let the countdown begin...

I've applied for a stall at an arts and crafts market in Leeds, if I'm successful then I only have about 3 weeks to get myself ready. Nervousssss! I want to make bunting and other such decorations.

This morning I checked my etsy and I had almost 300 views on one of my owls which is completely out of proportion with all my other items (I'm very lucky to hit 50 views usually) so I googled myself (saaaaaaad) and there's a website called stylehive which is featuring said owl. YAY! It's so exciting! I've never come across someone talking about me before apart from on anorak forums after indietracks. It's very exciting. Onwards and upwards. It also motivated me to post some new badges up on etsy today despite wanting to save them all up for the stall. I've gone for a slightly different style on my photos.....



I'm not sure how effective it is but a change is as good as a holiday =)

bonnie wee scotland

I'm back from a short cottage-sitting holiday in Scotland. It was idyllic...so so pretty. And we dog-sat the loveliest golden retriever. I'm a cat person but I completely fell in love with her. I feel inspired.

In badge news, I've decided to start making a couple of larger items with the hope that they'll fill a stall better and also make a bit more money. I sent off my cassettes and ipods to john at wiaiwya =) and the lovely Liz from The School wants me to send her some badges for her to sell at gigs she puts on in Cardiff. Woo! Here are some of the "mixtape" badges for wiaiwya...





I've made some cards and I'm super super pleased with how they look all packaged up, I'll post photos at some point soon to show them off.

xx

Do you want to work in C and A 'cause that's what they expect...

I am still jobless. But still inspired by everything around me and still SO excited about the wonderful world of felt.

I have new to do's....learn how to do "real" felting with raw wool and needles, finish my batch of mixtapes and ipods THIS WEEK for wiaiwya and post them off, polish off my packaging skills so that I have nicely uniform items to post off to etsians.

I have excitingggg newssssss. I emailed a bunch of people about craft fairs and YAY there's an art and craft fair in Leeds every two weeks and it's 25pounds a stall and yay yay yay. In around three weeks there is a tea dance themed event and I really really want to be ready to sell by then so that I can bake up some cakes and set up a really cute table of teaparty themed items and wow I'm just so excited I can't even find a full stop. It does mean that maybe I'll have to abandon etsy a little bit for a while. I think I'll aim for listing one new item on etsy every three days and dedicate the rest of my time to filling a stall with felt wonders.

xxx

night time musings

I can't sleep. This blog is constituted of the nocturnal ramblings of a tired bored panda. I can only apologise. I suspect that I'm already making little sense and I'm only three sentences in.

Well, since joining etsy I have begun foraging far deeper into the wonderful online world of craft blogs and creative websites than ever before. I'm intrigued and delighted, and above all massively inspired, by what I've found. Etsy itself is so so useful both in browsing through other peoples' shops, and the storque area which acts as a gateway to outsiders blogs and sites, and the forums where everyone is super nice and super helpful.

During my first adventures into the craft blogosphere I've become fascinated by gocco prints and I want to buy a gocco machine. I did a little research and found out that a gooco is a self contained printing machine made in Japan. This makes me love it more. Anything which sits in most Japanese households should sit in mine. It seems a pretty easy system, basically a less fiddly version of a screenprinting machine. You take a photocopied image, put it in, it flashes and burns the image onto a disposable screen, you put the ink on the screen, and press it onto the paper/fabric where you want it to go. Very poorly described, but just take my word it seems a) not too complex and b) very exciting. Ohhhh I'm going to throw caution to the wind and try some old fashioned prints cutting out potatoes and see if I can create anything nice looking on paper. Not that I'll ever abandon felt.

My favourite new found lands in the wonderful world of blogging are

http://decor8blog.com/ which has really nice, really useful, and really interesting to read blogs. and also so much inspiration from all over the internet. and it's such a huge blog once you start clicking on the links...from advice on choosing a creative life to looking at inspiration and other peoples' blogs and etsy items.

www.threadbanger.com is again just a really fun to read, inspirational, and informative site.

And I have almost hundreds of new favourite blogs that are just plain nice to look at. Maybe it's just that I'm sinking deeper into unemployed philisophical bum status, but I'm finding the world so inspirational right now.

My favourite thing to buy from charity shops is cheap books. They are just SO expensive new. I'm at "home" in (my mum's home) in kendal for a few days and I've been going through books so quickly. I love it. It keeps my brain alive. I read Orlando by Virginia Woolfe, I thought I'd read it before but maybe I didn't finish it because the story seemed familiar until halfway through and then it was fresh as a daisy. I really enjoyed it, she has such a lovely and funny style of writing in it. Lovely. I wish that I had a decent vocabulary. I wont list the other books, but I've also started a penguin classic version of Hurry on Down by John Wain. I love it. The cover has orange srips down the sides and when I was on the train I noticed that it matched the train ticket I was using for a bookmark =) What a design classic. And the book itself is so easy to read and entertaining, it's a similar style and subject matter to Lucky Jim by Kingley Amis which I also love. So funny.

Okay bed tiiiiiiime

I have some exciting news...at indietracks I was asked by John from wiaiwya to make some badges to sell as merch for the label. I'm so excited by this because I've been thinking for a while how nice it'd be to join up with people in the music world on projects. I love that I've sold badges at clubnights I genuinely LOVE, and gigs I'm passionate about (indietracks being the most exciting). I might even be makng some mini rose melberg's...wow!

I've begun attempts at wiawya stuff and these are my two first mixtapes....



This is how my etsy is looking...I'm going to try to add at least one item a day for a week or two just to see what kind of success I get. I'm still only on 5 sales on etsy but I've also sold a few through myspace so I'm definetely not giving up on the internet to use as a tool for selling.



My current obsession is colourful stationary. Look at these tickets...(but what on earth would I use them for?!)


these are from schOOLLOcker on etsy.

xxxx