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.

I have fallen off the Crafting wagon!

I have fallen off the daily blogging wagon too, thanks to my internet connection dying on me yesterday (so annoying!). Now that the magic box has been restored to life I can admit to you all that on what was supposed to be day 76 of my 365 project I made NOTHING. Nothing at all! I didn't even shop for anything crafty or reorganise my stash or make business cards or any of these other things that are part and parcel of the whole crafty process.

When you fall down though, you must get up again, so yesterday evening I turned my attention to my depleted moustache stocks... I will upload a picture and do a proper blog post about things later today but I thought I should admit my lapse as soon as possible.

Also I wanted to quickly mention that I am just DELIGHTED (tis the day for all caps it would seem) to have just logged into Etsy and found that showpony is the new Etsy featured seller - another Brit! and such an awesome shop. I just this weekend treated myself to a bag of hers that I've been eyeing up for weeks now... a lovely simple organic cotton shopper printed with a gorgeous image of a vintage handbag. Such a cute idea, I couldn't resist adding one to my growing hoard of shopping bags. Pictures when it arrives - I must do an Etsy shopping post sometime soon as I've afraid I may have been on a small spree... the dangers of money sitting in your paypal account you see, as I had some I couldn't withdraw (only just got myself verified) and the temptation to "withdraw" it by spending it on pretty Etsy treats was just too much for me!

365 / 75 - a saucer of biscuits

I spent a fair bit of time yesterday tidying the house and doing odd little chores like filing this and cleaning that... I rather wore myself out, and come the evening I was super-sleepy. I curled up on the sofa and listened to the radio for a while, and finished off the batch of biscuit brooches I've been working on:
(the saucer they're on used to belong to my grandmother, each cup and saucer in the set is a different soft pastel colour, so cute).

In other news, I am dead annoyed today cos I had planned to bake scones and when I got the flour out of the cupboard I found that the horrid bugs had returned. So icky and so annoying (especially as I'd just restocked that cupboard after the last time!). Bah.

To cheer myself up a little, I feel it is time for some ego-boosing links... My work has recently shown up on an assortment of fun little blogs. My moustache cards were featured on Found it on Etsy, my moustache pins on The Crafty Devils blog, and my library project zine and the moustaches themselves got a mention on ScribbleSisters (the blog world seems to like moustaches!). Also one of my bird mobiles was featured on a great little blog about kids stuff and the lovely jen1kanobi wrote some very sweet things about my shop following my featured seller "fame" (haha what a joke that is!)

Right, I still don't feel completely cheered up so I am going to go and eat some jaffa cakes (mmm, jaffa cakes...) and drink a nice soothing cup of tea...

365 / 71 - 74, some crafting during my mini Etsy break

I may have been on a small break from the old Etsy but the daily craftiness continues.

On day 71 I made lots of moustache disguises, but they were already in the post by the time I came to take this photo. Then on day 72 I decorated some cards for packaging with the moustaches, made some I Love Tea pins and made a start on some ninjas.
Day 73 saw me tending to the colour printer as it decided to run out of blue ink just when I wanted to make some cards. Thankfully this time I managed to put the right colour in (mistook the pink & the yellow last time) and print on the right side of the paper and all those useful things. I was rather tired and sleepy in the evening so I just sat and doodled with my felt tip pens and made 4 sheets of thankyou notes. Making lots of these little thankyous always makes me fear I should never sell anything ever again! but they are so useful and I have just run out.
Then on day 74 (which happens to have been yesterday) I finished the ninja baby pins (they look cute but they are tiny little killing machines!) and made a start sewing some biscuit pins together. The decorated fronts of the biscuits have been sitting in my work-in-progress pile for rather a while, it's good to be finally finishing them. Hurrah!

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 / 67 & 68 - sewing around a wedding and lots of parcels

I have been a bit busy the past couple of days. This featured seller lark has rather increased the number of orders I've been getting, and my kitchen is currently a bit of a bomb site of parcels and packing materials and lots and lots of little post-it notes with things scribbled on them like "check address" and "remember labels!" and "which colour?". Happy chaos.

Then yesterday we were at a wedding for most of the day... the day before I did a bit of sewing with an eye to packing up my works-in-progress and taking them with me to the wedding, and then before the wedding started (during the choir rehearsals) I carried on with the sewing (never hitch a lift with musicians!). Here is the box of goodies I took with me...
... and then here is the result of the day's stitchery:
Other than this I have no real news, except to state the obvious which is that my Etsy views and hearts, my blog views and also my Flickr views (now up to a -to me rather staggering - 23,404 views! crazy) have gone rather mental in the past few days. The lovely, lovely messages have kept coming too - thankyou again to anyone who has sent a kind word, each one has made me smile hugely. Sorry if all I've had time to send in return is a quick thankyou! Hugs all round :)

Right, I have to go and package up a few more things now. Having to attend to parcels is a most excellent excuse for getting out of doing the washing up, hehe.

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).

365 / 65 - sewing in someone else's house

So we went out for dinner last night, rather mucking up my plan to spend the whole evening sewing and cutting out lots of new pattern pieces. Ah well.

Good food, lovely company and I did manage to get a little bit of sewing done during after-dinner chitchat... embroidered a few more moustache pieces, finished a cherry blossom pin (and cut out the backing piece for another), and finally finished a moth brooch! Hurrah! :)

Here is the moth in all its fat, fuzzy glory:

365 / 64 - some sewing and some secrets revealed!

Yesterday I was feeling tired and sleepy and a little bit grumpy so I took the opportunity to curl up with my sewing and totally ignored my to do list in favour of some soothing stitchery. I made six little plush bird brooches (the seventh you can see in the picture was made the other day, a test bird!), cut out the final finishing teeny pieces of felt for my work-in-progress moth brooches, and did most of the work on two little cherry blossom pins. Here they all are, in the bright sunshine:
The cherry blossom pins are part of the secret I have been hiding from you. My secret swap partner (who has now received her gift) was the lovely greygoat who said she liked corsages and is known to love Japanese things... so I decided to make her a Sakura (cherry blossom) branch out of felt, an appliqued corsage. It ended up so large that it has two pinback fastenings stitched on the back to keep it in place, and took rather a while to sew... but I'm really very pleased with how it turned out:As I had a few of the little pink beads left over (they really are just the perfect beads for this, lovely pale pearlescent things with dark pink insides) I decided to use my new cherry blossom pattern to make pins for my shop...
They are really enjoyable little pins to make, I love adding the beads and the little embroidered details, and making them has allowed me the chance to try out some of the alternate solutions I had for the main corsage (darker thread for the central embroidery, not stitching the darker pink felt onto the backing to make it stand out more). It's lovely to have made a flower that actually resembles a real flower instead of a stylised retro "flower-type" shape like I've made previously. I'll hopefully be finishing the in-progress pins this evening, and I am going to try and finish at least one of those darn moths! They've been sitting around unfinished for far, far too long.

365 / 63 - not a lot

Mostly dull admin yesterday. Yawn. Not a lot of exciting things to report, I've just managed to make a few more business cards and get a teeny bit of work done...
... a few pieces cut out for birdie brooches, and a few moustache pieces nicely embroidered. I will hopefully have more interesting things to show off tomorrow as I have sooo much sewing that needs doing!

365 / 62 - printing, sewing, and another secret thing

Last night I made another secret thing which I cannot yet show off - it's a small something based on the secret swap item I've just put in the post, so it will have to stay hidden until the swapping is complete! I also printed off a few business cards (I've been out of them for ages, so I really need to restock) and made His & Hers lucky pants badges - destined to be a wedding gift for some friends of my sister...

365 / 60 & 61 - finished pastels, a secret treat, and lovely post

On Friday (day 60) I finished the pastel mobile I've been working on. Here are lots of lovely pastel photos:
It's very interesting (to me at any rate) to see the familiar mobile shapes in unfamiliar, softer colours. Sewing the finished discs onto the ribbons was a different process to normal, too, as they were single-sided (it's to be a wall-hanging) so the back looks like this:

Yesterday (Saturday, day 61) saw the arrival of some Etsy post (photos coming soon) and my secret swap package from the lovely Ally of AughrasLair... THE most gorgeous tote bag (great colours, great fabrics, I love owls, I use a tote bag most days) and a cute matching plushie:
I am just in love with that bag and cannot wait to show it off to everyone. Its arrival also prompted me to finally make the swap item I will be sending out... and because it is a SECRET there will be no photo until it has arrived at its destination.

I should have made it last week or even the week before that but I've rather been letting things drop while I've been unwell and working out the pattern etc for this item actually took a bit of brainpower (shapes to be drawn! colours to be chosen! decisions to be made! etc). It's 95% finished though and just in time for the end of the postal strike, hurrah! Just the last few finishing touches to add and some nice wrapping to attend to and we'll be sorted. Naturally as with all these things I have a few improvements I would like to go back in time and suggest to myself (darker thread there, perhaps? this colour instead of that, maybe?) but overall I am pleased with how it's turned out and I'm also very pleased that it looks how I imagined it in my head (sometimes this really does not happen). Fingers crossed that my swapee likes it too!

365 / 58 & 59 - not doing very much

I'm poorly again and spending a fair amount of my time in bed, it is most rubbish!
Please do not expect great things from me at the moment...

Wednesday evening I just managed to get a couple of tiny things finished - the very last pastel mobile disc sewn together, a couple of moustaches embroidered ready to stick on moustache cards, and the front and back of several apple pins sewn together. Then last night I cut out a few pieces for moustache disguise making and did some doodling with felt tip pens to make colourful thankyou cards to add to my orders (oh how I love felt tip pens!)

365 / 57 - Doodling

No genuine crafting for me yesterday evening as I wasn't feeling very well - very frustrating as I had some lovely soothing sewing bits planned. Ah well. I did manage to get some more doodles drawn during a slow patch at work (I say "slow patch", my boss says "when you were slacking off") so I guess that's something:
Some of those little scribbles are ideas for felt things, and some are just little scribbles (I was a bit bored). Not my finest artistic hour in either case!!

In other news: one of my moustache disguises was used in the October newscast from The Storque, the Etsy newsletter. I wouldn't really recommend watching it, it's a little bit lame. Jam packed with what my dad sneeringly calls "undergraduate humour". I do love Etsy, but that newscast was not their finest hour. Oh well. It was nice to see the moustache getting used for larks and japery though!

Other moustache-related news, thanks to the lovely heidiburton my moustache disguises were on the Etsy front page yesterday afternoon as part of a selection aimed at 8-11 yr old boys. Most marvellous. I even sold a couple of them, placating my boyfriend whose usual response to my gleeful "I'm on the front page! Yay!" is "yes but have you sold anything?" :D

365 / 56 - An Umbrella and Two Cups of Tea

UPDATE: sew your own little felt teacup brooches - printable PDF pattern now available from my shop, or in my Patreon pattern library.

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These are the subjects of my new brooches, look:
Yesterday at work we had rather a slow patch and I used the time most productively sketching out ideas for new felt brooches and ornaments. Of course once I'd got all my ideas worked out (I had already started picking out the felt and thread in my mind) I couldn't resist starting to make them the moment I got home. Here they are next to the original sketches - a horrible photo as it was so overcast and rainy today that the light was that annoying blue - you can just see some of the other ideas I am tossing around my brain at the moment...

The umbrella pairs up with my cloud brooch in my mind, and I've been wanting to make little felt teacups for just ages. I am planning some more tea-themed brooches as I'm very pleased with how those two turned out (I might have to put in less "tea" next time though as I think the cups look a little like they would spill at any moment!). Mmm, tea...

365 / 55 - Pastel circles everywhere!

I have been sewing lots and lots of pastel circles of felt together... and after a lazy Sunday mostly spent sewing I've nearly finished all the discs for this mobile. I probably could have finished the whole lot (only 6 more to go) but I got distracted by doing some work on little apple pins. Here are all the discs I have finished, stacked neatly in sixes in the little box I use to carry my crafting out of the house - ready to take when I went ribbon shopping today. It's very useful to have the real thing for comparing colours (though I should have taken some business cards with me cos I got asked what it was I was making!) ...
Oh, and in the wee hours of this morning it seems that a couple of my little baubles were on the Etsy front page. The lovely insomniac ColdCell snapped a screenshot for me which I have now stolen to put on my blog, thus:

Crafting 365 / 54 - a new mobile

Yesterday I made a start on the custom mobile I mentioned... I made a big mess of the kitchen table, spreading out the chosen pastel felt colours and cutting them all into pieces. The discs for this mobile are to be one-sided only (it will be flat on a wall, not hanging centrally and spinning) and it was interesting to break from my normal process of cutting two of every piece. It's also very interesting making something to someone else's colours and seeing how different the pieces look in this softer palette.
I managed to sew a few of the discs together before I went to bed, but there are still lots to do! I also managed to get a small batch of cloud brooches finished and relisted, though I wasn't totally awake and managed to sew one of the clouds on the wrong way round! Very annoying. I shall probably list it as a slightly discounted oops or something, there's nothing technically wrong with it... it just doesn't look quite right to me & it certainly looks different to the photos in my listing! Ah well. Must pay more attention next time! Here are the clouds nestling amongst the pastel discs - I think the grey looks quite nice next to the pastel colours...
I also did a little bit of dull work on my accounts last night, which is why my crafting 365 photo contains a calculator (resting on my snazzy accounts book - it's only snazzy on the outside, believe me!). Nothing too interesting/important, just adding up a few expenses from last month in an attempt to keep up with my paperwork!

Crafting 365 / 53 - a veritable binge of sewing and a narrow escape

I'm just starting a large custom mobile that was ordered this week and as that will likely be eating up all my crafty hours over the next week or so I wanted to "clear the decks" a bit before I started. So yesterday I made a determined effort to sit and finish a big pile of things that needed finishing (mostly bird ornaments) and also to get a few pieces cut out for some brooches so I could make them quickly in spare moments & get them back in stock on the old Etsy. I had quite a successful evening's worth of sewing, lots of goodies ready to photograph and then gradually list and I even tried out a new idea - little bird brooches. You can just see them in the top left hand corner of the photo...
I was going to make another bird ornament to add to the pile but decided to turn it into brooches instead and having two decorated sides I thought I would try out two sorts: one flat and one plush. Decidedly the plush version has won my heart, so you will be seeing more of them, but the flat one does have an odd flat-but-strangely-obsese charm to him.

Right when I was in the middle of this felt binge our birthday-celebrating friend and his parents came round for a drink (the "NOT 30" badge went down well, hurrah! I may make some similar ones for Etsy...) and his mother even left with one of my plush owls pinned to her lapel (so great seeing people wearing them). Unfortunately at that point my boyfriend spilled a whole glass of red wine whilst sitting next to me and my felt-works-in-progress... but he spilled it *away* from the felt and "only" all over our friend's shirt. You can see where my priorities lie that I immediately said "thank goodness you spilled it in that direction!" haha, but in all seriousness I might have killed him otherwise (and the shirt has come out fine in the wash). From now on: no wine near the precious felt! :)

Crafting 365 / 52 - lots of finished brooches, also more shopping

Last night I had a cosy evening in, listening to the radio and getting lots of brooches finished. I added black pupils and brooch backs to a whole parliament of owls and stuffed them, and also finished a few biscuit badges. Fun project of the evening though was making a birthday badge for a friend who is turning 29...
... because the important thing about turning 29 is of course that you are not yet turning 30! :)

Yesterday I got excellent post (just before the strike started at lunchtime), my Major Teacup t-shirt from ScaryGoRound. Yesterday being of course Thursday I couldn't resist modelling my new tshirt for Self Portrait Thursday over on Flickr. The UK Etsy gang's theme of the week was chocolate, so I had to dig out the Green & Blacks (you know, cos they forced me, haha), that and the moustache made for rather a mental photo...

Also yesterday I did some more Etsy shopping, buying a whole bundle of Kate Bingaman's Daily Purchase zines which I've wanted for just ages. This in my mind demonstrates the dangerous dangers of leaving some money in your paypal account instead of taking it out very speedily to help pay for bills etc. I have also been doing worrying amounts of window-shopping, with my eye on several sets of cards (like I ever need to buy any more cards for the whole of my life!) and a couple of prints, including one I am particularly in love with from Heidi Burton whose work is just genius (and not just because she a fellow tea-obsesso). I shall have to sell a few more Etsy things before I have paypal dollars to spend though :)

(Oh and a final happy-dance inducing bit of Etsy news, one of my very favourite Etsy artists bought something from my shop yesterday. Yay!)

Crafting 365 / 49, 50, 51 - lots to catch up on!

Well, I've been getting a little better (hurrah!) but of course now there is so much to catch up on that several things have been getting neglected including this whole blogging lark. Must Try Harder.

So, time to catch up on a few things from the past three days or so...

Day 49, I got quite a lot of sewing done as I was still mostly sofa-bound. I finished off lots of things from my wip pile, including loads of little birdies destined for my Etsy shop (though the leopard-print one is a gift for my MIL who is coming to dinner on Sunday)
Day 50 (I can't believe it's day 50 already!!), starting to get busy again after so many days doing nothing "useful" at all, but I still curled up in front of a West Wing episode in the evening and finished these few things from the wip pile
Day 51 (yesterday) was both busy and full of distractions.
I went shopping for two sheets of felt and came back with dozens (yum).
There was a crazy person outside my house shouting at people and talking to cats for several hours until the community police officers were called & returned her to the care home which had left her there in the first place (she'd wandered off during a day-trip it would seem).
And my poor next door neighbours had their first trip to Casualty with their wee kiddie so their evening out and our quiet night of babysitting got nixed in favour of a takeaway and lots of chitchat....
So I only managed to get a teeny bit of knitting in right at the end of the evening.
My photo for day 51 shows how little I actual managed to get done in contrast to how much I have "in progress" that needs doing! My knitting for the day is up in the top right corner...

In other news, I have been nerdishly tidying up my felt stash. This is it in its entirety:
So much delicious felt. I love my local market so much!

And then because I felt like doing some shopping yesterday and there is nothing in my hometown that I want to spend money on (aside from delicious wonderful felt, obviously) I had a mini Etsy spending spree with some of the cash in my paypal account. I finally bought Kate Sutton's tea badges (which I've been eyeing up for literally months), and gave in to the irresistable lure of some awesome tea-themed fabric from Namolio (I am feeling a dangerous urge to aquire tea-themed crafty supplies coming on...).

Then - prompted by her being the well-deserved Etsy Featured Seller - I invested in two amazingly awesome prints from one of my very favourite Etsy artists, Little Robot. I had my eye on the original of this for ages but had no money at the time (I also rather wanted the storage beard (an artist who designs a storage beard gets my votes any day of the week, I tell you)) so I'm dead chuffed to have added the print to my budding Etsy art collection. Given my current moustache obsession I couldn't resist buying this print too :)

All that shopping and I'd still not managed to spend more than £20 (including shipping). Ah, Etsy, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

Oh yes and that reminds me, one of my mobiles was on the Etsy front page the other day:
Also there's currently an Etsy treasury inspired by my moustache cards (how lovely is that?) and I've been blogged a fair bit recently... the lovely Rosehip blogged about her moustache disguise, Feltbug was "subliminally influences" by all the circles in my mobiles, and Swirlyarts has adopted my habit of working from trays. Hurrah!

I'm shutting up now cos this post is long enough already! :)

Crafting 365 / 47 & 48 - an assortment of simple crafty tasks

I am still ill, and it is still rubbish. I'm at the "pottering about the house in pajamas and an old sweater not really doing very much and watching lots of rubbish on dvd" phase (very technical medical term, that!). So I'm still ill but at least able to communicate with the human world instead of being stuck in bed the whole time dreaming weird dreams about theme parks, tomatoes and adding a nice ribbon trim to a bolero jacket from Topshop (analyse that as you will!!).

The day before yesterday I was really not up to very much and sat listening to the radio, watching dvds and generally staring into space a little whilst knitting some little hats. Then yesterday the old noggin was working slightly better & I managed to get a little bit of my work-in-progress sewing pile attended to.... here are the products of both days:
As you can see, I sewed a few more eyes onto a few more birds (though only the whites of some, making them look slightly spooky), made a few moustaches and started a few more, and I stitched together a couple of pink & purple ornaments which have been waiting for their ribbons for just ages (they look rather wonky in this picture but I assure you that they are perfectly fine!). Of course now today it is raining like crazy and there is no light to speak of so actually listing the little blighters will probably have to wait another age... ah well. Taking photographs would involve standing up for rather more time than I can manage at the moment anyway, haha.

Right, I am off to drink tea and to do a bit more knitting. This would almost be my ideal way of spending my time except for that whole feeling ill thing (that and the knowledge of all the money I'm not earning by being unable to attend my legitimate paid employment. Bah).