly scribbled on her face with a Biro…)

My Mum has made me and my siblings clothes when we were kids, she was always on hand to fix things if they needed mending (like when my hamster chewed a hole in the collar of a very expensive coat I bought!) She made outfits to wear to parties and to my sister’s wedding and made me a skirt to wear for my A-Level leavers dinner. She also knits a mean little dress…

Don’t you just love the 80s? That is me in the red knitted dress…

So she is not a stranger to the dressmaking pattern, to sewing in concealed zips, box pleats, darts, rolled hems and bias binding. She also makes curtains for people and cushion covers, and has made bedspreads and drapery for four-poster beds. In short my Mum is a very talented seamstress. It doesn’t mean she never makes mistakes, we often have a laugh talking about the times she has had a bit of a paddy at the machine when it has decided to eat up a load of thread or voile, or the times she panics thinking she has cut the fabric out wrong for something when there isn’t any spare fabric to do it again (99.9% of the time it turns out to be totally fine and she has just got herself in a tizzy.)

So why do I watch The Great British Sewing Bee if I am not into making clothes? It’s all about making clothes. I think it is just to learn a few bits and bobs in general about sewing. I was never any good at school, and haven’t ever had proper lessons. I am impatient and not mad keen on having to measure everything out perfectly!

I’m not a mega fan of the presenter Claudia Winkleman (who my mother lovingly refers to as a ‘Bumhole’) but she makes me laugh sometimes and I like seeing how different people can make something from the same pattern or item of clothing.

But, one of the main reasons is probably for Patrick Grant, one of the two judges on the show. Tall, well presented, with a beard (my husband has a beard so according to him I must therefore fancy any other man with a beard…) He is a designer and Savile Row tailor, although his background is in engineering which surprised me when I Googled him the other night. He knows his stuff and has a good eye but also a good sense of humour (which is the sort of thing that attracts me to someone – rather than facial hair alone.)

So I’m never going to be putting myself forward to be a contestant on the show, definitely not. Not just because of my lack of interest (and skill) for sewing clothing, but because I hate to be the centre of attention, hate having my photo taken so being on TV would be horrible for me! So I’ll just carry on making my weird little bits and bobs and perhaps just encounter Patrick in my dreams so he can tell me off about misaligned darts and then whisk me away for some naughtiness on the fabric cutting table…

Mmmm yes please – take my inside leg measurement! (Image from http://www.retailgazette.co.uk)

A new addition!

For years I have wanted to get another cat after my two beloved cats passed away between 2005 and 2008. They were both living with my parents after I had been moving about quite a bit. Molly had suddenly become ill and my Dad took her to the vets who was going to run some tests and when he came back to collect her, she had sadly passed away. No idea what had caused her death but we were all very sad to be without her. Then a few years later, her daughter Poppy – who had gradually become deaf and was starting to become unable to jump up to sit on the kitchen chairs and was wetting herself in her sleep – went out one morning and possibly had a heart attack and fell into the little stream in my parent’s garden. My Dad found her and buried her in a nice little spot – marked with a little lamb figurine that a friend had given them – out the corner of your eye you always kept thinking it was Poppy, so it seemed right to use it to mark her resting place.

My parents haven’t felt like they wanted to replace them but I’ve always had a cat shaped space in my heart needing to be filled! So after some badgering of my husband, we started to look at a few cats in local rescue shelters and on Saturday decided on one very special cat – who I brought home yesterday!

Mmmm catnip!

His name is Sam and he’s already been making himself right at home. He was relaxed after about 5 or 10 minutes and although he is still enjoying exploring about, he loves to come and snuggle up with us. Although for his first night we kept him in the kitchen and came in this morning to find he had opened most of the cupboards for a nosey!

He has also discovered how to open our drawers in our bedroom and that he likes to hunt about under the bed and how tasty peacock feathers are…

I think he will settle in just fine!

Master of all I survey!