Beaded bracelet from a friend & a new kit I'm working on

I've had a couple of nice pressies this week for no reason other than I just have some lovely, thoughtful friends. A very tasty parcel of American sweeties arrived from one friend and I'm doing a good job in demolishing those before they melt in this humid heat!

Met up with another old friend and she makes beautiful and very complex beaded jewellery and she had made me this little beauty.

As for me well I'm just putting the finishing touches to a new craft kit, it's going to be the Vintage Caravan Lovers - craft inspiration kit.

It centres around some rubber stamps I had made from my caravan drawings.

I'm quite a fan of using rubber stamps in unusual ways and it struck me this could be a very versatile design for creating mixed media pictures or pieces of embellished fabric for use in crafts as well as the traditional stamping on stationery.

The kit will have all you need to get stamping, it will also have some of my printed vintage camping fabric, natural cottons, linens and embroidery floss for sewing, some paper items and a small mystery bag of embellishments. I will include a little idea sheet to help the creative process and then hopefully people's imaginations will take over and lots of lovely caravanny things will be created.

Valentine brooches & kits

The cold snap continues but I'm looking ahead to February, the month of love and peace. I am just preparing some little wooden flower and heart brooches for listing on Folksy.

I've decided to produce the brooches as ready made or in kit form. 

To make the ready made ones a bit extra special, as they will carry a higher price tag to a kit, I have made some little Love Letter pouches from cotton to present them in.

Writing instructions for kits always seems to take forever. I think these are fairly simple to make, a bit like join the dots but you've got to make the description fool proof to cover all abilities.

Here's what you get in the kit, now I just need to make some nice packaging for it to go in.