Yes, it’s that time again – and pre-orders for the My Busy Week planner are now open! I’ll place the order with the printers at the end of July, which means that the planners should be ready to send out to you by the beginning of August.
Ideally I need a minimum of ten orders to make the costs of the print run viable, so please feel free to share this post with anybody who you think might be interested.
If you haven’t seen it before, the planner is designed for busy young children who like to know what’s happening when!
You could draw a shopping bag for supermarket day, pop in a sticker when it’s time for football or ballet class, or colour in the days when you go to Nursery. The planner is blank, and designed so that you can fill it in however you like!
eternal magpie My Busy Week children’s planner
The first page explains some basic ways to add information. Write in the month at the top, and number the days of the week so you can see what’s happening when. The daily columns are colour coded, so your little one might be able to understand which day is yellow before they can recognise a W for Wednesday.
There are 53 pages, all the same, to help your little one to get used to your family routine. As it’s undated, it doesn’t matter if their enthusiasm wanes – simply put it away for a while, and you haven’t wasted any pages when you decide to give it another try!
The book is spiral bound so that you can fold it over and lay it flat to look at one Busy Week at a time. The covers are sturdy gloss card, and the internal pages are made from good quality matt paper, FSC-certified, that’s nice to write on and strong enough to rub out any changes of plan.
Oh, and by the way… if you’re already subscribed to the eternal magpie monthly newsletter, you’ll have a discount code for £5 off your planner pre-order, as a little thank you for helping me to get it to the printers. Thank you!
My friend Clare (who’s a photographer) posted it on Facebook the other day, saying that their little one had been really into getting ‘5 a day’ since being given a sticker with it written on a few weeks ago. I absolutely love the bright colours and the handwriting – and the fact that it’s been helping Mum & Dad to up their game as well!
Five a day downloadable sheet, in colour
It was suggested in the comments that I could design one, so I’ve done just that!
It’s designed to match the My Busy Week planner (pre-orders close at the end of the month!), and it has options with two, three and four rows so that you can print out the pages that work best for your family. There’s also a black & white version for anyone (like me) who doesn’t have a colour printer.
I’m always thinking of different pages to add to my own diary. On the list so far are tracking how much water I drink (nowhere near enough!), and maybe some kind of chart to show all of my overlapping chronic illness symptoms. That’s definitely going to be a rather complicated one.
I will freely admit that I’ve printed out one of these five-a-day charts for myself, and stuck it to the fridge. Certainly when it comes to eating healthily, I need all the help I can get!
Yes, it’s that time again – and pre-orders for the My Busy Week planner are now open! I’ll place the order with the printers at the end of July, which means that the planners should be ready to send out to you by the beginning of August.
Ideally I need a minimum of ten orders to make the costs of the print run viable, so please feel free to share this post with anybody who you think might be interested.
If you haven’t seen it before, the planner is designed for busy young children who like to know what’s happening when!
You could draw a shopping bag for supermarket day, pop in a sticker when it’s time for football or ballet class, or colour in the days when you go to Nursery. The planner is blank, and designed so that you can fill it in however you like!
eternal magpie My Busy Week children’s planner
The first page explains some basic ways to add information. Write in the month at the top, and number the days of the week so you can see what’s happening when. The daily columns are colour coded, so your little one might be able to understand which day is yellow before they can recognise a W for Wednesday.
There are 53 pages, all the same, to help your little one to get used to your family routine. As it’s undated, it doesn’t matter if their enthusiasm wanes – simply put it away for a while, and you haven’t wasted any pages when you decide to give it another try!
The book is spiral bound so that you can fold it over and lay it flat to look at one Busy Week at a time. The covers are sturdy gloss card, and the internal pages are made from good quality matt paper, FSC-certified, that’s nice to write on and strong enough to rub out any changes of plan.
Oh, and by the way… if you’re already subscribed to the eternal magpie monthly newsletter, you’ll have a discount code for £5 off your planner pre-order, as a little thank you for helping me to get it to the printers. Thank you!
blast from the past – gothstuff light reflective bat tshirt
Way back in the early 2000s, when we started printing t-shirts, we did all of the work ourselves. We bought a heat press, and lots of rolls of flock and plastic, and printed every single t-shirt by hand. Direct-to-garment digital printing hadn’t really been invented yet, sublimation printing was in its infancy, and this light-reflective film was pretty much the height of the technology that was available to us at the time.
blast from the past – gothstuff skull & crossbones shirt and tie
The up side of printing every single garment individually was that we could offer a lot of flexibility. We quite often printed onto customers’ own t-shirts, and we also had a range of unusual-at-the-time items such as printed shirts, ties, and even underwear!
The down side of printing every single garment individually was that it took AGES. The more intricate designs took a long time to weed away the excess film, and the multi-coloured ones required several passes through the heat press. As a result, despite appearing to be successful in the numbers of t-shirts that we sold, I was never able to pay myself, and we didn’t recoup the costs of the printing kit until we eventually sold it all.
I’m working on a range of new t-shirt designs (like the one above) at the moment, and I must admit I’m looking at Redbubble and wondering whether my designs, or perhaps some of Miss Mouse’s photographs, might work well on coffee mugs and cushion covers as well as t-shirts.
Miss Mouse tote bag
You’ve seen Miss Mouse and the Woodland Gang’s tote bags in the shop, of course. I chose Inkthreadable to print these for me because they have both organic cotton tote bags, and these which are made from recycled polyester and cotton waste from the garment industry. They also have a range of organic t-shirts, which I’d much prefer to be using over non-organic, but if their sizing isn’t inclusive… I don’t know. I don’t want to get to that place where my shop has so many different options that it’s too confusing to buy something as simple as a t-shirt, but at the same time I do want these things to be available to as many folks as possible.
I have dipped my toes into the water of Redbubble with two notebooks featuring Miss Mouse in Autumn and in Winter.
They’re printed in and shipped from the UK – unless you’re buying them from outside Europe, in which case they’re printed in and shipped from America. As with all print-on-demand products, there’s no next-day shipping, as the notebooks literally don’t exist until you order them! And making things takes time, even for large companies with (presumably) oodles of people and printers. So delivery usually takes about a week.
I’ve also uploaded some A4 diary pages. I designed these for myself, and have been using them to keep all of my University and volunteering activities organised.
If you’ve known me for a while you’ll be well aware that I have a terrible addiction to all kinds of diaries and planners… and also a total inability to remain faithful to one for an entire year. These A4 pages are undated, so I can print out a few, write the dates underneath the days of the week, and when I get bored with them or decide that a different format would better suit my needs, I can design something new! That way I don’t end up buying two or three different diaries each year, as I can just print out new pages whenever I need them. It also means that I don’t need to carry around an entire year in one go! At the moment I have three months’ worth of pages tucked inside a plastic wallet, and that’s so much more convenient – and a lot less heavy! – than hauling around a giant organiser. I strongly suspect that more of these will be forthcoming, particularly once I start back at University and need to keep track of all my lectures and deadlines.
I must admit that, as a lifelong hands-on maker, it does feel a little bit weird to be handing over the manufacture of my designs to a third party. But, with the best will in the world, I’m not going to set up a printing studio in my office (unless I suddenly come into possession of an entire letterpress workshop, which seems unlikely!), and this way I don’t have to buy boxes full of t-shirts or other printed items that may well sit on a shelf for years un-sold.
So, all in all, I’m going to say hooray for the third party!
I just want to say a big THANK YOU to the folks who asked whether the children’s planners would be sticking around once this website changes from a shop into a blog. The answer is yes! I loved designing them, and I love that people are finding them useful, so they’re definitely going to stay.
I currently order them in small batches, to try and keep the printing costs at a sensible price. I can’t have them printed on demand as they’re ordered, as having them printed one at a time makes the books around £45 each! And that’s just silly. But the difficulty with having to wait until I have enough pre-orders to get a small batch printed is that I have no way of telling people how long that might take. So I tend to do a couple of pre-orders a year, one before the start of the school term, and again before Christmas. BUT! One of the main points of the planner is that it’s undated, so you can buy one at any time of the year and start filling it in whenever you like. And that’s impossible if there isn’t a pre-order taking place when you want to start your planner.
So… I’m looking at ways of making them more easily available. (But don’t worry – I will keep the current pre-order system running for the forseeable future.)
the moon journal is now available on amazon
To get the ball rolling, this week I did a little experiment. I re-formatted the Moon Journal, and uploaded it to Amazon. Now Amazon don’t offer spiral binding or landscape format, so if I were to do this with the children’s planners, they would have to change a little bit. I’m still thinking about that, as I’m really very fond of the whole landscape format and spiral bound design. We’ll see.
But, I’ve made the Moon Journal available, and ordered a copy for myself so that I can see what the quality is like. When it arrives I’m going to write in it with as many different pens as I can lay my hands on, to make sure that the paper is thick enough to withstand felt tips and little kids. I’m also going to lay the pages out as flat as possible, and just generally try to trash the binding, to see what kind of punishment it will live up to! If I think it’s going to be suitable, I might just have a couple of experimental planners printed, let some children loose with them, and see what happens. Then I can decide whether to switch them over to print on demand via Amazon, or stick with doing these small batch print runs myself.
If you’d like to be kept posted about how it’s all going, you might want to join the mailing list (in the right side bar, or down at the bottom of the page if you’re on mobile), which is where I send out monthly updates about what’s going on.
I was just going to post a little reminder about only having one planner left in the shop… only to read back through the blog and realise that apparently I hadn’t written about them in the first place! Oops…
So, this is “My Busy Week”, a planner designed for pre-school or just-starting-school children who like to understand the routine of their week.
eternal magpie My Busy Week children’s planner
The first page explains some basic ways to add information. Write in the month at the top, and number the days of the week so you can see what’s happening when. The daily columns are colour coded, so your little one might be able to understand which day is yellow before they can recognise a W for Wednesday.
Draw a shopping bag for supermarket day, stick a sticker when it’s time for football or ballet class, or colour in the days when you go to Nursery. The planner is blank, and designed so that you can fill it in however you like!
At the moment the planner is only available as an A4 spiral bound book.
I take pre-orders for the books, to make sure that I can cover the printing costs, but this can mean that they’re not always available. Currently I have one last planner in the shop, and once that’s gone I’ll start a pre-order for a batch to be printed in plenty of time for Christmas.
So, I was wondering… is this the sort of thing you’d like me to make available as a digital download?
It would be a little bit cheaper than the printed book, and you could download it whenever you liked… but you would have to print it out yourself.
What do you think? I know that digital downloads are a very popular thing when it comes to planner pages… so would you like to see this go digital too?
blast from the past – gothstuff Baby Cthulhu tshirt spotted at InFest 2018
Well, this was an unexpected blast from the past!
Way back in the mists of time (otherwise known as 2001) I ran a business called “GothStuff”. It did what it said in the tin – I made and sold a variety of clothing, jewellery and footwear, online and at various goth/alternative events. One of those events was Infest, a music festival that’s enjoying its 20th anniversary this weekend. My husband is there… and he spotted one of our t-shirts out in the wild! We haven’t sold these for at least a decade, so I’m extremely impressed that this one still going!
(Particular thanks must go to this lovely man, and also to my husband who, when he texted this to me, was met with the reply “GDPR!! Ask him if I can blog the picture!!”)
blast from the past – gothstuff Baby Cthulhu tshirt
This is what Baby Cthulhu looked like when he was brand new! Paul designed the characters, and we heat pressed them onto heavyweight t-shirts using a flock medium, so the images were fuzzy. Each colour had to be cut out and pressed separately.
blast from the past – gothstuff Baby Frank tshirt
All of the characters were horror literature or movie themed – we called them “Baby Horrors”. This one, as you can see, is a baby Frankenstein’s monster…
blast from the past – gothstuff Baby Mummy tshirt
…and this one is a Baby Mummy. (I know. Very confusing.)
blast from the past – gothstuff light reflective bat tshirt
We also had a range of… I suppose you could call it “casual clubwear”, if that’s a thing. You can’t really tell from a picture taken in daylight, but this silver bat silhouette was light-reflective.
blast from the past – gothstuff skull & crossbones shirt and tie
We also had neon colours that were blacklight/uv responsive, which we printed onto more formal workwear, as well as onto t-shirts.
(I don’t think I ever went to work looking quite like this, but those actually were my work trousers for a while!)
These photos were taken in the summer of 2004, and while I was digging around in the depths of my computer looking for them, I also turned up some other photos of things I’ve made over the past few years. So, prepare yourselves – there’s a new Blast from the Past coming every day for the rest of the week!
I’ve been following Helen of Secret Lentil for years (which sounds a bit stalker-ish now I come to think of it), but haven’t quite managed to buy anything from her yet. A few years ago I saved up very hard for a dress that I loved, and somebody else bought it THE DAY BEFORE I got paid. I’m still a bit sad about that.
I always have to fight this vague feeling of “oh well I could make that myself anyway”, because of course I do have a mountain of cotton jersey and an overlocker right here, but obviously it’s not as simple as that. I start with patterns and plans and write myself instructions. Helen builds imaginary clothes that live in her head. How cool is that?!
India Flint I learned about when I bought her “Eco Colour” book, and tried out a few experiments with natural dyeing. India’s clothes have a strong connection to the location where they were created, having been dyed by the plants, earth and water of the places where they were made.
I have lots of plans in mind for future plant dyeing projects, and I have a freezer filled with sumac and rhubarb and raspberry leaves, and avocado stones and skins, just waiting to come out and add colour to something. Where I get stuck is with the thought that I need to design the “perfect dress” before I can dye it, otherwise it’ll be a waste of cloth and plants and time and water and heat.
(Don’t tell anybody, but… sometimes I wonder what I could come up with if I just made whatever I liked, and didn’t spend so much time worrying about what other people might want to buy.)
Oh, good grief. It’s a month since I last posted here, and I haven’t made a single one of the buttonholes I mentioned in my last post! I have made four in this blouse, though I accidentally made them on the left instead of the right. I decided it didn’t matter too much, as the blouse was for me… but then it didn’t fit, and now the blouse is sitting in the Etsy shop, waiting to find its new home. What you may or may not be able to tell from this little snippet, is that the print is covered with My Little Ponies!
I made the executive decision to split my Etsy shop into two, although at the moment they’re both selling a mishmash of the same things. Once the listings start to expire in one place I’ll re-list them in the other, and hopefully it should all be sorted out over the next couple of months.
The eternal magpie Etsy shop will sell bits and bobs that I’m clearing out from my stash, organic cotton clothing and zipped pouches as I make them, and the more “everyday” styles of felt hat. Oh, and my own sewing patterns, more of which in a moment.
A little while ago, a customer who I’d made one of these tunic dresses for (way back in 2009!) got in touch. She wanted to know whether it was possible, as I no longer made these tunics for sale, for her to have a copy of the pattern. I thought about it for a minute, said yes, and set about writing up the instructions.
Since sending off the pattern, Maria has already made not just one, but three tunics – and in the absolutely most fantastic choice of fabrics! And proving that word of mouth is absolutely the best way to sell things, Maria has been very kindly sending everyone who’s admired her tunics over to the eternal magpie Etsy shop, where you can now buy the pattern!
It’s a bit of an experiment at the moment – I’m drawing out the patterns by hand onto brown paper, as I don’t quite have the technology to get them into the computer. I drew them by hand in the first place, and haven’t yet managed to replicate them accurately with my pattern drafting software, which is very frustrating. Also, my greatest bugbear about printing out patterns is having to spend ages sticking all the pages together, so I thought that sending out the patterns complete would be a nice way of saving other people from having to do that.
So, I’ll see what kind of feedback I get about the patterns – whether they’re the right sizes, whether people can understand the instructions, that kind of thing – and decide after a little while whether this is something I want to carry on with or not.
I seem to be pulled in so many different directions these days… I’ll have to see what starts pulling me most strongly.
I had another mad day in the Etsy shop yesterday, this time listing three versions of this fleece bolero jacket, and three versions of the new top below. This afternoon I went out and bought some patterned fleece, so I can actually make and then take photos of the patterned versions that I’ve listed.
This is my own jacket, and it lives very firmly in my wardrobe. I love it, and it looks just as good with jeans and a t-shirt as it does with a smart dress. My friend Karen (whose wedding I made this outfit for) has the prototype, which is the same style but plain black. She says it “Makes me feel like some kind of thief/archer elf in a fantasy film!”, which is perfect because that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do!
The one change I’ve made to the design is to replace the hidden hooks and eyes with decorative frog fasteners – though I don’t have any pictures of those yet. The one problem with this jacket is the hooks and eyes slipping open as you move around, and the frogs won’t allow that to happen. Much better.
This is a new top I made to wear to work, last week or the week before. It’s always cold on the reception desk, so I wanted it to have a high neck at the back to keep me warm. I also wanted to be able to wear layers underneath it without feeling constricted, so it’s longish, loose fitting, and has a draped cowl-style neckline at the front. The edges, like the jacket, are finished with bias binding which is hand-stitched into place on the inside. This top is so comfortable I’m going to have to prize it out of my own cold dead hands to put it in the washing machine… or of course I could always make another one! I’m quite a fan of having duplicates of clothing that you love.
This one’s available in the Etsy shop too, in the same incarnations as the jacket – plain fleece, patterned fleece, and organic cotton sweatshirting. I’ve got a piece of bright pink fleece with white spots to make another one of these, so if you’re a size UK 14-16 ish (size M), look out for that popping up on Etsy soon!
I’ve had a couple of requests for custom dressmaking projects lately, to which the answer I’m afraid is still no. I’m trying very hard to concentrate on sewing projects like these, from patterns that I’ve drafted myself, and also on the hats and felting. Because I’m also working part time, I simply can’t fit in anything else. I’m contemplating putting together printable PDF patterns for these items, so that you can go ahead and make your own, but I don’t even have the time to devote to that right now.
In fact, I shouldn’t really have spent two afternoons filling the Etsy shop with haberdashery and fleecy tops instead of working on the hats, but there’s only so much felting my poor arms can take. I’m at work-work for the next couple of days though, then it will be back to felting and hats at the weekend. I have so little free time before the craft fair I’m taking the hats to on Easter Sunday that I really don’t know when I’m going to get anything done!
