365 / 85 - oak leaves and poppies

Back on the wagon again late last night after a tiring evening cleaning the house (nowhere near finished but miles better than when the plumbers left) ... attending to some works in progress, applique-ing and embellishing two poppies and embroidering the two oak leaves. I finished the brown one at about 1am! It will be in my shop this evening, with the green version to follow once it's been finished and photographed. They are rather large brooches but quite striking, I think. They took rather a lot of tiny stitches!
In other news, the plumbers will have to come back again soon because I realised they didn't do one of the things they've billed my landlord for! (he is unamused, particularly as he also had to come round this morning to fix something they did to the pipe connected to my washing machine that made it cease to work).

Much more pleasantly, I got some lovely Etsy things in the post, hurrah! :)
I have treated myself to a fair few things on Etsy lately and have been very slack at taking pictures to show them off (tsk tsk), but here are my latest goodies...
Lovely card sets from Lisa Congdon ( "the tenderhearted" card set which combines two of my interests, trees and birds) and The Paper Bluebird (wintery bird cards). Both sets are just lovely and I cannot wait to send them to people, but I would particularly recommend the ones from paperbluebird.etsy.com - gorgeous little gocco prints and a wonderful and friendly seller to boot! She is a member of my Crafting 365 group on Flickr and was sweet enough to send me a bundle of free cards with my purchase, all of which are just gorgeous but I am completely in love with the zinnia cards and may have to keep one to get it framed, it is so wonderful and such perfect bold colours (I do love colour).
Also it seems I have been blogged in France!, my French is not really up to the task but I got the general idea (running the text through babelfish helped, too!), it seems like a really lovely mention. Hello to anyone who has found my blog from there, including the lovely lady who mentioned my work while discussing buying handmade gifts this Christmas :)

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