My Very First Pincushion

I am so proud! :)

A Package in the Mail

Just as I was thinking, "I wonder when those earrings from jessprkle will arrive?" lo, I looked out of the window and there was the postman and he was clutching a global priority mail envelope with my name on it. Hurrah. I shall be repackaging the yarn-wrapped lovelies to post to my sister later this afternoon, and (thanks to an exciting bundle of business cards & freebies enclosed in the parcel) shall be sending her an extra crazy pair of earrings that look like they've been made out of xmas decorations (florists ones, maybe? you know, the ones you twist together to make centrepieces etc). Mental stuff, courtesy of sweetyprize

A Treasury of Felt

Out of sheer boredom the other day, I tried to snag a treasury over at Etsy.com and as I am currently felt obsessed, I filled my 12 spaces with lovely felt items. Searching for these helped me find some great new sellers, but also reminded me of some of my faves. As I cannot decide who might be my featured Etsy seller this week, I shall write about all these guys instead...

Almost every treasury I get, I end up putting something by paperbluebird in because her bird ornaments are just so brilliant - they have real character in their expressions and the embellishments are delicious. This one is probably my favourite:
I also put in a crazy "zombie owl" patch I found from MoxieMadness, a cute little birdie patch from demoderby, and a lovely embroidered pincushion with two birds on it from loosestring (her needlework is just flawless).

I ended up with lots of floral things in my treasury, too. Search for "felt" and "flower" on Etsy and you find an awful lot of nice stuff. These handfelted poppy pins by lanadeflor are just stunning, and her shop is full of very pretty felt items like hair pins and purses.
CynContemporary embellishes her bags with some amazing arrangements of felt flowers (she has a leafy one which appeals to me greatly, too), and Etsy is just filled with people making wonderful corsage brooches - my featured picks were a leafy one from fibrespace and a Narcissus from the ever charming and delightful Nonsuch:
I am very into felt food at the moment, so JustDessertsSweets' beaded tea cake pattern charmed the socks off me:
I also featured the cute cupcake pincushions betzwhite makes out of felted sweaters - her coffee cup pincushions were featured on Martha Stewart's tv show, apparently, as one of those "you can make these at home" items. They are cutesy and girly-pretty and slightly twee but still so darn covetable. And then finally: felt food for cats - BuenoStyle's fun sushi for kitties (complete with catnip):

Random Saturday Things

Not very awake this Saturday, wandering round in a bit of a daze & totally forgot to take all the pictures I'd been meaning to post up here of works in progress, etc, and now it is too dark - boohoo.

In the meantime: another small Etsy update. The whole site seems to be going a bit mental over the newly posted Constitution - there are some quite bold changes being proposed, and I can entirely see why some sellers are so upset over it. Hopefully the vocal discussions going on will produce some good positive suggestions, and the rules will get tweaked into something rather wonderful. I am particularly pleased about the changes to the non-paying-buyer rules, as 10 days was a long time to wait to report someone to admin for not paying! (especially for all us paypal users). I can see that there is some trickiness re cheques etc, but 7 days to pay via paypal was just nonsense esp as during those 7 days you could see all the negative feedbacks about your dodgy buyer and know you were never going to get payment - so depressing! Ah well: progress beckons...

I have sold another zine (taking me up to 17 items sold) and my Library Graffiti zine is in a treasury at the moment (a popular item with treasury makers - I've seen it in at least 4! certainly helped my sales the time two people listed it at once!).

I have been working on some new mini-zines with illustrations in them as well as my scribblings. I am making them collection-themed, and have started with a zine about 7 of my favourite brooches. I am sewing copies together this weekend, and will post pics when they're finished. They are a bit scribbly (full of spelling mistakes and my drawing style is a bit - what's the polite term? - "naive") but I am quite pleased with them all the same. It is fun to draw things! I have lots of others planned as I enjoyed making the first one so much - featuring my collections of (possibly) mugs, retro crockery, potplants, records, necklaces, badges, and vintage dresses. I am also scheming an illustrated zine about the cats in my street, because they are all such characters.

I am sewing a lot of felt items at the moment - needlebooks, pincushions and loads of little brooches. I am doing autumn versions of my leafy pins, and lots of button flower brooches. I'm also making a little owl in custom colours for my mother's birthday. As ever, I am finding the sewing process a very soothing one but I keep having very irritating headaches that mean I have to postpone the lovely sewing and do boring chores like washing-up etc instead (boo).

I sold a little owl brooch, a little leaf, some cards, and a couple of birds to a lovely neighbour of mine this week. Actual sales, hurrah! I saw her the other day, and she was wearing my leaf pin which was lovely to see!