365 / 81 - Brr! and also Yawn!

Brr! because it is still COLD here thanks to our lack of heating (I am now a walking bundle of wool and have made a treasury to celebrate the fact) and Yawn! because I did very little crafting yesterday as my accounts needed doing...

Here is my snazzy accounts book, along with the teeny bit of creative stuff I managed - sketching out possible shapes for a forthcoming conker (horse chestnut) brooch (having made one with a little acorn I just have to try to make a conker!) :
I was very bad and impatient yesterday and instead of waiting and spreading out all my new listings, I went and listed them all at once, including all three sizes of poppy. I will be donating £1 to the poppy appeal for every poppy brooch purchased from my shop this November.

I was also most delighted to get an email from the lovely charlottenarunsky letting me know that one of my mobiles was on the Etsy front page as part of a "picks for baby" treasury.

365 / 80 - exciting new things! hurrah!

It is quite cold here cos our heating system has been dismantled. Hopefully we shall have magical heat by the end of next week but until then we are enjoying the pleasures of oil heaters and hot water bottles. The lovely gloves I bought from knithappens are getting a lot of use, too!

I was stuck in the house for a few hours in the afternoon yesterday while the plumber ripped out all kinds of odd bits of piping. This gave me an excellent chance to cut out pattern pieces (you've always got to sneak in the craftiness when you can!). Then in the evening I was very productive cos I went out babysitting and took my sewing with me...
As you can see, I finished some more teacup pins, worked on some moustaches and also made new brooches:

A little mug of tea (for those days when a cup of tea just isn't sufficient)
An acorn
& three beaded poppy pins (I kept making them bigger and bigger as I tried to work out what size I wanted the petals to be - I still haven't totally decided which I prefer)

There are still lots more patterns I want to try, but these will do for the moment!

UPDATE: My poppy and little teacup designs are now available as sewing patterns! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

365 / 79 - apples and teacups

Last night we went out to dinner so I only got to do a little bit of sewing - half-finishing a new batch of little teacups, and sewing together the apple pins I'd almost finished the night before:
(please excuse the terrible light!)

I have been getting a bit bored with all this batch-making - it's very useful and important, obviously, but it gets a fair bit dull after a while and I have been itching to try out a few new ideas (lots of new ideas). So today I have been trying new things. There will be photos tomorrow, hopefully in half-decent light so I can get my new pretties listed in the shop tomorrow evening.

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

365 / 78 - satisfying tasks and a secret revealed

Last night my crafting tasks were deeply, deeply satisfying as I got to Actually Finish Some Things instead of just doing odd bits of works in progress. Here are the things I have finished (along with some things I almost finished)...... a batch of teacup pins, a batch of plush birdies and also some apple pips pins.

Ah, it is so wonderful lining all those finished things up in a row like that (mildly obsessive? moi? surely not).

Today I have been busy with blogging tasks - I am still very behind on updating the UK Etsy Sellers blog, but I have at least now brought the shop guides up to date... They still need a bit of work as I need to give a description of contents for many of the shops, but I've done some of them at least and all the empty shops have been removed and the new shops added (thanks to the sterling work of Kezzaroo updating the UK Etsy sellers list every month).

I have also been uploading photos to my flickr, of the secret item I made way back on day 39 of this crafting 365 project. It's a felt version of a comic strip creature? character? monster? not sure what to call him, but he is called Space Owl:
Today has also included a memorable trip to the post office (after which I realised I had been undercharged! I actually got to send a free parcel, it was rather marvellous), talks with my landlord about plumbers (our boiler and water tank and so forth may need replacing - doom!), and a lovely tea-break catching up on Storque articles wherein I spotted my moustache pins in a cute set of spy-related items in one of their How-To pieces, hurrah!