I find great comfort and enjoyment from the little things, especially when life feels out of my control and the world does feel like it’s slipping into chaos, at the moment. I live in a messy house (it has two little monsters who don’t know how to tidy very well!), I love it when it has just been cleaned and tidied, neatness and order make me feel calm, but I’m also a realist and accept life is not always neat and tidy so I settle for little snatches of order in everyday moments.
Stacks of sharpened pencils make me happy (I’d be happier still, of this fabulous and practical sharpener didn’t ‘chew’ them in order to work….but you can’t have everything!), in this case ready for the start of school after our week long holiday.
I love watching the chickens when I’m working in the kitchen, I find them entertaining, they make me smile….I don’t usually allow them on the kitchen table, but Bowie was attempting to hide from the other cockerel and he just suddenly hopped up there to hang out with a nice little stack of wrapped birthday gifts, ready for Felix.
As anyone who has read this blog for a while knows, I LOVE neat little piles of finished sewing work, especially things in my favourite colour combinations (of which green and pink is one).
I quite genuinely took a few moments to line these brooches up once I’d sewn all the pompoms on…sad, I know. Just the leaves to add and then the brooch backs to attach.
It’s all about pink and green at the moment, even the view from my studio is conveniently matching, with the shed unintentionally echoing the colours of the Eglu.
A rose I planted on Smelly’s (the cat) grave has flowered for the first time and even that is obliging my sense of order by being all matchy-matchy.
And my favourite moment of this morning, apart from saving a fortune on home insurance and energy bills (seriously, I just halved our energy bills by shopping around!) was managing to finish sewing the little green outfits above with *just* enough thread.
I’m working hard, at the moment. Foxes and badgers are stitched and just need to be dressed and photographed. I have aprons (made last year but not yet listed), tweed purses, new flower brooches and some Christmas bits ready too. I didn’t get as much done in the half-term as I’d have liked, but we did have fun hanging out together and I worked quite a bit in the evenings.
Time to go make some poached eggs for lunch, yet another thing that will make me happy and the added bonus of keeping chickens!
I find it quite difficult to get motivated at these times, I tend to flit from one job to another and the less I get done the more frustrated and demotivated I get and I simply don’t have time for that, basically. So, the fan has been brought out of the shed (it was 29 degrees in the studio, this morning, when I opened the door!), I have a jug of iced cucumber and mint water on the go (or I forget to drink and get quickly dehydrated), music is playing and I’m making a point of working through project boxes that have been on the go for months.
Open projects are kept in stacked Ikea boxes and I’d like to see the pile reduced. I’m also making a point of developing designs that use up all the supplies I already have, instead of buying anything new (tweed pencil cases are on the agenda and possibly peg bags).
Today, badgers are finally getting their noses and I’ll be getting familiar with the buttonhole maker on my new(er) Bernina later. I hate doing button holes. I must remember to never design anything that can be ruined by the button hole at the final stage, as that’s just depressing.
Brooch backs will be next, then a big photographing session and lots of new product listings.
I’ve been re-designing the website for months, so that’s my evenings sorted. I started this process so long ago and it’s far from complete but felt I just had to go with what I have so far and I’ll keep tweaking it live. I need to decide on a banner/logo/text but I’m happy with the direction it’s going in.
As a re-cap for anyone not familiar with 
Some Secret Cinema events are known as ‘Tell No One’ events and for these you don’t know the movie in advance, although you can usually work it out from the clues. The Moulin Rouge event was one of their ‘Presents’ events which are large-scale numbers, where you know exactly what you’re going to see (past ones have included Dirty Dancing, Casablanca and The Lost Boys, amongst others – check out their site for a glimpse of how amazing they were!). After you buy tickets (be quick, all the best dates are gone in moments) you will get an email with some details on the event and you will also be assigned a character and dress code.
You don’t have to worry too much about this, in all honesty. You will feel stupid if you turn up having made no effort at all, but if you choose to dress as someone else from the movie no-one will say anything. My sister and I were both ‘celebrities’ and the dress code was white, period costumes. I am incredibly lucky to own quite a lot of antique clothing so I managed to cobble together an outfit mainly from my stash. The skirts I wore were given to me and are very precious so I did worry a bit about wearing them, but they are in such amazing condition and I am generally very careful so I just went with it (I couldn’t decide on shoes in the above photo!).
Again, I raided my cupboards for accessories (suggestions of which are also listed with your character details). You can buy everything you need from the pop up online shop if you don’t happen to have a hoard of antique clothing lying around!
Nice photo of me looking moody….I can never take decent photos of myself, sorry. Oh and the ‘hands free’ bag was genius, of I say so myself, as you need your hands free for the glass of champagne you’ll be holding, when there 🙂
You get some props listed along with your character and these might come in useful for bartering or gaining access to hidden areas (signed photos, in our case, with me on the right with my face stuck on some burlesque naughty photo….we were both ‘actresses’ to be precise. Clearly these are dodgy 5 minute Photoshop jobs but they were good enough). I quite enjoyed making these as well as getting my costume together….never say I wasted my degree – ha ha.
The event itself was amazing. I can’t say much as the whole point is it stays secret, phones and cameras are not allowed and will be zipped up on arrival in plastic bags.
I did finish some of the new aprons, but there wasn’t a chance to photograph them (red is very difficult in good light, but in winter, almost impossible). I’m happy to have the ‘reject’ one to keep and wear on Sunday (I always keep the one I am least happy with), the rest will be for next year now.
I bought an extremely cheap box of tat from Ebay…
to use with some tree rejects (the things that weren’t strung etc) to make a wreath. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but I love it. It only took about 20 mins to make and then a painful hour to fix to the door!
It’s on just in time for the weather to turn nasty, as the remains of Storm Barbara head our way. The door has a small overhead porch so I’m hoping it survives alright, but as pretty much everything on there is plastic, it should be OK.
So that’s it. I’m quite excited about not leaving the house for a few days and for the first time in forever, we genuinely don’t have anything planned for almost a week (we do have guests, here and there, but I have a stocked freezer and cupboards, ready). I’m thankful we’re all healthy and happy and together for Christmas so I hope for the same for everyone I know.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to work out the best way for me to balance making a living, with looking after the boys. My oldest finally has his official diagnosis and Charlie will (hopefully) be getting his in the coming year. Having children ‘on the spectrum’ means I am quite restricted in the hours I can work, especially with being a single parent, and having gone through a quite difficult transition into Secondary with Felix it just demonstrates to me how dependant the boys will be during certain periods of their lives. So, it really does have to be working from home (for the moment, anyway) as that offers the flexibility I need, and it has to be sewing, as I’ve already invested so much time into establishing a ‘business’, plus it’s the only thing I really know how to do. The difficulty is it’s getting increasingly hard to compete with commercially made items, especially now that ‘vintage’ (sorry, there are lots of quotation marks today…..always makes me thing of Ross in Friends and I cringe slightly that I use them so often!) is so mainstream, and handmade (resisted the urge to stick quotation marks there) is also so fashionable. I’m not complaining, I love how much lovely stuff you can buy these days, I just need to take some time out properly in January and plan how best to present my work to either differentiate it from commercially made things, or to compete on price. I see beautiful pieces of work on a daily basis where I think about the price versus how much I would have to charge for something similar in order to make it scale. Tricky, but doable. I have faith in me 🙂
Every year, I buy the boys some form of decoration critter that goes in their stocking, usually it comes from Anthropologie (See the top photo for this year’s bits and pieces) but as I was reading Facebook this morning, the cutest thing popped up in my targeted adverts from 
Clearly I’ve shopped there before, for their link to appear in my social media, but I haven’t had a look for ages and I got sucked into a good browse this morning.
I love the 
They also have Mimi Kirchner owls!!! 
Sooooo cute.
I was a bit gutted to miss out on a Doug the Pug from the ASPCA Animal ornaments (F would have LOVED one of those!)
but I did get a couple of Brimley Cats, which the boys will be very exited about (in case you don’t have internet crazy kids, this collection is inspired by famous internet pets).
On the US site you can even get tea towels!
If the above don’t work for you, what about some Fair Trade handmade ornaments?
or (and this is probably more my kind of thing, at the moment) some sequin clip-on birds?
They have quite a few pretty Christmas bits, much at half price right now, so it is worth popping over for a look.
We’ve gone for retro tack again this year, our favourite thing being the foil flowers Mum took off some crackers in the 1980’s. You don’t have to try hard to work out who I get my hoarding tendencies from, I mean, who keeps tacky cracker decorations for 30 years!!
My plan for today is to wrap gifts, write cards, and it was to photograph a new Christmas apron for the shop, but the light is so bad I don’t think that’s going to be possible…
I might even find time to watch Elf and eat a mince pie 🙂
I started them back in January, which is often the case for winter specials. I do quite a bit of designing and planning for the next festive season, just after one has passed; I think I just want to commit to some of the new ideas I’ve had that I don’t find time to make with all the craziness that happens in the run up to Christmas . 
There were mistakes, as always, with the odd swear word used, 
but I’ve managed to refine the making technique of mice to avoid the past pain of turning the whole thing out, skirts and all, through a teeny, tiny gap in the side. Bonus.
On another side note, one 
I worked on them over the summer, Instagrammed them (and subsequently sold a few before I got to blog and list them, sorry);
but the last few have just gone live in 
I really am supposed to be winding down the things that don’t make a great profit, but at the same time, I really enjoy making them and they are always fun to photograph, usually because of the skirts and shoes…..we’ll see, maybe there will be more next year after all 🙂
I updated the shop, yesterday, adding its ‘Winter’ front page. I was slightly loathe to do so, as if feels like some of defeat, in that I haven’t completed the much-needed re-design, but time is running out to list any new stock for this year, so needs must. I’m now about to spend the day updating all the stock.
Some things, amazingly, have been made but have been unlisted for a while, such as these three, final, tweed bunny purses. By the date of the above photo, I was sewing these back in September of 2015 and even then, they have been cut out and dumped in a box for at least two years. I imagine I was hoping to take really good photos of the finished purses over the summer, as I don’t plan to make them again (big fail there, by the way, no photos were taken). As it is, I’ve just listed them with my original images.
iPhoto has a new thing where ‘related’ photos pop up when you look at an image, it was nice to see these photos of an original bunny purse from 2010. I’d made it for myself, to take to a party (hence the shoes and the weekender bag) and back then, you could fit a mobile phone in, as they were small; not a chance these days.
Oh and the original line up of second generation bunny purses! See, now I’m getting all nostalgic and instantly want to make more, in fun colours. No, Beth, you will only find yourself swearing and trying to contain the tears of frustration when attempting to align the zips so they open and close smoothly (concealed zips on a tight curve are never a good idea!!!).
Summer has been….interesting. We’ve had the drama/trauma of settling F into secondary school, which hasn’t been easy and is ongoing. He’s at a great local school, one we waited a long time for on the waiting list (as he was desperate to go there) but he’s struggled with the move, as many kids do; it’s a big change going from a small primary to a huge secondary school and with the added stress that F is a ‘quirky’ child who doesn’t do change very well, we’re all a bit exhausted at the moment.
We have (another!) new cat, this time from Battersea, called Frederick. We missed Tuppence a lot, so we decided to brave another. I’m hoping he wont get ill/break a leg/turn out to have caliciviris etc. I think we deserve to have a cat with no complications, although Birdie, our original RSPCA cat has never had any problems (fingers crossed!).
Freddie also likes laying on curtains, apparently.