Month: June 2014

All hats, all the time…

Felt cloche hat

Okay, that’s not strictly true, and I don’t even really know what I’ve been doing with myself over the last fortnight apart from working a lot and feeling a bit ill, but I have just finished a little flurry of hats, so here they are.

The one above is the colour of a perfect cup of builder’s tea, trimmed with gold lace that took weeks and weeks to arrive from China. I won’t be ordering that lace again, but I’m making good use of it while I’ve got it. This one in particular is very pretty, and I have enough left over for at least one more hat.

Felt cloche hat

This one’s more the colour of coffee, or really good dark chocolate. This is also lace-from-China, which I’ve altered slightly from its original form. It had a segmented piece at the top which is designed to have ribbon woven through it, but in this case I preferred it without. The loopy bits are all couched down securely to the crown of the hat, but the teardrop shapes are left loose to allow a bit of movement.

I’m hesitant to describe these two hats as “Steampunk” just because they happen to be brown and gold, but perhaps they’ll be the perfect addition to somebody’s outfit.

Felt cloche hat

I wasn’t at all sure what I was going to do with this lavender coloured felt, and then I spotted this gorgeous organic cotton lace from Lancaster & Cornish. Okay, so it’s a lot more expensive than the Chinese lace (in this particular instance, fifteen times more expensive!!), but now I’ve worked with it I’m in no doubt that it’s absolutely worth it. The quality is amazing, it’s organically produced, and to be honest it’s just plain gorgeous.

The flower embellishment is also organic – a cotton and bamboo blend from the Organic Textile Company. I have quite a lot of little scraps of this fabric left over from a dress, so I can feel a few more of these flowers coming on – perhaps as brooches.

Felt cloche hat

And this… this is what came off my new cloche block from Guy Morse-Brown. Isn’t it just gorgeous? I realise I seem to be singing my own praises here, but really it’s the hat block that does all the hard work, and Owen Morse-Brown (who makes the wooden blocks) has carved an absolute work of art. I’m in love with the asymmetrical shape, the way the crown hugs the head, and the cutaway at the back of the neck which makes it incredibly easy to wear. I’m keeping this one, and I’ll definitely be making more!

Felt cloche hat

The flowers are made from the offcuts of felt that I trimmed away from the brim, and they’re cut out with Sizzix paper punches. It’s quite hard work to hammer the punches through the thick felt – they’re not really designed for that kind of punishment – but the flowers have come out with nice clean edges. The centres are Swarovski crystals. (I’m trying not to think about how much it looks like one of those flowery swimming caps.)

The hats are all on Etsy, should you fancy a closer look.

I’m now at that awkward stage once again where I need somebody to buy a hat (or a bunch of smaller stuff from the Emporium) before I can afford to buy any more felt hoods to make new hats with. It seems unlikely that wool felt hats are going to fly off the shelves in the middle of summer, but at least it’s not as though I have a shortage of other materials to make things from in the meantime. I have some carded wool batts on order to make some felt which will hopefully be heavy-duty enough for slippers or hats, I have lots of organic cotton to turn into tunic tops, and I have plans to make a few things for myself. Summer dresses, perhaps. I certainly won’t be short of things to do!

Garden, 6am

Garden, 6am

I’ve been awake since about 4:30 in the morning, something that’s increasingly common now that I’m not taking sleeping tablets to control the fibromyalgia. I wake up (this morning thanks to the entire dawn chorus taking place in the forsythia outside the bedroom window), and I don’t go back to sleep again. Today, after having a bit of a grumble about Nature on facebook, I decided to go outside and have a bit of a look at it.

Garden, 6am

This wild corner is in the top right of the picture above. The garden’s about 30 metres (120 feet) long, and this is standing right at the back (underneath the blackthorn tree), looking towards the house. It might look like an overgrown mess, but this is my favourite part of the garden at the moment. We’re letting it run completely wild, with just a little attempted management of the overgrown lawn grass. I need to look up when you’re actually supposed to mow a meadow, because that’s what I want this to become.

Garden, 6am

Who’s been sleeping in my bed?! We haven’t seen any evidence of foxes in the garden at all, but this squashed patch of long grass is there every morning, which suggests somebody’s been sleeping here. Could be a fox, could be a cat, could be a party of hedgehogs. Who knows? Whoever it is, I’m pleased we’ve got company.

Garden, 6am

The tiny apple tree (not even five feet tall and only a couple of years old) is absolutely bursting with braeburns. Last year we harvested them too soon, worried about losing them in the storms. This year it’s going to be even harder to wait, having watched them grow all year!

Garden, 6am

The tiny pear tree (ditto) is also looking great. The pears had all gone before we moved in, so we don’t know what they’re going to be like, or quite when they’ll be ripe. And who knew that pears grow upside down?!

Garden, 6am

The enormous hypericum is just starting to come into flower, along with some of the other long-neglected shrubs. I can’t wait to see it in full bloom, it’s going to be fantastic.

Garden, 6am

Is this a type of geranium? I’m not sure. I haven’t got around to identifying anything that’s growing in the wild patch. Whatever it is, it’s all over the place at the moment, along with lots of campions and the last of the garlic mustard. The bees are loving it, even at this time of the morning, and so am I.

Improving on Me-Made May

28/5/14

You may have spotted that I didn’t post very many photos from my Me-Made May escapades. This is partly because I mostly look like some kind of strange triangular bag lady (I like layers, and most of my clothes are comfortable-shaped), and partly because it turns out that I only wear about four outfits, over and over again, with very minor variations. How boring!

28/5/14

Towards the end of the month I made a last-ditch effort to wear some of the smarter clothes in my wardrobe, only to discover that when I put them on… well, suddenly they’re not so smart any more. This dress is now very firmly on the “waiting to be chopped up and turned into something that doesn’t look like a giant floral sack” pile. There’s just no point in wasting time and fabric making clothes that require waist shaping in order to look nice, when waist shaping isn’t something that I actually have myself. Although, having said that, my other vintage dress (also made from an Advance size 18½ pattern without alterations) fitted really well and looked lovely!

17/5/14

See? I still don’t have a waist, but the dress looks smart, not like a huge great cushion’s attacked me while I wasn’t looking. I think this is partly down to the fact that this dress has a smooth skirt rather than miles of pleats. (Also: not a selfie, vintage-style foundation garments, not layered with t-shirts and bloomers and giant boots on account of it being freezing at work.)

Lace crop top

Sadly, even if I did have the budget to wear lovely things from Kiss Me Deadly every day, the fibromyalgia simply wouldn’t allow it. But, the whole Me-Made May experiment did reveal that I am very much lacking in the Me-Made underwear department – despite the fact that I spent plenty of time and money on the London College of Fashion’s Structured Lingerie course back in 2011. I bought this lace when I came back, in a fit of enthusiasm, and it’s been untouched in a box ever since, along with a metre and a half of pink, and four metres of a prettier-than-it-sounds grey. This particular lingerie is about as unstructured as you can get (no wires, no fastenings, nothing), but I used a lot of the skills I learned on the course to make it. The pattern itself is from Sewing Lingerie, a Singer reference book, where it’s described as a “sleep bra”.

The wide stretch lace that I used to make this is actually really affordable, and comes in lots of different colours and patterns. If this one (and the pink one I’ve just finished, and the two or three grey ones I’m going to make next) turn out to be comfortable, I can feel a drawer full of these coming on before Me-Made May next year!

Pleasure doing business…

Well, most of the time.

Today I woke up to discover outrage all over the Etsy forums, because a percentage of shops have been enrolled in an “experiment” without any prior warning. Okay, I’m sure it says somewhere in the T&Cs that we’ve all agreed to this kind of fiddling about as part of our contract with Etsy, but in this particular case a bit of advance notice would have been nice. What Etsy have done is to remove all information about shipping costs until after an item has been added to the shopping cart. This is resulting in loss of sales (who wants to faff about adding things to a cart to find out information that should be part of the listing?), and for European shops, anyone involved is now in breach of EU distance selling regulations by not displaying their international shipping fees up front. There’s no way of opting out, no way of changing the situation, we just have to ride it out until Etsy deems the experiment finished and hopefully reinstates the shipping information!

I have to admit that I’ve been thinking about moving away from Etsy for a while… not because of any problems I’ve had with Etsy (until this morning!), more because I’d like to have my own store with its own design and branding, which I can’t have on Etsy. One of the strongest points about the stalls I’ve done with the Emporium in Real Life has been the branding, and that’s lost amongst all the identical-looking stores on Etsy. I’m doing what I can with my product photography, but it’s not brilliant, and I’d like my branding to be stronger.

I’ve used Big Cartel before, and I’m quite tempted to try them again – although with around 100 products in the store at any one time, their fees will be more than I’m paying on Etsy. But then I can do things like adding the different styles of zipped pouches under one listing and still retain inventory control of each different print, which is something you can’t do on Etsy. The shipping information is set up in the same way, which I like – you simply set a profile for each object. This works well, as it allows me to charge exact shipping fees, whether it’s £1 for a sewing pattern or £12 for a hat.

I’ve also been looking at Shopify – a friend has recently set up a lovely gift shop on this platform, and my husband’s using it to launch a board games shop very soon. The fees again are more than I’m currently paying on Etsy (and Shopify’s lowest monthly fee is only 99 cents less than Big Cartel’s highest!), so I’d need to be sure I was definitely going to be making enough sales to be able to cover the cost of the fees. On Etsy you pay by item rather than by month – so at least if you don’t sell anything (depressing thought), you don’t pay anything. The other down side of Shopify is that you can’t specify shipping per individual product, you have to set a flat rate based on the overall total of the order, or by the weight of the products. This simply doesn’t work when Royal Mail calculate their prices by size as well as weight – hats aren’t heavy, but they’re big, and I want them insured!

Shopify is perhaps the most professional-looking of the three though, and allows a great deal of customisation. It would also allow me to import and maintain this blog, which would be a bonus! Both Shopify and Big Cartel would allow me to use a custom domain name if I wanted to, and they both have integration which allows direct selling on Facebook. What they don’t have, however, is the huge community surrounding them which is the biggest benefit of Etsy. Admittedly I don’t get too involved in teams and forums and groups, but the fact remains that almost two-thirds of traffic to my current shop comes from within Etsy itself. And that would simply disappear if I disappeared from Etsy, which means I’d have to do an awful lot more work on marketing – which frankly is not my forté. I want to spend my time making stuff, not running a marketing campaign to sell it.

I don’t do very many stalls in Real Life, and my products simply aren’t priced to be sold in other people’s shops, so I really need my online presence to work for me in terms of actually selling the things that I make.

If anybody has any suggestions based on their own experiences, I’d be really grateful to hear them. I’m so confused right now that I don’t know what to do for the best!