I Love My Customers

All my customers are awesome. Truly. But some make me smile more than others, and the ones who send photos of my items in use make me grin for whole days! The latest wonderful, grin-inducing photo comes from Jessica who is so lovely that she blogged it too:
You may notice that I've added quite a few links to my "interviews and features" section down on the right there in the last few days, as I've been busy compiling a proper scrapbook record of them all. It's taken me a while having lost lots of links etc during our last batch of internet browser issues but I'm getting there... As well as having guilt at using up all the ink in my dad's printer making said scrapbook, I'm embarrased to discover that there are so many kind people whom I neglected to give a shout-out too! Please accept a belated THANKYOU! for your sweetness, one and all. I will try harder in future I promise :)

Disguise Yourself

There's a bit of a disguise theme going on with my crafting this week, first finishing a batch of moustache disguises on Sunday...
... and then cutting out pieces for making masks on Monday evening:
I was just planning on starting a few "spares" of the masks I've currently got listed on Etsy, but when I went looking for the appropriate felt colours in my stash I discovered some much neglected patterned felt sheets and decided to put them to use! I'm trying out a camouflage version of the bandit and a leopard-print version of the cat mask. The camouflage felt was originally bought to make this little guy:
A couple of sweet mentions to, er, mention today: one of my circles pincushions was featured on a nice-looking blog called One Part Whimsy; and my newly-established Folksy shop got a lovely mention on the always awesome I Like. Hurrah!

Lovely Features

UPDATE: want to sew your own felt bird masks? You'll find the tutorial for these over on my Patreon page.

Subscribe to get instant access to a growing library of PDF embroidery patterns and craft tutorials, and updates when I add something new!

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Last night I started work on some more bird masks... I've been finishing them today, and pottering about the house feeling a bit stuck indoors as we've had a workman in (sent by the landlord to fill in a hole in the wall - yes, really). I have been greatly cheered up though by a couple of lovely features. First up, my tea addict brooch got a kind mention by Anna, and then the sweet people at Folksy have made me one of their featured sellers! They have three sellers featured at the moment (myself, spugmeistress and sally) , and we rotate at random on their homepage and also at the side of some pages, tis very interesting (well, interesting to me at any rate!). They also included my violets brooch as one of their "top picks": The site is still only teeny tiny, but I'm still dead chuffed to have been picked. Folksy is awesome. Spread the word! Also pretty awesome, did you see the new Dawanda widget I put up over there? ---> Fancy, fancy pants.

Eeeee!

I've not been too well today, and was expecting to skip yet another day of blogging and opt instead for curling up with a nice cup of comforting tea and some trash telly on youtube... when I logged out of Etsy after adding a new listing and saw this:
My medium poppy got picked up by the robot that looks for "knockout" listings to rotate at the top of the Etsy homepage! Eeeeeeeeee! So exciting, and so unexpected as I didn't think any of my images really counted as proper "knockout" white backgrounds. That one was just an accident of a very sunny day!

I am going to do a small happy dance now. And then go watch me some youtube...

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

In the meantime...

I'm still stuck without the internet for 99% of my day (sob!) but I just wanted to mention that there's an interview with me over on IndieFixx today, hurrah!

I am rather pining for the pretty colours and fantastic inspiration offered by lovely design blogs like IndieFixx... particularly Poppytalk (and so many of the great blogs linked to on there) and (my current favourite) Print & Pattern - always so much lush stuff to look at, and so much colour! I may have to go out and buy a glossy magazine to tide me over, but it just won't be the same...

365 / 158 - A Blue Thread Crisis

Yesterday evening was rather blissful: a pile of old films to watch, and my work-in-progress pile to attend to. Lots of spring flowers to finish, and more to begin, but I also wanted to make some blue teapots - or at least one so I could take photos of it today. Unfortunately, I don't have the right sort of blue thread...
All those blues, but not the one I want! A trip to the habedashers is called for I think...

In other news, I found a great little quote about Etsy in this article on the BBC:
"I think there's generally a resurgence in hand-made, home-made stuff in response to globalised, generic goods," she said. "The Primark Effect, if you like: the equal and opposite reaction to that physical law would be The Etsy Effect."

Oh, and I have been blogged a few times... First up, I was completely delighted to see that my little blog has been added to the daily reads list on the ever-awesome Cuteable. My tea addict pin got a lovely mention over on the 16sparrows blog, various 365 members have been blogging the project and giving me a mention in the process (thankyou all!), Cindy bought some of those great tea buttons I got off Etsy a few weeks ago, my moustaches showed up on the (new and rather interesting) Autonomous Artisans blog, and my abstract mobiles were featured on Craft&Found. Hurrah!

365 / 146 - Framing, Sewing and being Blogged

It's sunny! Wonderful, wonderful. Thanks to the wonders of sunshine, here is a photo of what I've been up to these past two crafty days:
Lots of moustaches finished on day 145, some of the pictures (mostly acquired on etsy) framed yesterday afternoon, and apple pins (finished) & oak leaves (embroidered) last night whilst watching yet more episodes of Doctor Who.

Ah, how satisfying it is to have finished all of that lot... I am also dead chuffed to report that I have been blogged a delightful four times this week.
1) My deer pin showed up on Cuteable
2) My mobiles are featured on the Craft zine blog today (thanks to paperbluebird for the heads up!)
3) One of my customers posted a lovely photo of one of my bird ornaments on their Christmas tree! I cannot tell you how much I smiled seeing that photo, it is so great to think of my work as part of someone's Christmas.
and 4) The lucky buyer of my 500th item - the super-talented Heidi Burton - has blogged her gift parcel in just the sweetest way.

On the little scribbley note I wrote to myself as a reminder to mention these things I have also written "heidi cards!!" in a somewhat frantically underlined fashion because I keep forgetting to mention that Heidi Burton has Valentine's Day cards in her shop and they are awesome. You should buy some, and if you do she offers to write your greeting for free and post it in time for Valentine's. My favourite card? The tea-themed one, obviously...

365 / 76 & 77 - back on the wagon with pips and pins and more moustaches

Okay so yesterday afternoon I got so engrossed in my craftiness that I never got around to blogging day 76... so here it is:
A whole bowl full of moustaches! I don't really know why I took a photo of the moustaches inside a piece of vintage crockery, but after the biscuits on the saucer it somehow seemed like a good idea. Endless photos of moustaches can get a little dull, I feel. Now at least you have some crockery to look at.

I cut out LOTS of moustache pieces in preparation for many an hour's patient stitchery (they are marvellously relaxing things to make, particularly at the embroidery stage) and completed seven of the little fellows ready to package up and take to the post office yesterday. The women in the post office continue to be delighted by the stickers I put on my parcels (I'm sure they recognise me by my stickers alone), I can only hope that my customers are similarly charmed. Decorated packages are so much more fun to receive, I reckon. When the stickers run out I am planning to buy a permanent marker or two and do some doodles :)

Thinking of post offices (not the most exciting topic this world has to offer but please bear with me), it never ceases to amaze me the wide variety of service you get depending on which post office you go to and (in many cases) which window is free when it's your turn... Some seem never to have sent anything airmail before, while another couple are the very soul of efficiency (one even commenting how pleased she was to get an organised customer!). Some write "small packet" on the parcels, some don't. Some believe in "printed papers" as a category, some ignore it. I have even been told off by one assistant for doing things another told me I had to do! Craziness. My personal favourite was the assistant who was totally foxed by the proof of posting I handed her - it was proof of posting for three items, with three names and addresses clearly written on it (as per usual with my parcels) and she wrote "one" in the number of items! So annoying.

That really wasn't an interesting digression, was it? Ah well.

On to day 77 (yesterday) ...
Yesterday I cut out lots of pieces for a batch of apple pins, stitched their white insides and their brooch backs and then sewed on half the required little brown pips. I also cut out pieces for green and purple "I love tea" pins and dug out the bird brooches from my wip pile and finally gave them brooch backs and their little beady eyes. Not particularly satisfying work as nothing got finished but lots of things progressing nicely. One of the apple pins will have to get listed as an "oops" though as I made the pips just ridiculously large. Here is last night's work table:
In other news, I have been spotting my stuff in lots of nice places. One of my peacock-esque mobiles was on the Etsy front page as part of a peacock-themed treasury. Yay.

My moustache pins (and also the UK Etsy blog which I am still shamefully behind on updating) got a lovely mention on The Monobrow, and someone posting a comment yesterday pointed out this charming review over at Roadside Scholar - I particularly love the mention of my English vocabulary, "great words like “chuffed” and “witter”!" :)

Oh, and I totally forgot to mention before, but in a recent Storque interview with the awesome guys behind Circa Ceramics my mobile was featured as one of their "top Etsy picks", which just made me smile hugely as I adore Circa Ceramics, their colour palette is just so zingy and delicious.

365 / 69 & 70 - moustaches, parcels and taking a small break

Phew, the chaos seems to be over now! I have so many parcels to package up and orders to attend to that I am going to take an Etsy break for a few days - I'll still be working on anything ordered before today, but any orders from now until the weekend will have to wait for next week. I feel rather as though I have spent the past couple of days in a lovely Etsy bubble and now re-emerged back into the real world... and the real world is a bit messy, I need to buy some groceries and I'm about to run out of parcel tape.

So, I will be taking a small break from blogging too... tho the daily crafting will still be going on, and getting photographed, there will just be lots of photos to look at upon my return :)

For the moment though, here are days 69 & 70...
Both days I have been making moustaches, here are some from day 69
Also both days I have been packaging parcels (not the most creative act in the world, I know, but a very necessary one! and I like to make my parcels look nice!), here are some of the ones I packaged up on day 70:
The people in the queue behind me in the Post Office are not going to be happy! haha.

Things I have learnt this week:
1) I am not nearly as organised as I'd like to think myself - going from the occasional sale to briefly creeping into the unofficial "Top Sellers of the last 24 hours" list has rather broken me and my so called "systems" :)
2) Preparing things in advance like thankyou cards to go in orders is probably the most useful thing I've done with myself this crafty month. It has been so nice to put a hand-decorated thankyou note in with all my orders (whenever I've bought anything on Etsy a thankyou note has been wonderful to receive) but I never would have had the time to write them during packing (and they would have been quite illegible!!)

3) Post-it notes are the best invention EVER. I have been writing order details down on a post-it note, and sticking it to the correct size of envelope, so the details are right there for addressing, packing, customs-labelling, etc the package and I can write little notes to myself (check address! which colour? etc) and not lose them. Wonderful, wonderful little sticky things.

Right, that's all from me for the moment...

365 / 66 - Oh My God How Chuffed Am I?

I am still a bit ill, and pottering about my house wearing deeply unstylish pajamas and clutching a cup of tea as though my life depended upon its soothing deliciousness... but there is a big fat grin on my face because (hurrah hurrah) the Etsy gods have smiled on my and I am the latest featured seller. Yay! When I first found out I thought possibly I was imagining it, and I was a little worried I might throw up or faint or something equally ridiculous but now I am just dead chuffed. I read a lot of the other featured seller interviews when trying to write mine and my gosh there are some AMAZING artists that have been featured before me, I am so in awe of some of them and now my little penguin avatar is sitting amongst them and eeeeeeee! I am so over-excited :)

HUGE thankyous to everyone who has sent nice messages or left notes on my Flickr or here on the blog! I have been quite overwhelmed by the sweet kindness of the comments and blushing at many of them.

As well as spending quite embarassing amounts of time looking at the Etsy front page yesterday, I did some crafting too... lots of it was done whilst sitting on the sofa, listening to the radio or watching the latest episode of America's Next Top Model (via Youtube, the only way I can get my fix!). This was my workspace (also known as the coffee table)
As you can see I have been making more tea-themed brooches, and a little batch of cherry blossom pins (using the last of those lovely beads). I even finished that batch of moths I've been working on for weeks! Hurrah! (At the bottom of the picture you can also see my dinner plate from last night which so far today I have been too lazy to take to the kitchen, tsk tsk).

PS - my moustaches got blogged!

Twice, in fact. The lovely Rosehip71 blogged my moustache disguises here and even went on to draw a special "whiskery tribute" to my moustaches. Very awesome stuff.

I also found my moustache pins on a great little site, Fieltromania. Gosh there are some delicious felt things featured on that blog - I was dead chuffed to find my moustaches amongst them (such lovely comments left, too! incredibly sweet).

Eek, what a neglected blog!

Okay so first I was busy sewing things... and then our whole county got flooded and we had no electricity for 24 hours and no running water for about 2 weeks (all fixed now though, hurrah!) ... and then I had to help my Mother-in-Law move house (not fun)... and then our neighbourhood hosted a massive choral festival... and now I am recovering from all this! Basically I have been a little busy and muchly neglecting my blogging and crafting :(

Hopefully things will be back to normal soon and I shall have lots of new pretty treats to photograph and blog about! I have been greatly inspired to Get Crafting this week cos I have been on the Etsy front page on a most miraculous TWO occasions.

First up my "I love TEA" pins were featured - very exciting, my first ever bit of Etsy front page glory - thanks to the lovely heidiburton picking them in her treasury list.

This is a rubbish screenshot I took of my front page moment:

And these are the pins themselves - they are first up on my To Sew list this week as a couple of them very happily sold :)

Then today I logged on during my tea-break (a small break from dull Saturday chores like ironing and washing-up) to find myself on the front page again, along with lots of my fellow workers-in-felt from the UK street team! (Screenshot courtesy of Siansburys and lovely felt treasury selection thanks to KoolKookyKreatures).


The abstract mobile got over 1000 new views during the time it was featured on the front page and my "hearts" (people marking my shop and/or items as a favourite) have rocketed accordingly which is most flattering. Hurrah for lovely Etsy!

I'm off to get started on the sewing now...