rainbow stacks

I've been a busy bee....cutting out 4" squares to turn into some more felt-rainbow-freebie-packs, which I have been adding to orders placed in any of my online shops throughout out the month of July

AND I've been looking through a new (to me) button wholesale catalogue....if all goes to plan I'm going to place an order on Monday!

felt washing experiments

I cut two pieces of felt, exactly the same size.

...popped one in the washing machine (40 degree wash with powder and softener + a duvet cover, can't just wash one bit of felt can I!) and it came out looking like this ::

haha!

once it had dried I layed it on the other sheet to check for shrinkage ::

...it shrunk....a lot!!

BUT what a lovely texture ::

Next I cut another two pieces and this time I hand washed one piece (with special kind-to-wool washing liquid, in lukewarm water) and once it dried it looked like this::

It shrank a bit and the texture changed to this ::

ooohhhh the possibilities of newly-washed-chunky-lumpy-felt....

*this whole experiment was inspired by a customer, thanks Net :-)

drawers

John is working away this week....'twas only supposed to be one night, now it's three :-(... but before he left he gave my drawers their final coat of paint...I've put some fabric covered card in the label holders and covered the bottoms with shiny white card....all I need now is to fill it up :-)
John says there is still a bit of tidying up to do, scraping excess paint off the handles etc etc but I think it looks great!

Even though it seems that the minty green glossy paint I picked is very hard to photograph!

link goodness

This morning I was reading through my bloglines and came across a few interesting things::

First of all my friend Claire has organised a swap!

And it's a robot swap!

BRILLIANT!!!!

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Then I read this post about charging for postage and all that that entails

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Then I saw that Heather Bailey had opened a shop selling her loveliness

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and THEN I saw a post about needles and wondered how I didn't know about needles as I use them A LOT!!

and because I can't help myself, here's another picture of Christmassy Things!!

Blue & Green should never be seen?

This morning the post man delivered 2 parcels....one from America which contained this ::

and one from down the road which had lots of lovely new tissue to wrap orders up in ::

It wasn't intentional but they are nicely colour co-ordinated!

and for those people who say Blue & green should never be seen...you're wrong!

:-)

Nearly there...

Today I'm putting the final sewing touches to a few more Christmas Ideas and then I'll be all ready to start designing my Christmas Wholesale Catalogue!

I've never done this before...ordinarily if people are interested I use my website as a catalogue and email prices as and when.

This year I'm trying my hardest to be more pro-active about wholesale....the next hurdle will be getting out and about and trying to send the catalogues to shops who would like to stock my designs...anyone know any great shops that are crying out for paper-and-string things???

If you have any suggestions they shall be kindly received...and if the recommendation leads to an order you can be sure they'll be a little Christmas something in the post as a Thank You :-)

Early Morning Blogging

John had to get up at 5.30 this morning to get ready for work and when he left at 6am he woke me to say goodbye and for some *crazy* reason I decided to get up too!

I've spent a while cropping and filing photos so I thought, why not blog now, rather than later!

Last night I put the finishing touches to some Robins, this time with a more natural colouring :-)

and some roly-poly penguins too

I tried to add smiley faces to the penguins but Beaks and Smiles do not go together!