Nice Things in the Post

I've had a horrid cold for a couple of days and have consequently slacking with the blogging - sorry! A quick post before I go wrap myself up in blankets again and get some sleep, to mention the lovely post I got this morning:
On the right: adorable little boxes of tea from a sweet customer who was apparently dead chuffed to get my "congratulations you bought my 1,100th Etsy item!" gift parcel and wanted to say thankyou. Such a nice surprise! (I like to send out a bundle of freebies with milestone sales - the 1,200th will be the next one if you fancy trying to snag one for yourself...)

On the left: the gorgeous butterfly stamp cube I treated myself to from Bombus. It simultaneously satisfies my stamp-nerdishness and what I refer to as my "rubbish girl"-ness as it's just so darn pretty with all those lovely butterflies! Great customer service from the lovely Bombus, too, charming packaging (the parcel came wrapped in a map instead of brown paper) and a couple of freebies for lucky me...
... one of her fab map cards and a set of snazzy recycled envelopes; I always like a nice bit of stationery and I already have someone in mind to receive the caravan card :)

Odd and Ends

I hoard nice-looking pieces of paper. Paper with nice patterns, shiny paper, scraps of wrapping paper... I just can't throw it away! I keep it "just in case" and love spending afternoons cutting and sticking and making use of it. So I very happily spent yesterday evening cutting up lots of papery odds and ends for making more mini thankyous, including these pieces cut from wallpaper samples:
EDIT: this is the sort of thing I was making - just simple little thankyou notes to include with my orders.

Packaging and Parcels (C365, days 321&322)

Apologies for the lack of a blog post yesterday - I was planning a quiet evening of emails and blogging and other internet-y things in the evening but the boyfriend reminded me we had people coming round to dinner! Oops :)

The day before, I'd spent my evening cutting out some pictures to use for making thankyou notes (to send out with my shop orders) - this lot are taken from a 1950s childrens book, some seriously cute pictures!
Then before I was reminded about dinner, yesterday afternoon I devoted myself to packing up some orders:
(The silver packets are felt bundles wrapped in tissue paper, in case you wondered!). My week doesn't have enough of a pattern to it to have fixed shipping days, so I end up doing a bit of packaging here and a bit of posting there but I am becoming increasingly organised with my shipping system. Over the past year I have turned into a serious "postal science" nerd, boring everyone with the correct way to address mail, "interesting" (to no-one but me) facts about customs regulations, and learning exactly the right time to go to the Post Office to avoid queues (not foolproof but spot on 90% of the time).

The best laid plans... (365 days 229 - 233)

Sometimes things just don't work out how you plan them. I did a little too much last week, and rather knackered myself out... so I have had to abandon my "design a day" project (temporarily) until I am awake enough to actually, you know, design stuff!

One of the most wonderful things about this crafting lark is that I can carry on "getting stuff done" even when I am totally exhausted and crashed out on the sofa gazing into space a little gormlessly. I suffer from M.E. (most annoying) so this does happen more often than I would like, and it's always great to be able to make stuff even when I'm otherwise "useless" - not awake enough to write emails, do the washing up, etc etc.

So, thanks to my crafting 365 project instead of just watching lots of videos over the past few days I watched lots of videos and also...

... cut up a couple of vintage books (bought cheap in charity shops) to make thankyou cards for my orders. A book of birds (I love birds so much) and the most darling kids book from 1955 - check out the end paper with all the animals reading their bedtime stories. The owl is particularly awesome:
... appliqued a big batch of poppy shapes to their black backgrounds ready for making poppy brooches:... dug out some yummy vintage snap fasteners from my stash ready for a new (currently top secret) design:
... and then yesterday, after the courier showed up with my delivery of felt (all 60 colours back in stock! hurrah!), I started to make up lots of bundles of mini squares, cutting them out and wrapping them in tissue paper so they can be stored neatly until posting time:
Every time I make up a big batch of those I worry that no-one will buy them and I'll be stuck with all these parcels of felt, but I rather like felt so I wouldn't really be that upset... and it's such fantastic colour therapy making all those little rainbows.

In other news: thanks to lovely Curiosity, my pink poppy pin made an appearance on the Etsy front page at the weekend, amongst lots of UK Etsy lovelies. It snowed that weekend, but spring had sprung on Etsy at least!

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

365 / 119 - felt tip pens

So I'm still not feeling very well, curled up in lots of blankets sleeping rather a lot and watching far far far too many episodes of Project Runway than a sane person should. I'm not really awake enough for full-on craftiness but I did manage to get in some felt-tip pen action handwriting all my thankyous - 208 of them to be precise:
Oh, and I did manage to (finally) get my secret swap item finished but now I'm too ill to go to the post office. So frustrating! Ah well. Back to bed for me... zzz...

365/ 117 & 118 - sewing, schemes and sleepiness

Yesterday I wasn't feeling too well so no blogging for me! :(

The day before (Tuesday/Day 117) I was working on my final few Xmas orders, adding finishing touches and parcelling them up - one even got gift-wrapped in this fancy Paperchase paper I bought once in a sale:
As you can see I also finished some poppies so I could put them back in my shop (they'd sold out before). The box of beads was for my secret swap item, now finally finished but still not posted (sorry!).

Then yesterday (Wednesday/Day 118) as I was feeling overwhelmed by a horrible cold and generally Quite Poorly I curled up in lots of blankets and watched many an episode of Project Runway on Youtube (I have such classy taste!) and did some cutting and sticking. White card + prittstick + old hoarded pieces of gift wrap and other decorative papers = 200 little thankyou cards for sending out with my orders. The perfect project for my sleepy afternoon but I dread to think how long it will take me to use up all 200 of these!
I still need to get out the felt-tip pens and write the actual thankyous on them (they will be colour co-ordinated to the paper, because I am a bit anal about colour-matching) but it is deeply satisfying to have them all "finished". I very much want to use the next few weeks / months to build up stocks of "useful things" like thankyou-cards, business cards etc as well as my items themselves, so you should be seeing lots of pictures of batches of things...

Before all that though I need to attend to my own Christmas preparations! I've been so busy sending out orders etc that I've not written a single card (I love to send cards), wrapped a single present, put up a single decoration or baked a single festive treat (mince pies... yum...). Tsk tsk.

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