Welcome to Spring!

Well, it's the 3rd of April, so Spring is definitely here and hopefully we'll not have too many April showers as we've seen quite enough of them for a while!

The Penny Rug Pattern I was working on last week is now finished, you can find in my Etsy Shop

I really really enjoyed making this and I hope to start creating more of these gorgeous candle mats, or if you'd rather just good old household decorations... I've all sorts of summery ideas buzzing round my head now, but in the mean time have a lovely batch of orders to work on, including name banners, wedding campervans and baby shoes:

In other exciting news.... I've got an Easter Tutorial up my sleeve which hopefully I'll be publishing early next week - Yay!

Work In Progress

For this week's Handmade Monday I thought I'd do more of a pictoral post than anything else as I haven't got anything finished to share with you today.

I took a pic of a Work in Progress from my working week - making an R2D2 hat as part of a commission

As you can see there's also a Campervan with 3 wheels half done and there's a couple of other half finished bits hiding in my craft box - I'm terrible for starting more than thing at once!

(Thankfully though they did all get finished in the right order!)

Then this afternoon I was quietly sitting at the dining room table cutting out enormous letters for a commission (I've been asked to make a 5 foot name banner for another craft business so they can use it at craft fairs and it's all in this gorgeous hot pink colour! Not sure how I'm going to show you the finished pics of something so big, but that's a problem for next week) Anyway, I was sitting there quietly on my own when my 4 year old daughter Seren came up and asked if she could do some cutting out too, so on some of the scraps I drew her some flowers and she sat next to me happily cutting for ages:

I love the look of concentration!

And then of course the peace was shattered by my 2.5 year old son, Patrick coming up and asking if he could cut out too. Here he is sitting opposite Seren watching carefully to what she's doing and within 20 seconds of this being taken he was pouting because it was 'too difficult' and back to the telly he went!

Hope you've all had a lovely weekend :-) I'm off now to check out the other lovely blogs at Wendy's link up party on the Handmade Harbour website.

London Bus – 3D and Cuddly!

My 21 month old son, Patrick is currently obsessed with Buses – from our kitchen windowsill he can be entertained for (what feels like) hours waiting for the next bus to go past, and then hollers at whoever is nearest that he’s seen a bus. This can be very entertaining (and noisy!) and it’s just as well that Gloucestershire County Council have just laid on a new bus route through our village!

We're actually heading up to London this weekend to stay with family, so a trip on a real London Bus is definitely in order, but in the meantime I decided that I would make him his own bus to play with. Given that he’s also very into cuddly toys (we have a collection that have to go to bed with him every night!) I am attempting to make it a 3D cuddly bus! I’m not quite finished with it yet, but here’s a couple of work in progress shots. 

If it works well, I’ll list it in the shop should anyone require one for their little motoring enthusiasts!

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