365 / 94 - Spring Cleaning and Scissors

The "spring" cleaning continues... but I'm feeling a lot better about it. For one thing, I'm actually making some progress - parts of my house are both clean and tidy! Getting rid of a lot of the clutter and properly organising things is making me feel better already (so many of our possessions were still in their "that'll do" places from when we first moved in) and I'm pleased with the pile of stuff we now have to give away.

Most importantly though, I did some crafting last night, hurrah! Not the largest or most exciting of crafty tasks, but one I have been meaning to do for ages - cutting up old envelopes to make, er, new envelopes:
Some of the new envelopes will have our address on the inside so I'll keep those for my personal letters etc. but the plain brown ones will be matched up with my new map cards (I do so love the look of the brown paper with the vintage maps) and the blue patterned ones I'll use for sending out zine orders. I've been using my spare map & giftwrap envelopes for sending out zines recently and the difference it makes is just huge. Even the normally stern cashier at the post office was entranced!

In Etsy news, my tea and cake obsession was blogged on I Like, my ornaments got a mention on Funky Finds and my moustache pins were on the Etsy front page early this morning - too early for me but you can see the treasury here. I was also delighted to find sweet mentions of this very blog here, here and also here - so, so nice to read other people's reactions to my witterings :)

In other news, it's lovely and sunny here this morning - even if I had anything crafty to show off yesterday I'd barely have been able to take a photo of it the day was so dark and gloomy and filled with rain. I'm hoping to get some gardening done this afternoon if the weather holds... does gardening count as craftiness, I wonder?

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.

Crafting 365 / 45 & 46 - moustaches again

Blergh. I am ill, and it is rubbish.

The day before yesterday I guess it was creeping up on me as I was super-tired and spent most of my day curled up on the sofa listening to the radio (crime & thrillers on BBC7, excellent stuff) whilst sewing some moustaches. Then yesterday I had to go back to bed and spent 90% of my day asleep in a big nest of blankets. I did get up in the late afternoon to put the finishing touches to the moustaches so that they could get parcelled up and posted by my long-suffering boyfriend (he really hates going to the Post Office).

Here are the moustaches just before they went into their jiffy bag...
... they're destined for a kids birthday party, apparently. I love the idea of a room full of 8 year olds all with moustaches! Makes me smile rather a lot.

Also excellent and smile-inducing: I was featured on Cuteable today! :D
It is a really lovely feature, I am very chuffed indeed.

I'm going back to bed now though... zzz...

Crafting 365 / 44 - some knitting and some more moustache-related fun

It is starting to get very dark here in the evenings so sewing anything dark is right out. I managed to get two brown moustaches finished & labelled before the light went but the rest of the moustaches had to wait...

Instead I turned my attention to my bag of knitting and made a few more little hats. I'm rather slow at knitting them so I only managed three last night, but as I've been knitting one or two at the end of each evening the pile is gradually growing. Here are the 20 I've knitted so far, along with those 2 moustaches:
So far there have been no knitting disasters, though a few of the hats are a little irregular and one time I forgot to change the colour over so the stripes are Not Quite Right. I'm tucking them all away in a brown paper bag once I've knitted them, ready and waiting to get stitched together & pompommed at a later date. It is very satisfying making a new mark on the tally (I can never remember how many I've done otherwise) and I do love to make stripey things.

In other news, my cloud-themed treasury was on the Etsy front page last night, hurrah! I missed it as I was tucked up in bed but you can take a peek at it here - I'm really pleased that several of the people I featured sold stuff, excellent items one and all.

Also, the lovely Brooke has been taking some more self-portraits with her moustache... the second one is particularly excellent, I think (a moustache eye-patch! genius). She also has a teeny thumbnail of herself modelling the moustache included in her new banner over in her Etsy shop which made me smile rather a lot! Hurrah for moustaches! :)

Crafting 365 - day nine - parcels in the mail

I have to get this out of my system before I can write a sensible blog post - my moustaches are on the Etsy front page! Hurrah!!! I am just so, so pleased. My family members are starting not to believe me when I say being on the front page is special and supremely exciting, cos this is the 4th time it's happened to me in about a fortnight (only the 4th time ever, I might add). I actually let out a small yelp when I saw them there today - loads of lovely felt things on the front page with them, too. I do rather love felt & all the awesome felty things on Etsy are just so inspiring.

Right, now I can get on with my blog post :)

Today I have been doing efficient and purposeful crafting in order to get some things finished and in the mail. I had a custom order for a notecard (made from a map of a particular place in France) and also had to finish two moustache disguises to finally be able to send them to my volunteer models (the lovely gemmafactrix and lazerbeanz). Here is the card atop the parcelled-up moustaches...

The map I used for the notecard actually came from the UK Etsy swap group, from the lovely seaurchin and I think the stickers I used on the parcels came from there too (tho I forget who sent them)! I love decorating my post with stickers - dull parcels depress me and the women who work at my Post Office seem to be cheered up by it if nothing else!

Small bit of other news: I have been blogged by the lovely Wildcat Designs, here.