Stockings for Craft Hope

Have you heard about Craft Hope? They describe themselves as "a love inspired project designed to share handmade crafts with those who need them. It is our hope to combine our love for crafting and desire to help others into a project to make a difference around the world."

For their current project (Project 14) they're collecting homemade stockings for some of the 12,000 families that lost everything when tornadoes struck the southeastern US. The stockings will be added to holiday boxes being put together by a local charity who will distribute them to the families in November.

If you fancy making a stocking (or several) for this project, you can find all the important info about the project, the stocking requirements and the deadline HERE.

If you need some stocking inspiration, the lovely people at Lark Books are giving away three stocking projects from recent and upcoming books... including my stocking project from Fa La La La Felt!


You can download the stocking patterns HERE.

Tea Parties for a Great Cause

Regular readers will know how much I like a nice cup of tea and a tasty cake...

If you share my love of such things, you may be interested in taking part in the Blooming Great Tea Party campaign.


The tea parties are to raise funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care, a fantastic charity who provide care for poeople with terminal cancer and other illnesses in their own homes. Every £20 raised will pay for an hour of nursing care - last year's tea parties raised enough funds for 30,200 hours of care!

Want to take part? Click here to register, for more information and for lots of useful bits and bobs for your tea party like recipes, and printable invitations, donation forms, bunting, etc. (registration closes on 31st July).


P.S. the pictures in this post are of some cakes I baked a couple of years ago - for high-impact, low-effort cupcakes, nothing beats a pack of dolly mix!

Cherry Blossoms for Japan

My thoughts have been with the people of Japan this weekend.

I've decided to donate 50% of sales of my cherry blossom brooches and hairbands this week (13th-19th March) to the Japan Tsunami Appeal.


The cherry blossoms are available from my website, my Etsy shop, my Folksy shop and my DaWanda shop.


For each £10 item I will donate £5, for each £5 sale item I will donate £2.50. For the sake of simplicity I'll also be donating these amounts in £s for cherry blossom items sold via my DaWanda shop where prices are in Euros. (Update: the £5 sale items have now sold out but there are still lots of brooches & hairbands left in stock, and I will make more if they sell out).

I'll post my donation receipt on the blog next week.

Woolly Hat Day

The colder autumn weather has really kicked in this week - time to dig out all my winter woollies! I'm thinking about attempting to knit a woolly hat, and if I get my skates on I might even have it ready for Woolly Hat Day.


The first ever St Mungo's Woolly Hat Day is taking place on 22nd October. It's a fun way to raise money and awareness for a very serious issue: homelessness.

"Wear a hat for the day and donate £2, get sponsored to wear a silly hat or incorporate a hat in any way you choose to fundraise. Ask your colleagues at work or the children at school to wear a hat and make a donation." ... you could also organise a knitting event in your community, similar to the fun "flash knitting" party organised in Leicester Square last week to promote Woolly Hat Day.

If you're interested in taking part or want more information you can visit the Woolly Hat Day website or email WoollyHatDay@mungos.org

Place Your Bids...

The winners of the Upcycle Christmas competition have been announced and all the entries are now up for auction here - including my cocktail hat:All the proceeds for the auction will go to Sue Ryder Care, a fantastic charity that provides care for people living with cancer, multiple sclerosis, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, motor neurone disease, stroke and brain injury. A seriously good cause!

Update: It seems that the items in the auction have all been set to ship to the UK only. Apologies to my international readers!

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!