Showing posts with label russian dolls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label russian dolls. Show all posts

Thursday, 6 December 2012

It's Nice to Be Nice

If you've bought some felt from me recently, your parcel has probably had this pretty tape on it...


... lovely Russian dolls reading "It's What's Inside That Counts". Here's a better shot of it on my desk, earlier this summer along with some tape from Summersville:


I love this tape, and adore how cheerful it makes all the parcels I send out. So I was delighted to see that the designer, Hazel Nicholls, has some new tape in stock...


... a biscuit-y "It's Nice to Be Nice" (image from her Etsy shop).

I've got that design as a print (it's currently in a box somewhere while I don't have space to hang it, but it used to hang in the kitchen in my old flat) and I do love a) biscuits and b) being nice, so I couldn't resist buying the tape version to add to my parcel-packing supplies.

I just ordered some this morning, so it should be making an appearance on my parcels sometime soon :)

Friday, 15 June 2012

Photos from this week...

So, what have I been up to this week?

I got a new delivery of felt squares and spent some time sorting through it all, making up colour bundles and cutting and sorting squares to make some mini felt rainbows...


I also made up a few bargain bundles of "not quite perfect" squares that I've been collecting for a while, and added to my Etsy shop (at the time of writing this there are two left in stock).


I made a start on catching up with my accounts and other admin...


... normally I like to have all my accounts in order by the summer but this year has been so weird that I'm quite a bit behind with this stuff. I'm determined to get it done soon, though! (not least because I literally won't have the time when the autumn rolls round).

I've also been using bits of spare time here and there to print lots of certificates of posting and return address labels and other boring-but-useful things like that.

And I bought some useful-but-not-at-all-boring new tape for my larger/bulkier parcels:


It's got a lovely design by Hazel Nicholls on it - cute Russian dolls on it that spell out "it's what's inside that counts". I got the red tape from Hazel's Etsy shop, and the blue tape from Of Cabbages & Kings (they also sell the red version). I hope my customers will like it as much as I do!

Crafting-wise I'm still doing lots of knitting in the evenings to relax. My sky blanket is getting bigger and bigger, and I'm continuing to work through all the random balls of yarn in my stash to knit squares which will, eventually, one day, become blankets of some description. I've almost used up my whole stash now - I've used up all the large balls of yarn and now only have an assortment of "leftover" balls that (like the olive green one in the photo below) are just large enough to knit a couple of small moss stitch squares.


Amazingly (after taking an unusually long break from it) I've also done some sewing! I'm still feeling a bit creatively blocked but much more in the mood for just sitting down with some work in progress and slowly stitching my way through one task or another. The next job on my list is to finish sewing a batch of owl masks.


As for the "new things" I mentioned last week, I've been enjoying sharing lots of bits and bobs over on my Facebook page  (thanks to everyone who's "liked" my page recently!) and my attempt to give up caffeine continues to go well, though I'm not sure I'd have the willpower to keep it up if decaf teabags didn't exist!

The "switching off the word verification widget" experiment is going less well. If I moderated comments via my blog's dashboard it would be fine, as about 95% of the new spam is going straight into Blogger's spam folder but alas I prefer to moderate comments via my email inbox as it helps me keep on top of publishing and replying to them.

For some reason Blogger "helpfully" emails me all the spam comments to moderate even when its own anti-spam filters have already categorised the comment as spam, and as far as I can see there's no way to change this: I either get all the comments in my inbox or none. If I have missed an obvious setting, please do let me know folks, otherwise the word verification thingummy may have to come back soon.