Been away & returned to hassles!

Why is it, (it seems) that every time I go away for a few days I return to a load of hassle!
I've been on a whirlwind trip to Skye and I come back to the central heating on the blink which equals do battle with landlord to get it sorted. And I've come back to a nightmare with a job I left for printing. On this occasion the print job is mine and fortunately not for a customer.
It was my Christmas cards which I thought I'd found a good deal with an online printer in Germany but the hassle has come at the point of delivery. The courier, DPD, claim to have attempted to deliver the parcel on 2 consecutive days but say I was out, I was definitely in, they also claim to have left a calling note but that is not the case either. Somewhere along the lines they have either gone to the wrong house or not even visited this place. The long and short of it is the parcel has now been returned to sender in Germany, the printer now wants me to pay more to have it redelivered but why should I when I was in and it was the courier who has failed to supply the goods and therefore the fault is with them.

Anyway, the battle is ongoing to get my cards back over here. Could really do with them soon as December is upon us and I thought I was doing really well this year getting my cards done early.

Some pics and notes from my trip will follow when I get on top of things.

Have a good weekend folks.

Cat festive cards & other nice new things

It seems there's no escape from Christmas things in the shops and I realised I've already bought one or two festive things and some other lovely things, mainly books, which will help with the Christmas 'making'.

I wanted to show you these lovely, simple, yet exquisite cat cards which are available at the Art & Rose Gallery in Pocklington. Art & Rose have designed and produced these cards so I think the quantities are limited, the pack has 8 cards of 4 designs.

Also from Art & Rose, this beautiful ceramic angel decoration with feathers by local artist Shirley Vauvelle. Another limited collection.
I do like to have a few new and unusual decorations each year.

Moving away from designer decorations to bargain basement decorations, I found some very nice, Scandi style bits and pieces in Wilkinsons. This little tin robin with mistletoe was only about £1.50, they also had lots of folk art hearts, reindeers etc.

I couldn't resist these socks, I will never be able to knit socks and even if I could it would take forever and not be cost effective so these were quite a nice treat from White Stuff.

I found some excellent book bargains in The Works.

Another new book is this crochet one, I think I can manage the 'easy' rated patterns!

This book was a rather unexpected surprise in a way. Following an incident in Hobbycraft which lead to me writing a letter of complaint, I was the lucky recipient of an apology from the store manager and £24 worth of vouchers for my inconvenience so I got a few nice things.

This is a new M & S coat in my favourite shade of purple, it is sort of an early Christmas pressie as family members said they would contribute to some of the cost (we'll see if my sis gets her purse out, it's usually full of moths!).

Rather annoyingly I bought the coat in Harrogate a couple of weeks ago as they didn't have my size in my M & S store, I haven't even worn it yet and what happens.... I went in my store the other day and they had lots in my size now and with £20 off the original price I paid, grrrrrr! Don't you just hate it when that happens and you've not even worn the coat yet.

Here are some crochet silks and ribbon which my folks brought me back from Spain the other week.

Final pic, a little doodle embroidery I am working on for something festive.

It looks like I've had lots of nice presents already from Santa as I look back at these photos.

Wooden disc brooches

This was a quick project that was quite nice and simple to do. Not terribly original as I've seen similar things done where you stitch onto wood and ceramics through little drilled holes but it is quite satisfying.

I bought the wooden discs in a pack of 22 from Hobbycraft (about £3) and I set about drilling the holes with my Dremel and it went through surprisingly easily, even allowing me to get quite near the edge.

I started off with simple holes around the edge and I then progressed in join the dot style to flower shapes.

It's great once you get your embroidery silk threaded through and the flower emerges.
I also stitched beads for the centres and glued on felt leaves before glueing a pin on the back. 

I'm going to be quite busy for a while but I'm planning a festive giveaway once December arrives and it may include one of these brooches, more details end of month.

New on Spoonflower & free shipping day

At 5pm GMT today Spoonflower are offering free shipping for 24hrs on all their fabric. That even includes international shipping which is great news for us here and it's a great way to try out a swatch which I believe is 8 inch sq for $5 as you can make some lovely little things with that size.
I intend to order some festive fabric and some of my camping fabric as I've just uploaded a new version in pink with a smaller pattern repeat.

http://blog.spoonflower.com/2012/11/free-shipping-day-is-coming-november-15th.html

Other Spoonflower news: I'm entering the design contest which goes live this evening. This is quite an exciting contest because it is in conjunction with Mollie Makes magazine and I think the winning fabric will be featured in a future issue.
The subject was Flight of Fancy and this was one of those competitions where you had a limited colour palette which was pre-decided. It was an odd and difficult selection of colours to work with, lemony yellow, apple green, grey & light teal which you could add black or white to.

After starting out doing a bird related design which I couldn't get to work or rather I felt it wasn't very interesting, I then changed to good old butterflies. 
I coloured some vintage butterflies in the specified palette and these I scattered over some music note paper. I also had some other designs I'd worked on in the past but not done anything with them called Flower Faces and I scattered a few of those around too. This is the result, the yellow version is in the contest, I quite liked the teal version but thought it might be a bit dark to show the details.

 Here are the Flower Faces which are in the design, I think they might surface again at some point for another design.

This was the bird design I abandoned.

And lastly, this is the new pink camping fabric which will be for sale soon once I have ordered a swatch. I was also thinking of doing a fat quarter with 4 different colour portions to give a bit of flexibility for small projects but I'm not sure I've settled on these four colours yet or whether one needs to be a bright green!

Spoonflower also do wallpaper now and wall decals.

Stock which has gone to Gallery 49

I think that is me done regards providing the galleries with some Christmas stock. I delivered these latest goodies to Gallery 49 in Bridlington last Friday.

There was a selection of brooches which I have probably shown before but these were 3 new abstract Harris Tweed ones.

I made some of the little fabric wraps which you use on your recycled baked bean cans or jam jars to make a pretty pencil pot.
I used my butterfly fabric for these:

I also did some which used my vintage memories fabric, I incorporated some embellished rubber stamped bits of fabric and the inside lining had rubber stamping too.

And the ice cream van fabric got used on one too.

With whatever time and resources I've got left, and if my hands aren't too cold for making stuff I will try and rattle out a few more things for my Folksy shop.

I've just done these Scandi style wraps and listed them as a pack of 3 in the shop.

I haven't finished my nutcracker man textile picture as I'm having trouble deciding what background to stitch him onto. These are just 2 of about 6 combinations! Hopefully I'll get him done before Christmas.

A busy week & a trip to Harrogate

A week has flown past. I ended October with a few tasty treats in the form of buns and toffee apples which I hadn't made for years.

I took a selection of festive items to the Art & Rose Gallery in Pocklington, including these Harris Tweed landscape brooches with sheep.

I think when I made the biscuit brooches it was Anne who commented they would look good on a plate with biscuits so as I had a few jammy rings I popped mine on the same plate!

I managed a quick visit to the Warhol exhibition at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull which was pretty good with lots of different work and not just the soup cans.

On Friday I went to Harrogate to the Homebuilding exhibition which was rather good. It also allowed a trip to the best coffee shop in Harrogate, Bean & Bud. Had a most delicious sandwich and cranberry and white chocolate tiffin, with you know who as company!

Had also heard about La Maison Du Cafe so popped across there for a nice Red Brick espresso too.

Look what I spotted outside a butchers in Harrogate, these wonderful Nutcrackers.

And whilst on the subject of Nutcrackers, I'm currently stitching one up for a textile picture.

I've got a busy few days stitching as I need to make another gallery drop with festive goodies by the end of the week.