Wey Hey - Giveaway!

Just as the lovely 'Swirly Arts' closes her fab Giveaway, I am opening mine - pure coincidence, there must be some ESP going on! I had planned to open my Giveaway today, but the way my week has gone it was looking a little dubious! However, it seems to have come together somehow - things happen like that sometimes.

My Giveaway is to celebrate my new range of 'home-decor' gifts which I have now dedicated my original Etsy shop to. I did of course have to open a new shop to accommodate my 'tweedie-plush', well they really needed their own space! It's also just to celebrate being 'allowed' to share my crafty ideas, hiccups, and day-to-day goings on in my home in the Hebrides. It really does give me a lot of pleasure, so here's a little thank-you for my readers.

The second pic above shows the tweed in a better light, as it's pure black tweed with a white check weave - really pretty! The weaver I bought it from gave me a little extra as it was all he had left, so I'm going to share it with you, hehe! The mini-cushion is about 25 cm square with a sweet little bow feature in the corner - you can probably see a better image of one in my shop.

To win the Giveaway just leave a comment saying what you would do with this little cushion - it's more of a decorative one because of its smaller size. Hope you will join in the fun - you can always have a little browse in my new Etsy shops, but its not a condition to the Giveaway!

I will be busy with a Gallery Shop order I received yesterday, for the next week or so and with my hubby being on holiday too, so may not be blogging much for the next week or two. I will leave the Giveaway open for 2 weeks until midnight (European time) Wednesday 12th August. Anyone in the world can enter - spreading a little tweedy love around the globe!

I will either use the 'Random Number Thingummy' thing or just pull the numbers out of a hat - whichever seems most appropriate! Have fun!

Bye for Now :)

P.S. I will announce the winner on Thursday 13th August.

When the Going Gets Tough . . .

Who needs a dishwasher?

. . . the Tough get baking!! What on earth to do with an eight year old and a fourteen year old son for the whole of the Summer break is completely beyond me - when in doubt, make cake! Out came the packet mix today, after the arguments between playstations and TV were bringing me to the edge of insanity and the realisation that I had achieved nothing whatsoever of any value.

Betty Crocket's cake mix - quick fix for 'school holidays' insanity syndrome (doesn't help the dieting though!!)

At least you can 'see' a cake and it symbolises that you have actually achieved something, even if it was from a packet. It sure did rise though - goodness knows what was in the ingredients! 'Teenage Son' with the exquisite taste buds did confirm however that is tasted like 'packet mix' - that boy!!

I had hoped to get organised for my Giveaway today but as you can see we went a little 'off course' from the proposed schedule - hopefully by the weekend I will be sorted! Kids - sheeesh!

Tell Me to Stop!

HELP! I can't stop crafting!! Two projects on the go yesterday - first one, these pincushions in this fab Kokka print. I couldn't resist the cute London-inspired print. They're both in the new shop.

Next, I was having a wee look at some oddments of fabric lying together and trying to think what to do with them. I'm always looking for ideas to use up my oddments, and these were just too pretty to ignore. I was thinking of flowers of some kind, a brooch possibly, I eventually came up with this rather crazy multicoloured flower!

I faffed around with it for a while before thinking that it could really be applied to any project as an embellishment, or added to an existing item eg. cushion, bag, scarf, hat, etc as a fun and funky 'tweedie' adornment. I've been working on a bit of packaging for it this morning as a craft accessory gift. The centre is one of my own fabric buttons.

Mad, bizarre, fun or funky, I'm not sure which but it's ready to go into the 'fun' shop, when I get time to list it. Would YOU use this 'tweedie' madness on one of your projects? I'd love to know! It's approximately 4.5 inches across (30 mm button), and definitely not for a shrinking violet type of crafter! A bold statement, I'd say!

Off to do the rest of my housework now - my craft area may be tidy but, er, um, the rest, well - better horse on!! I have to make my Giveaway prize yet - Eeeks!

Bye for Now!

Charming!

Well, I can honestly say that I'm back on the 'crafting wagon'! My crafting area is all nice and tidy and as one of my nice commentors remarked, I would probably find lots of crafting goodies to inspire me in the process. And she was right! Some crafting supplies I had completely forgotten about reared their heads, from 'way back when'.

I was going to show you pics of my nice tidy storage area but I had so many photographs that I had to delete some off my camera - so you'll just have to take my word for it!! As I tend to craft in different parts of the house, this area is more for storage than actual crafting so it's not nearly as pretty as some of my fellow crafter's spaces! Anyhow, it's perfectly adequate, as long as I keep it tidy!

Anyway, it's all had the effect of blowing any cobwebs anyway, both literally and metaphorically speaking! I got some lovely crafting supplies in the post this week which launched me into making some new products. Some metal 'swivel clips' arrived which enabled me to make some 'Bag Charms' which I've fancied doing for a while. A little miniature butterfly 'softie' gave me the idea of making them - I then decided to make minatures of a whole lot of my 'Tiny-tweedies' soft toys and was really pleased with the results. Here they are:

They are quite tiddly at about 3 inches in size. I just redrew my original designs and they seemed to transfer remarkably well to their new, smaller versions. I've added some cute tartan ribbon to attach the swivel clip to the bag charms. This is the first day of my 'holiday break' proper, though you wouldn't guess!

I've added the four shown above to my Etsy shop tonight (the Teddy Bear one is personalisable by the way). No sooner had I added them, than I got word that I had been featured in this lovely blog here. Jill is a fellow Scottish crafter and I was quite delighted when she told me of her feature. So quite a productive day all round.

Sorry, my posts seem to be very business/shop-focused at the moment - it's just that I don't really have the time to blog about all the other daily goings on with my boys on their school hols. I'm still hoping to do a giveaway perhaps mid-week to celebrate my new Etsy shop . . . Oh, and all that tidying and sorting now too!!

Bear with me!

(Free Worldwide Shipping on my 'bag charms' by the way - OK, enough 'business talk'!!)

Trying to find . . . my creative space

. . . it's in there somewhere, I just know it is!!

. . . or in here?

. . . what about in here?

I'm tidying my crafting storage area this week - I know it doesn't look like it, but I am!

NO CRAFTING till I'm done - that's the rules :) More creative spaces over at kootoyoo's cool place!

Felt Matters

Felt really does matter - when I'm not dreaming of tweed, I'm dreaming of felt, well not quite, but . . .

. . . I'm being incredibly boring 'blogwise' and perhaps otherwise, as I'm putting a lot of my energies into tidying up my crafting space this week. I've told myself quite firmly that there will be NO CRAFTING until I do this!! I'm quite impressed with myself that I seem to have got on top of things at last, probably because I made the decision to bring a halt to certain aspects of my craft business this month.

It's amazing how actually enjoyable this can be when you get into 'the mode'. I took a ridiculous amount of photographs so I thought I'd start with my felt pile.

Sorry, a bit of a squidged shot of my felt sorting!

I've sorted it (again!!) into (1) printed felt, (2) acrylic felt and (3) wool or wool-mix felt. I keep my acrylic felt mostly for paper-craft. The last pile is my wool-mix felt - my precious pile! I have various types/qualities of felt in this pile, but it's used predominantly for my toy-making projects. I haven't done much with my printed felt apart for the odd embellishment here and there.

Some of my wool felt is from Japan - this is my very, very precious stash as I've never been able to find it since (I got it on E-bay), some I get on http://www.myriadonline.co.uk/ which has lovely 100% wool felt in fab colours. I have also got some from http://www.fredaldous.co.uk/ which is specifically for toy-making - both great sites for toymaking in one form or another.

More pictures soon - I might reserve them for 'My Creative Space' on Thursday - if you can take any more!!

Let the Listing Commence!

One of my 'beach-balls' which I listed on Etsy over the weekend.

I've been busy over the weekend listing items on my new Etsy shop 'Tweedplush'. I've quite a lot of stock to go through, some of which I'd already photographed and some not! So it's quite a big job, but one I can do in dribs and drabs through the holiday break. I am enjoying the idea of listing/selling items which I actually have in stock as opposed to making all of my items to order, which can be a bit more stressful!

It's great to know that with my two Etsy shops now clearly defined, I can go ahead and create and list to my heart's content!

Happy Monday!

Attack of the Mutant Zombie Coconut Monster

The boys and I decide to crack open a coconut I'd bought along with the weekly groceries yesterday morning. Little did we guess that I'd inadvertently bought a Mutant Zombie Coconut Monster! I must be more careful when I do my weekly grocery shop - it's a scary, dangerous world out there! Mutant Zombie Fruit and Veg are out to get us - Aaaaaaargh!

I won't say what we did with the perfectly cracked coconut halves (Teenage Son managed to crack it open into 2 exact halves) but it was quite funny!

Happy Sunday :)

Jiggling About!

Well, I have been winding down a bit this week and with my Big Sis and her lovely gals home on their hols we have been spending some fun time with them and the extended family in general! In between time I've been 'jiggling about' a bit with my websites - taking a break from custom orders has given me a wee bit of space to think about new products and how to incorporate them into my online shops.

My Etsy shop has now been dedicated to my 'home-decor' gifts which I hope to continue to make. Here's one of my 'mini-cushions' which I designed to tie-in with the draught excluders with the same bow feature - I was pleased how it turned out and it's a nice, compact size to make a decorative feature for a living room or bedroom.

I will be adding other items such as fabric buttons, pincushions etc to this shop - it's my 'grown-up' site now! Don't panic - I have not abandoned my 'tweedie-softies'! Far from it, I have decided to set up a second Etsy shop completely dedicated to them - this will be my fun, creative space! Well, I can't spend all day making cushions, I'm a 'creative type' you know!

I've called my second shop 'Tweed Plush' and it's all ready and set up waiting for me to add lots of yummy, tweedy softies - Hurray! Let the listing commence, and the creativity oooze out! I have lots of stock to add here so this may be a job for over the summer hols - here's to creativity!

With all these new changes, I'm feeling a 'giveaway' coming on to celebrate - perhaps a little Harris Tweed 'mini-cushion'. I will try and get this together over the Summer break as a bit of a thankyou for my 'bloggie-readers' for putting up with my creative ramblings and my 'sometimes-wobbly' attempts at running my little 'tweedie-business'. My blog has become a big part of this and I really appreciate it!

Back to holiday 'family time' now - Cheerio an Drasda!

Winding Down a Bit

The last few days have been more about winding down a bit, enjoying some lovely family visitors who are on holiday, and in general taking a step back from the pressures of trying to succeed at my little creative business. I've decided not to do any online custom orders this month, and will be concentrating on selling locally (Art Gallery Shop) and perhaps adding stock to my Etsy shop.

Mostly, I will be crafting as and when it fits around family commitments over the school holidays, and it feels pretty good to say that!

We munched on some of this lovely watermelon yesterday as my nieces and nephews ran around our house in the sunshine - happy days :)

I did add another of my draught excluders to my Etsy shop and am toying with making a few more over the summer break, as an alternative to my 'softies' creations - it feels good to go in a slightly different direction, in a very relaxed way, of course - hehe!

This is a much slimmer line, shorter version suitable for your average sized home and is light enough to make a lovely gift too - I was pleased with it when I saw it wrapped up and looking pretty. It's nice to use local tweed/Harris Tweed on a larger scale, although this has to be reflected in the price of course. I would like to be in the position where I'm supporting our local weavers by making larger pieces like this - we'll see how it all pans out!

Back to making a few more 'tiny-tweedies' for the Gallery shop over the next few days, in between enjoying ourselves of course!

Have a happy Sunday!

Juggling my creative space . . . !

"If you let me do an hour of my sewing, we'll make some cakes later".

Plenty crafting going on, but I thought the cakes were more fun! (Jane Asher's packet mix, by the way).

Bye for Now!

Guitar Hero!

. . . been having a bit of fun making this 'softie' guitar over the last couple of days, after being nudged by a family friend to make one. It was a fun project and I'm now on a second one in a different plaid/check tweed. I'm planning to make a set of three in readiness for the Hebridean Celtic Festival which starts on the 15th July, next week. I like these spontaneous 'tweedie' happenings, as a result of a little nudge in the right direction! 'Teenage Son' was on hand to give technical direction where required : )

Sorry!

It's another sunny day here in the Outer Hebrides, with a bit of a sea breeze just for comfort! As the sign says, I won't be doing much crafting today and over the weekend. Not just because of the sunny weather, but the backlog of 'stuff' I let build up in the run-up to the last craft fair - well, something had to go!

We're now in school summer holiday mode, so if my posts are a bit sporadic that's why! Not that I think we'll be going very far afield. Joke: "How do you get a Lewis man to go on holiday? Sabotage his fishing rods??" Hmmmm - perhaps not!

Maybe I should take shots of this sign in various sunny locations around the Western Isles - I can see how that could get really irritating though! Anyway it's the school holidays, so the heat wave is bound to come to an end soon!!

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are!

my creative space . . .

My creative space this week comprises of me drooling over these two sets of fabric you see in my photograph - and they both make me very happy! I mentioned in my previous post about finding a local weaver who is selling his own tweed (as opposed to through a tweed-mill), and I was delighted to get some of this tweed from him in the post, a couple of days ago.

The Matryoshka fabric came in the post from Japan to replenish my stock of it - I got a warm fuzzy glow from getting both fabrics within days of each other. They both came with a nice friendly handwritten note - one difference being that one came from Japan, and the other came from a village about 20 miles from where I live - I thought that was kinda cute! I love the juxtaposition of the two fabrics.

My boys are on their school summer break now, so I won't get further than drooling over these (off to dental appointments, hair appointments, etc). Never mind, the sense of anticipation is almost as enjoyable : )

Kootoyoo is on her hols but I thought I'd carry on with the weekly ritual!