Messy Making

This week I've been busy behind the scenes - working on some secret projects with a looming deadline.

Since I can't show you what I'm working on, I thought I'd share some snaps of the creative chaos happening in my studio right now...carefully cropped to hide the projects themselves, of course!

Top of this morning's To Do list = tidying up a bit so I've got space to do some more making :)

More Creative Chaos

First thing on today's To Do list? Tidy my desk!

Creative brainstorming and testing out ideas can be messy stuff. No time to tidy! Must! Make! More! Things! Immediately!

I am actually sitting on the floor to type this, as it's the only place in my studio which isn't completely covered in craft supplies, haha :)

Creative Chaos

Crikey, the past few days have been hectic.My working day finished at 2am last night!

Okay, so I was sitting up watching DVDs and doing lots of sewing which isn't quite as bad as sitting at the laptop until the wee small hours but still, ugh. I will definitely be getting to bed earlier tonight.

I'm also going to be tidying up my workspace as it currently looks a little... chaotic.

My desk:

My studio:

The sofa:

The living room floor:

Tangled

Newly added to this week's to do list: tidy up and untangle my sewing thread!

The Truth

Being a crafty blogger involves lots of editing - deciding which projects to share, which works in progress to photograph, and carefully cropping shots of workspaces and domestic corners to be as interesting as possible (and to hide that pile of ironing in the corner!).

But today I present to you some unedited chaos...


Our lounge has gradually disappeared under a mountain of crafty debris this weekend as I've been working on about a dozen projects at once. As we actually might have to use that sofa and the coffee table at some point I think today's project might be tidying up!

365 / 151 - much craftiness, much mess

Okay so yesterday I did allow myself to become a little distracted from the crafty tasks in hand but still: lots of craftniess was achieved! Praise be!
After a comment on my Flickr about how neat and tidy I am, I was forced to admit that it's all lies and that most of my 365 photos of "my workbox" are staged for photographs. Not having my own workspace where I can spread out my felt etc and leave it lying around, I have to get out my evening's supplies and works in progress and then clear them away again in the evening so when I take my 365 photos you see what I have unpacked from the night before (if that makes sense). I thought today I would show off the debris that my crafting creates, and deliberately left the chaos out overnight:
If you click on the photo it should take you to a heavily annotated version, so you can see what all that stuff is ... but basically it's lots of felt, some admin, some pattern pieces, assorted wips, and there's a cup of tea and some chocolate in there somewhere too. The supplies will get packed away neatly (though where a lot of that felt is going to go I'm not sure yet, as my stash has more than doubled in the past week!), the wips will go back in their box, the admin will get put in my towering "to do/file" pile, etc etc and we'll be able to use our table again!
What did I actually make last night? Well, I cut out lots of pieces of felt for various designs that I need to restock, I finished the first of the little oak leaves and I made a couple of new things too - alphabet pins (to be a custom item, your choice of letter and colours) and a badger!
I'm really pleased with how the oak leaf turned out, and the letters are just how I wanted them but gosh the badger makes me smile. It took me rather an age to translate my initial badgery sketches into a finished brooch (hares are giving me similar trouble) but he's rather a cutie in my opinion:In exciting shop news: I've decided to offer a discount to customers who send me customer appreciation photos, ie pics of people wearing my brooches etc. If you buy something from my little shop (or have bought something in the past) and send me a photo of yourself enjoying your purchase, I will put it up on this here blog and you will get a 10% discount off your next order. Discounts will be issued as a refund via paypal after purchase (excluding shipping costs), and there's only one discount per customer - but you can of course send me as many pictures as you like! :)
PSST - if you've sent me pics before now you must give me a shout and give me permission to put them on my blog or you won't get your 10%

Back in a couple of days...

The Christmas shipping deadline from here to the US is coming up pretty fast now, and I have a few parcels still left to pack before it arrives.
Also in my "actual" job we're working on a project with a deadline for early next week.
And then finally the plumbers came round again to fix a problem with our heating that they themselves caused when installing our new boiler. They took our carpeting and floorboards up for what turned out to be no good reason, and half of our possessions had to be moved to enable them to do it.

Basically I am saying that I am going to be a bit busy for a couple of days! I will still be crafting though, never fear, so I will be back on Sunday or Monday with lots of crafty photos :)

Thrown off the wagon by a messy house

It is sad but true. Yesterday I did not a single crafty thing because I was cleaning my house. I hate days like that, hate them hate them. They make me feel like a domestic drudge instead of a person and after all that work my house still isn't bloody clean! In fact in some places it looks worse as boxes of things have been emptied but not yet re-packed and cupboard-contents are strewn across the floor. I have been throwing lots of things away, washing lots of things, rearranging lots of things... but making NOTHING. Bah. I did have an excellent day for my other project though - clearing out cupboards gave me a lovely big pile of things to give away.

In other news... I was buying Etsy gifts for other people in the evening when I found just the most beautiful Etsy shop, called paperiaarre. It's based in Finland and sells gorgeous handbound books and also some of the most awesome brooches I've seen in ages. Made from old book pages they are beautiful in a soft, quiet and elegant-but-still-slightly-nerdish way - classy but still casual. A lot of the time I am a total scruff-pot, unbrushed hair and old jumpers and 100% jewellery-free... but when I scrub up neat I love to wear brooches and I just could not resist this one:
I bought another which is supposedly a gift for someone but I can picture it finding its way into my jewellery box and onto my cardigans, hehe.

365 / 87 - stock control and mess control

Yes, you guessed it, I spent yesterday organising things. I did a little bit of sewing and cutting out of pattern pieces but mostly I spent my "crafty" time reorganising my systems as the more stuff I make the harder it is to keep it all tidied away neatly (the woes of not having my own workroom).

I reorganised the boxes and tins I use to store my finished items, and packed everything away into little plastic bags which I swiped from work last month when they were just going to be thrown away. I used to have two boxs which were full of "currently listed" stuff and then another which was for as-yet-unlisted items or excess stock (spare stuff, basically). I was forever forgetting whether or not I had another of x in stock or rummaging around trying to find the purple version of y ... so now everything is neatly stored together. All the tea cup pins together, all the cloud pins together, and so forth. Really not the most exciting thing to be reporting, but I think it is a good step towards me becoming more efficient and making less mess.

I've also decided to use the little bags to organise my small works in progress - so when I cut out lots of pieces to make a batch of brooches I can tuck them all in a bag together and they won't get lost or dusty or whatever. I have so many odd little wips they start to take over the place after a while, and now they can go in a box, hurrah! Similarly, I have so many different thread colours on the go at once - and my main thread storage drawers are in another part of the house - I end up with reels of thread on every available surface and I tend to lose the colour I need. So now my "current" threads are all in a drawer pinched from the main unit (the ever popular IKEA drawers, beloved of crafters everywhere). Here are some of the bags (with works in progress and also pattern pieces) and the lovely drawer of thread:
So, yes, very dull stuff but gosh it feels good to see it all tidy. I am not anywhere near having my workspace(s) and supplies organised how I want them, but a few more little steps like this and I may be there soon.

Off the wagon again, and a new project

No craftiness whatsoever yesterday. This is the reason:
I should have taken a photo of the whole room to show the devestation wreaked upon my kitchen by this work, but frankly it is a bit embarrassing and I'm slightly concerned it might give me flashbacks should I see this blog post in the future...

Due to some slightly dodgy fixes we were given the magic of heating and hot water yesterday, most miraculous. I now have a burning desire to clean the whole house from top to bottom and never let anything get dirty ever again (how long will this last, I wonder? haha). Obviously I cannot actually clean until all the work is finished (a day or two yet) so I have been satisfying my desire to clean up by tidying the spare room and having a bit of a clear-out, pushing crafting right off the schedule.

I am generally attempting to buy less stuff (Etsy things sooo do not count!) and also to rid myself of a LOT of my possessions, so I love a good clear-out. We have regular "Free Stuff parties" (friends and neighbours all have a clear-out, and everyone swaps stuff with the leftovers going to charity shops) and I have lots of things like clothes stashed under the bed to test if I ever actually wear them...

But it can be hard sometimes to clear out lots of things at once, so I have started a little project where every day leading up to Christmas (your traditional time for buying lots of things) I will find something to give away - either to a friend or to a charity shop. I started at the end of October and I have been really surprised by how easy it has been so far - finding ONE book or ONE item of clothing or ONE bit of jewellery or whatever has so far been painless, and the pile they make all together is quite marvellous. I would highly recommend it!

Crafting 365 / 34 - distractions from the task at hand

So yesterday I was determined, with 20 more of the felt discs to sew together, to push right through and devote as many hours as possible out of my Sunday to sewing round in little circles. But as is unfortunately the way of things, life rather got in the way...

First up, a very strange thing happened. I did my usual hour of housework and actually felt like doing more! Very odd stuff. Obviously, it is never a good idea to stop cleaning if you actually want to clean ... so I carried on cleaning. I decided that the house needed a really good vacuum, too, as we've only been doing one room here and one room there when there's been crumbs or whatever to hoover up. So I started vacuuming, and the Hoover (it is an actual Hoover) started melting!! Not good. It had got blocked up inside somehow and overheated and lo: melting plastic, but luckily no fire (phew). So there was that.

Then to cheer myself up I decided to use the nice organic butter I bought the day before to bake some brownies (yum yum brownies, yum). Halfway through this (butter and chocolate melting in a pan, me with the scales weighing out the dry ingredients) I discovered that my dry food cupboard was infested. Ewww. I managed to borrow some ingredients from a neighbour & finish the brownies but I had to chuck out a LOT of food (including 5 bags of flour, and assorted sugars and dry pulses) as it was all full of little crawling things. I still feel itchy just thinking about it. Horrible stuff. The brownies were rather nice though, very nice with a cup of tea when I threw up my arms in despair at all this domestic chaos and went for a quiet sit down in the other room...

Finally turning my attention to my sewing pile, the urge took me to start making some dragonfly brooches (on my to do list for just ages, since I made one for seaurchin in a swap earlier in the year) so I made a start on those... and only after dinner that evening did I actually do what I'd meant to all day and actually curl up with my sewing box and crack on with those circles. I managed 9 in all, they're pictured here with the in-progress dragonflies...
... in the middle of this large repetetive job it was a nice little break making the dragonflies (so comparatively small & speedy!). I am very looking forward to adding their sequins etc.