Mumpreneur Awards - making the finalist group!

Well, I have so much to share this week I don't really know where to start!!

This is my 3rd blog post this week (almost unheard of!) as I shared two Piratey tutorials for a Pirate Eye Patch and a Pirate Sword in honour of International Talk Like a Pirate Day on Thursday (September 19th)

Then I found out on Tuesday that I had been selected for the finals of the Mumpreneur UK Awards!

I was in total shock!

I entered back in January and then promptly forgot all about it and when the finalists were announced on the Mumpreneur Facebook page I had a nosey, wasn't on the list for either Best Product or Best International Seller (the two categories that I'd entered) and slunk off to lick my wounds in private.

BUT.... I got an email on Tuesday saying they'd been having some problems getting in touch with some of the finalists and here were the details of what they needed from me as I was a finalist in the Best International Seller category!

WOOOOOOO-HOOOOOOOO!

Out of approx. 1500 entries, each category is whittled down to 8-10 finalists and I was one of them! I'm over the moon :-)

Quickly put everything they needed together and emailed it all over, whilst also writing a press release for the local media, to see if it wasn't too late to get some publicity and I got a phone call yesterday saying one of the local papers will be sending a reporter & photographer out to me on Monday (tomorrow!) and the piece will be in the paper on Wednesday!

Yay.... but... wait..... "What about the tip you call a workshop?" my helpful husband asked, last night, while we were away celebrating our anniversary!

So today, I have lugged, shoved, tidied, junked, retrieved from the bin, found homes for and put up on walls all the stuff that had been covering the floor of my workshop! I still have a big pile of paper to sort though, but it does now resemble a room that someone works in, not just a fabric dumping ground gone wrong!

Need to make a curtain to hide everything under the workbench!

Sign stolen from the Home & Gift Exhibition

Finally got some of my work displaid!

So my lovelies, that's me for now... off to make some dinosaur cushions, put more things up on the walls and try and hide this big wodge of paperwork!!

Enjoy Handmade Monday!

The Fascinating World of Fascinators

For those of you who follow me on Facebook or Twitter you'll probably be aware that I decided to spend my birthday money on a Fascinator workshop, which finally arrived (seemed like forever, though in reality was less than a month after my birthday!) on Monday this week. My tutor was a lovely lady named Lenette Isko, who began making couture hats and fascinators 6 years ago when she was faced with the prospect of 4 weddings in one summer!

My day with Lenette started at 10am, at her home in Longhope, Forest of Dean (so a nice easy 10 minute drive from my house!) and immediately I felt at ease in her company and knew I was going to really enjoy my day.

Lenette showed me a huge range of fascinators that she had made and after working out which ones I preferred  we got to work on the basics of rolling. Rolling means to roll the edges of the sinamay (the material fascinators are most often made from) rather like rolling a cigarette or a joint - I knew all that practice when I was younger would come in handy ;-)

Having decided that I didn't actually want to make my fascinator with the rolled flower petals, I'm very glad that she showed me how to because my 1st commission (later that same day!) was from a friend who is going to the same wedding I am this Saturday and who needed a fascinator fast, so I put my new-found skill to the test and have made her a black and pale blue effort:

I'm really quite proud of this as it was without any help, but I am totally in love with the one I made at the workshop... it's exactly the kind of thing I've recently seen other people wearing and that I've, quite frankly, lusted after! (I know, I'm odd!!) so here is my lovely creation (which obviously I made with quite a lot of help on the day!):

My one is made from the same material, but the two round base layers are stitched together with a bais trim on each layer and then the thick loops are made from a long piece of bias with the edges ironed in (this stuff sticks to itself - so clever!) and the thinner loops are made from a piece of bias with wire sewn into it, to keep it in place, then all artfully arranged (ahem, more luck than judgement!) and sewn together. Et voila!

Sorry for the rather long post... I'll spare you the details of Seren's headband (my 3 year old) until next week (after the wedding) and once I've got stuff to say about things other than hair embellishments!

Monsters in the Workshop!

Well, after thinking that I was all set for my workshop and that I couldn't be any more prepared after doing so much last week, I was totally thrown today by two of my students (both 11 year olds) asking to make monsters! I had to think on my feet with this request and luckily both were brimming with immagination, as you can see:

Pretty scary looking beasts!

Thankfully, so that I don't have nightmares for the next week, my other two students (both adults!) wanted to make slightly prettier things:

The flower is going to be an embellishment for a bag and the owl on purple background will be a bag, but the lady making it has arthritis so couldn't go as fast as she'd have liked!

All in all though a very satisfactory session and a nice way to end the run - this was the 6th one I've done this term and I'm taking a break now till May as we've got almost all our weekends jam packed with friends coming to stay, going away ourselves, a play to perform, a hen weekend and a wedding! Phew, now I think about it, I might need a stint at an eastern meditation retreat to get over all of that!

Workshops & Elephant in Progress

After a nice positive set of comments about my first blog post (and fortified by a large glass of wine!) I thought I'd offer another. This week has been all about workshops & an elephant in progress.

The workshop I actually only ran today, but I've spent most of the week preparing for it. Given that my first series of workshops were billed as being 'felting classes' when they were actually sewing with felt, I had a mixed reception (although all of it very polite!) So this time round I asked Babs from Zigzags (in Coleford, where the classes are run) to make it quite clear that these classes were for those fairly new to sewing or children as it's more about the sewing, than the felt, the felt just happens to be the medium we're working in. I realised if I had more young people or those very new to sewing in the class, I'd need to be really organised and prepared, so all week I've been making a range of templates, photocopying and making lists of required materials for each item. Phew.

So today the class ran, and I'm glad I was so prepared... although it wasn't that busy, the participants were all in need of quite a lot of attention, so it wouldn't have been easy otherwise!

One thing they were quite keen to see was the elephant that I've been working on this week:

I'm not quite sure what to do with this little guy... he could be another brooch, but I sort of like the idea of turning him into some wall art (maybe framed) this could just be because I am additcted to elephants (espcialy Indian ones, like this chap!) and have a LOT of them framed on my walls. Given that I'm at a drama rehearsal tonight (I'm part of the local Am-Dram group) I've still got a bit of time to make my mind up.

I've got a few things that I've been asked to create by a couple of my lovely customers... an owl cushion is first up so I'm going to have fun designing that today in my lunch break (at the day job!) and then we're moving onto a Miffy inspired rabbit, so watch this space later in the week for photos. Have a good Monday everyone xxx

PS. The owls (from my previous post) are now available in my Etsy shop