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.