Life – Page 2 – eternal magpie

Hats, Shoes and Dolls.

I mentioned, back in my New Year post, that my One Word for 2015 was going to be “focus”.

I also mentioned that the three things I wanted to focus on were HATS, SHOES and DOLLS.

So, as you do, I promptly took a three-month sabbatical from making hats.

Although this might seem counter-intuitive, it actually gave me time to think about how the hats had been received at the wedding fair in January (nowhere near as well as they were at the Christmas craft market), and start to gather some extremely useful feedback. As a result, I’m having a bit of a re-think about the styles of hats I want to make.

This is the first experiment off the blocks (well, actually, off an old biscuit tin!), and I have to say that I’m quite pleased with it so far. It’s a small top hat, about 10cm in diameter, and about the same high. The brim was blocked flat and then hand shaped and wired, and finished with bias binding. The embellishments are some felt “tentacles” I made a while ago, and you can see that I’ve started to add a few sparkly Swarovski crystals, which I love against the matt felt. This particular one won’t be for sale, as it’s part of an outfit that you’ll have seen a sneaky glimpse of if you follow me on Instagram. All will be revealed when it’s complete!

As far as shoes go, a plan is currently in the works! These are a few cotton pairs that I made back in 2011, but decided not to take any further. This time I’m changing both the materials and the method, and I have a few people signed up to do some wear testing of a batch of prototype wool felt shoes.

They will be shoes, not slippers, as they’ll have a durable rubber sole that can be worn outside. They’ll need the same sort of treatment as any fabric summer shoes, although I think the wool will be fairly robust. If they turn out well, I have other fabrics in mind. Harris Tweed, anyone? Silk, for weddings? We’ll see. Fingers crossed that the prototypes turn out well!

As for the dolls… well, they’re firmly stuck in my imagination at the moment. They were going to live over at Mr & Mrs Magpie’s Inexplicable Emporium, but I simply haven’t had the time or the energy to do anything other than think about them. Olaf hasn’t even been tweeting very often.

I know exactly what the characters all look like, and I know how I want the dolls to turn out… but the gap between my current skills and the finished dolls seems impassable right now.

For the moment I’m concentrating on the new top hats, plus my favourite shape of close-fitting cloche. I’m ordering the materials for the shoes this week, so I can start to get those into production as soon as the felt arrives. But after that, and my Proper Job, and my Aromatherapy distance learning course, I think the dolls might just have to wait for a little while.

I’m sure they’ll demand to be made when they’re ready.

Back to the fabric stash

So, I’ve been writing recently about mindful consumption and buying handmade shoes. A few years ago I wrote about Value versus Cost, and sneaked inside a post on vintage sewing patterns, I wrote a mini essay about ethically-produced jeans.

I’m trying very hard to be as responsible in my own shopping as I possibly can. My trousers are ethically produced. My yoga pants are organic cotton. My shoes are handmade. I try, as much as possible, not to support mass production in terms of clothing.

But, like everyone, sometimes I fail. I got very, very excited about these Yellow Submarine Vans, so I “treated myself” and bought them. (Ten months later, they’re sitting on my shoe rack having been worn only about half a dozen times because they don’t fit right and they’re not comfortable, so there’s a lesson for me!)

Shortly after I’d bought them I got very excited about some almost-matching fabric, so I “treated myself” to that too. It’s cotton, but it’s not organic, and I had it sent over from America. I’m currently sewing it into a shirt that I can wear with the Vans. (Hopefully the shirt will actually fit, at least!)

I’m always a sucker for a novelty print, and in fact I’m currently waiting for the arrival of a parcel containing a shirt’s worth of this Lorax-print fabric. It’s coming all the way from America again, and at least it’s organic cotton this time. But while I was shopping I popped in a couple of other half-yards “for Milly”, and “to make the shipping costs worthwhile”.

That’s when I realised that I was basically making excuses to myself, to justify the purchase of cute things that I liked the look of, rather than thinking about what I actually needed, or how it was made.

Given that I still have metres and metres of this lovely handwoven organic cotton sitting in my sewing room (bought all the way back in 2008, before Bishopston Trading closed down), I really have absolutely no excuse for buying any more fabric right now. Okay, so plain colours of cotton are not as fun and exciting as hilarious novelty prints. (And you know I do like a certain amount of my wardrobe to be hilarious!) But I can make up for that by printing simple designs myself… over-dyeing the fabrics… adding embroidery or lace… wearing lots of jewellery or knitted accessories… or just enjoying the nature of the hand-woven, hand-dyed material.

After that it’s time to go on a different kind of shopping spree I think – doing some research into what lovely new ethically-produced fabrics have become available since the last time I looked. Now that does sound exciting!

Feeling Pretty Nostalgic

Image © Pretty Nostalgic

I’d already decided that my theme for this year was going to be “focus”. Last year it was all about “action!”, and although that went pretty well, it culminated in three major deadlines in a short space of time, a difficult recovery from that, and perhaps a certain amount of acting without really thinking first.

Lately I’d been looking at various magazines, thinking about the best place to take out a print advert for my hats. I can only afford one piece of advertising at the moment, so it’s very important that I get it right! The top contenders were Vintage Life and Rock & Roll Bride, until I suddenly remembered Pretty Nostalgic.

I thought I hadn’t seen a copy in the newsagent’s for a while, and it turns out that’s because the magazine is now a subscription-only Compendium, with very varied articles and no advertising. However, they do have a Business Directory which is also based on an annual subscription. This gives you an entry in the Directory (in print and online), several copies of the printed Compendium to sell or give away, and the opportunity to get involved by writing feature articles or otherwise contributing to the magazine itself.

I think what really struck me was this:

“Pretty Nostalgic is about hands-on living, heartfelt giving and mindful consumption.

We are committed to supporting independent British makers, small independent shops and businesses and those who supply handmade, vintage, antique or upcycled goods and services. We want to put our hard-earned cash into the hands of those who deserve it!”

That definitely sounds like something I’d really enjoy being part of! I’m trying very hard to move away from mass production, as both a producer and a consumer, and this seems like a good step in the right direction.

The best thing about Pretty Nostalgic’s approach is that it really is a community. More than just placing an advert in a magazine and walking away with your fingers crossed, it’s an opportunity to interact with folks who have similar values. I have to confess that it’s not a community I’m actually part of yet. (And Pretty Nostalgic are in no way involved in this post, I’m just really excited about their manifesto!)

Reading the Compendium, and thinking about how I want to advertise Eternal Magpie has caused me to take a few steps back to have a good old think about what I really want to do, and what I want my business to represent. As a result I actually won’t be signing myself up for a business membership quite yet, but I have just subscribed to the Compendium as a personal member, so I look forward to reading the latest issue!

Hello, goodbye

I’m hoping that a few people will have followed me over to this new blog location… hello to those of you who’ve joined me!

I feel as though the sentence above should have an extra comma in it: art, books, chocolate and young men. Either way, the sentiment stands. I have a young man (my husband will be 37 tomorrow, to my 41), and goodness knows I get through a lot of chocolate, but my life has been sadly lacking in art, books, and indeed art books, lately.

Things have been very quiet around here, mainly because I haven’t been doing very much apart from going to work, coming home, trying not to be ill, and making hats. The trying not to be ill part isn’t going very well at the moment, so I need to make a few changes to try and improve matters.

I had already planned to take a sabbatical from the hats during February, to sit back for a while and have a bit of a think about the direction I want to follow with them. It turns out I’m going to need a bit more time than that, so the hats are going on the back burner for a couple of months. My boss at work was good enough to suggest I took some annual leave at short notice, so I’ve spent a few days curled up on the sofa, reading and trying to relax. I have a couple more days before I go back, which are reserved for celebrating Paul’s birthday, and trying not to be ill. Hopefully they’ll also include plenty of books and chocolate.

Once I’m back at work, my remaining free time is going to be selfishly spent for a while. Sewing for myself, knitting for myself, picking up my long-abandoned Aromatherapy course, and probably delving back into some art books as well. I’m not sure at the moment how long it’ll take me to get back to the hats, but I do intend to blog about what I’m doing in the meantime. (She says, having posted barely anything for months.)

Anyway, here’s a big thank you to those of you who’ve chosen to stick around – hopefully the rest and relaxation will perk me up a bit soon.

Happy New Year!

I was going to try and catch up with what I’ve been doing since the middle of November, when I last posted, but honestly I don’t really remember! I know there have been two craft fairs (a small one and a big one), and I’m sure Christmas was in there somewhere, amongst a whole lot of germs, but mainly I’ve just been going to work, coming home again, being ill, making hats, and trying to sell them. Not a lot else going on really. I was so poorly over Christmas that my niece doesn’t even have her annual dress yet!

I’m currently panicking like mad about having to go back to work on Monday, and still being a bit ill, and not having actually achieved anything with my time off over Christmas despite having lots of things planned. I’m trying very hard to take a little bit of time to myself, to write my work rota into my diary, get myself organised, and have a good think about what my goals need to be for the year ahead.

I’ve downloaded Susannah Conway’s Unravelling The Year Ahead workshop again (it’s free! go for it!), and have just completed a rather puzzling Oracle reading that I hope will become clearer as the year unfolds. I pulled an extra card to try and find some clarification, and was met with The Challenge… so that didn’t help much. I didn’t buy Leonie Dawson’s workbooks again this year, entirely because I never actually filled them in. The thought of having to make plans and examine my life in detail when all I wanted to do was NOT BE ILL was all a bit too much, to be honest. I may have rather cheekily printed out a clean copy, and am merrily changing all the 2014s into 2015s with a big fat marker pen. Sorry Leonie! Maybe next year…

I have, however, chosen a word that I want to be able to embody this year, and that word is focus. (I’ve also ordered another One Word bracelet from Honey & Ollie, to wear with last year’s.)

Last year I tried to do far too many things, with the net result that I didn’t put as much time and effort as I would have liked into the things I was really enjoying. I spent too long thinking about what might sell rather than what I wanted to make, and that just made me miserable.

This year it’s about three things:

HATS, SHOES and DOLLS.

Hats first, as I have a stand at a local wedding fair in three weeks’ time. Lots of preparation to do for that. But from February onwards, I’m hoping to be able to do some work on the other two.

Mind you, such a lot depends on my health, and of course first and foremost I need to be well enough (and stay well enough) to go to work. Whether I have the energy for HATS, SHOES and DOLLS after that remains to be seen.

Birthday Sale on Etsy – 41% off everything!

Today is my very last day of Being Forty. As of tomorrow I’m forty-one, which puts me officially In My Forties. Does that mean I’m supposed to start pretending to be a grown-up? I do hope not.

Anyway, for the third year running, I’m having a one-day Birthday Sale in both of my Etsy shops. If you’d like to make a purchase, you can use the code “HAPPYBIRTHDAY” at checkout to receive a whopping 41% off everything except the cost of shipping.

The Eternal Magpie shop can be found here…

…and here’s Mr & Mrs Magpie’s Inexplicable Emporium.

Enjoy my birthday and your shopping!

It’s not all work, work, work…

A question I’m asked fairly often is whether I plan to eventually give up my job and work full time for myself, making and selling things. If you’d asked me a few years ago, the answer would have been a resounding yes! I’ve had a couple of periods in between jobs where I was lucky enough to be able to work for myself full time, and whilst I did enjoy it, the pressure of needing to bring in a steady income coupled with the isolation of being alone at home all the time made me, quite frankly, go a bit bonkers.

For the past five years I’ve been volunteering and subsequently working at The Museum of English Rural Life, in a whole host of different capacities.

Chicken-wrangling, during a visit from a local farm…

Dressing (approximately) as a Victorian, for a Dickens at Christmas event…

…and bonnet-wearing, with colleagues, for #museumselfie day on Twitter, in the photo at the top!

As Learning Assistant I had access to the most fantastic supply of materials, so I could work with the Toddler Time group, and with families to make all sorts of things…

… like this “pomme pomme” for Apple Day!

This paper puppet, inspired by our life-size straw effigy of King Alfred…

…and these adorable little Christmas trees. Recycled cardboard tubes and paper plates are an extremely versatile mainstay of toddler craft projects!

Admittedly I’m not working with the toddlers at the moment, having asked for a small cut in my hours to try and get my health back on track. But I am still working as part of the Visitor Services team, which means mostly half-days on the front desk meeting and greeting visitors to the museum, helping to look after the shop, and being on hand at lots of different types of events. I haven’t stopped working on the craft projects completely (I’m currently putting together a printing activity for our Village Fete), and I’m lucky enough to work with a great team of colleagues – many of whom I now count as friends.

Of course, we all have days when we wake up in the morning and think, “I wish I didn’t have to go to work today”, especially when the making is going well, and I don’t want to have to take a break from a particular project. But having a steady part-time job gives me just enough income that I don’t have to rely on my artwork to pay the bills. This alone is incredibly liberating, as it gives me the freedom to experiment with different projects without having to worry about whether they’ll sell. It also gives me enough time to actually do the work, as well as being fantastically inspiring! Since being at the museum I’ve learned to make felt, to use a drop spindle and a spinning wheel, and been privileged to work with lots of other fantastic artists. There are tools and textiles in the collections which are endlessly fascinating, as well as tremendously knowledgeable colleagues to talk to. The garden is beautiful, and there’s always something different going on.

There’s a school of thought which suggests that the only ways for an artistic type to actually earn a living are either by teaching, or working part-time for somebody else. At the museum I get to do a bit of both, and a lot more besides. What more could I ask for? I used to think that my eventual goal should always be to end up working solely for myself, making a living from my artwork and sewing. It turns out that having this balance suits me much better, and I hope it can continue for many years to come.

(And thanks to the marvels of Modern Technology, this should magically update itself while I’m at work today!)

Holiday Germs

It turns out that my brain’s still full – this time with germs.

I had five days off work at Easter, spent four of them working on the Emporium, and the fifth in bed with a chest and sinus infection. What a lovely relaxing holiday! This is our little stall at the Corn Stores Indoor Market, the first event of its kind. Unfortunately the combination of a quiet town on Easter Sunday and the absolutely pouring rain meant that it wasn’t terribly well attended – but we made a few sales, and had a lovely day chatting to the other stallholders. Hopefully it will be busier next time.

The following day (despite feeling terrible and having to hobble around with my walking stick), I forced Paul to take me on my annual pilgrimage to Carter’s Steam Fair. We stayed less than half an hour in the end – partly because the weather was terrible, and partly because I should have really been in bed!

We usually have a go on the arcade machines (neither of us being big fans of the actual rides), and Paul fancied winning this little chap to go with his ever increasing collection of miniatures to paint. Unfortunately the motor had broken so the crane didn’t want to work… until a nice man with a huge chain of keys came along and opened up the machine and poked it with a screwdriver until it sprang into life!

Paul seems quite happy with his winnings!

This dapper gent (half soldier, half carousel horse) doesn’t seem too bothered that there’s a giant chicken giving him a funny look…

…and I think this is the best advice I was given all weekend.

It may not all be going to plan (you may not even have a clear idea of what the plan’s supposed to be!), but if there’s nothing you can do about it, why worry?

(I worry a lot. I’m working on it.)

Ups and downs

So, last Friday was Valentine’s Day. In our continued tradition of unequal gift-giving, I gave my husband a card, and he gave me an iPad! Admittedly he was going to give me the iPad anyway – he’s just upgraded to a new one, and I’ve inherited his old one with a nice new case. But he certainly gained a great deal of brownie points by wrapping it up in lovely paper!

I’ve been downloading lots of exciting new apps, mostly ones for drawing and sketching with. I’ve chosen a few free ones that I can try out, before I decide which ones I like best and want to pay for. The drawing above was done with an app called Sketches, and it mirrors the theme of this past week. It’s titled “My Face Hurts”.

Also on Valentine’s Day, I had to go to the dentist. Luckily we didn’t have a romantic meal planned for the evening, because I ended up having a tooth taken out! Four days later it’s still really painful, and the fibromyalgia doesn’t like it at all. Much to my frustration my face now acts as a warning beacon when I’m in a lot of pain, and this is how I came home from work today. Lovely! Given that I have a public-facing job, and it’s half term this week, I can only hope that I’m not scaring too many children away from the museum!

This rather different picture of me, from all the way back in 2008, is the cover photo for the first knitting pattern I designed. After a comment left on the blog by someone trying to track down a copy, I was prompted to open my own Ravelry store, and this is currently the only pattern in it.

I do have three existing patterns that I can add (also available in the Tutorials section to the right there), but I need to work out how to do that without duplicating the original patterns, as I seem to have done with this cardigan. I also have two completely new patterns ready and waiting, but they’re both waiting for photographs. All of my test knits were given away as Christmas presents, so I need to sit down and knit some new ones so that I can have a photo shoot. The temptation to dye my hair pink for the occasion is now extremely high!

What I Did At The Weekend

I know it’s Wednesday already, but I had a few days off work at the end of last week and the beginning of this one, so it all blurred into one lovely long weekend where I basically did nothing. Well, I was ill for a couple of days, which is what really prompted me to think that Doing Nothing for a while would be a really good idea. And it was.

During these days off, Paul had a birthday. While he was out I thought I’d try a little experiment, and I baked a batch of cupcakes! To be perfectly honest, they didn’t turn out that well. They didn’t really rise, and the chocolate didn’t really melt, so they looked a bit funny, and they weren’t light and fluffy so much as dense and a bit strange. But, they tasted nice, and several people have eaten them without complaining of a stomach ache, so perhaps they weren’t as bad as all that! Still, I think I’ll stick to sewing.

After a lovely birthday lunch with Paul’s parents, we brought back with us several boxes of crockery which used to belong to Paul’s Nan. She couldn’t take all of this with her when she moved into residential care, so we are now the very excited owners (well, let’s be honest, I’m a lot more excited than Paul is!) of a Poole Twintone dinner service! We must be missing a box though, as none of the coffee pots have their lids, and we have one rectangular lid with nothing to sit on. The set is so extensive because it was added to over many years, received as gifts, and picked up at antique shops and car boot sales. That explains the seventeen (seventeen!) tea cups…

While all of this nothing was going on, I managed to make myself a Very Bright hat. The picture above is from Yarma, a $0.99 app that allows you to upload photos to Ravelry straight from your phone. It does have filters built into it, but the hat really is that bright!

The yarns are all hand dyed. The pink background is a cochineal-dyed cashmere from Elisabeth Beverley at Plant Dyed Wool, and the stripes are hand-spun Blue-faced Leicester mini-skeins by The Outside. (I wrote about them over here.)

The hat was going really well, until I reached the very last decrease row. Somehow I managed to pull one of the circular needles out of the stitches, and because the row below was also full of decreases I couldn’t figure out how to get all of the stitches back onto the needles again in the right order. (Hence the mess you can see in the Yarma photo above.) Thankfully the stripes gave me an excellent place to rip back to, so I very carefully picked up the last row of orange stitches and worked the decrease section again. Phew! The pattern is Wurm, which I’ve knitted I think three times now.

I still don’t quite know how I ended up with a hat though. I’ve been spending weeks walking to the bus stop in the cold thinking, “I must knit myself a pair of gloves or mittens, these fingerless ones are too cold”. I had every intention of working up a pair of lovely rainbow-striped gloves that would keep my fingers warm on the way to the bus stop. But then I would have needed to divide all of the little skeins in half… and work out how many rows to knit in each colour, so that all the stripes were the same size… and the next thing I knew, there was a nice, simple hat flying off the needles.

I do have a little bit of yarn left over though, in all eight colours. Just enough to knit yet another pair of fingerless mittens, knowing my luck!

Category: Life

Hats, Shoes and Dolls.

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Back to the fabric stash

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Feeling Pretty Nostalgic

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Hello, goodbye

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Happy New Year!

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Birthday Sale on Etsy – 41% off everything!

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It’s not all work, work, work…

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Holiday Germs

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Ups and downs

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What I Did At The Weekend

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