Welcome to the new website!

eternal magpie and miss mouse, image copyright Rainbright Photography
eternal magpie and miss mouse, image © Rainbright Photography

Hello! Hopefully this website switchover has been a relatively pain-free experience all round, and here we are!

So, in case you’re wondering, eternal magpie is now primarily a blog rather than a shop… although you can still buy dresses if you’d like to. I’m just making them exclusively to order these days, rather than trying to fill a little online shop with stock.

If you were a follower of my old blog, which has been going since 2006!, you’ll find that most of the archives have now been reinstated. Some of them are missing pictures and links, but I’m gradually going through and fixing as much as I can. I’m also putting back together the tutorials that people have been looking for – you can find those in the menu at the top of the page.

I’ve copied over a few blog posts from my previous website – mostly the ones that were about something other than announcing a new product for the shop, or a sale, or something marketing/admin related.

From now on I’m mostly going to be blogging about my own sewing and knitting and nature finds, much as I did on the old blog. I’ll also be linking out to Miss Mouse & friends when they’ve been up to something exciting, and to my other Patreon project, Mrs Magpie Writes.

Hopefully it will also be easier for you to leave comments and for me to respond to them now that I’m back in a proper blog format. I’m looking forward to chatting with you!

Happy New Year!

Miss Mouse recovers from a New year's Eve party!
Miss Mouse recovers from a New year’s Eve party!

I don’t know what sort of party Miss Mouse went to last night, but it looks as though it was a good one! 

I did say that things would be changing around here in the New Year, so… what’s different? Well, as of right this second, absolutely nothing. That’s because the eternal magpie website in its current format is paid for until the middle of February, so I’m going to let it run its course before I switch over to being a blog again, rather than a shop. 

So, I’ve decided to allow the 75% Off Nearly Everything Sale to run until the end of January. At that point anything that isn’t sold will be making its way to a charity shop, so if there’s anything you’ve had your eye on, BUY IT NOW. If you’ve signed up to the mailing list or you’ve bought from me before, you’ll also have a discount code that you can use on top of the sale prices. 

(If you’re not on the mailing list, check out the form in the top menu.)

From February onwards, the site will be switching over to a WordPress blog, which is how it originally started way back in the mists of 2009. I’ve managed to import the majority of the old content back in, so I should hopefully be able to restore access to some of the sewing and felting tutorials that people are still looking for.

If I’m not going to be running a shop, what am I going to blog about? Well, the same things that I blogged about before, I think. Sustainable fashion, ethical shopping, how to make stuff, that kind of thing. I’ll also go back to blogging about my personal sewing and knitting projects, which I haven’t felt able to do while I’ve been running the shop as a focussed brand. And of course there’s always Miss Mouse, and I’m also working on a writing project which I need to get back on track in the New Year. So there will be links out to those two Patreon blogs as well. 

The mailing list will continue to run, with updates at the beginning of each month. They’ll be a round-up of what’s been happening on the blog, for anyone who doesn’t use a feed reader and doesn’t want to keep checking the website. The Facebook and Instagram pages will also be kept updated whenever a blog post goes up, so that’s another easy way to keep in touch. 

If you’re waiting for me to make something for you (I know that Rebecca has some curtains which are heading in my direction!), or you see the perfect fabric that you definitely need to have transformed into one of my dresses, please just ask! I’m not giving up sewing for other people entirely, I’m just not going to be running it as a little branded shop for a while.

(If I can figure out the logistics, I might be able to pop some easy payment buttons onto the new blog, but I haven’t got that far into the process yet.) 

So… check out the sale before I clear out my workshop… sign up to the mailing list if you’d like to be kept up to date… or follow me on Facebook or Instagram if that’s where you hang out. The promised changes are happening very soon!

What I Do When I’m Not Doing This…

Mr Magpie writing up his folklore research with a glass dip pen
Mr Magpie writing up his folklore research with a glass dip pen

Have you ever wondered what I do when I’m not making dresses for the eternal magpie shop

Well… the gentleman pictured above is Mr Magpie, and he is part of a group of doll characters collectively known as Miss Mouse & friends. They have a Patreon-based blog, over at www.missmou.se, where you can follow all of their little adventures. You might also have spotted them in the “books, magazines & planners” section of the shop, where some of their Patron Rewards from the past couple of years are now available for sale. 

Next year I’m going to be concentrating less on printed Rewards and more on photographic and other digital content that everyone can see… as well as some more complicated stories for our much-appreciated Patrons.


Reading University Herbarium cyclamen specimen
Reading University Herbarium cyclamen specimen

In October I went back to University… as a volunteer at the Herbarium. I’ve joined an ongoing project to catalogue a species-specific collection that recently became part of the Herbarium’s collections overall. My current role is primarily as a data wrangler. There’s a small team of us, doing all the things necessary to get this collection into the database – ideally in such a format that researchers can easily get the data out again and make scientific use of it! 


title page of Gerard's Herbal
title page of Gerard’s Herbal

In October I also went back to University… as a writer/researcher. Originally, the idea was to start doing some research that would help me to write a series of short introductory books on a variety of topics. The sort of thing you might like to read if you’d just watched a documentary on the telly, and wanted to find out a little bit more about the subject. Somewhere along the way, that idea has escalated into researching for a PhD proposal! I’m currently trying to narrow my thoughts down to two primary ideas (both relating to Early Modern medicine), and then I can start to do some more detailed research to enable me to choose between them. 

(A few years ago I had a different PhD planned out, to do with the publication of anatomical imagery, and how the accuracy of observation was far in advance of medical knowledge at the time. Then Dr Adam Rutherford and BBC4 went and made a whole television series about exactly that, making my proposed thesis redundant. As is often the way, Life intervened, and this is the first opportunity I’ve had to think again about Academic Things.) 

I have another Patreon-based blog, called “Mrs Magpie Writes”, about what I’ve been up to and how it’s all going. Not all of the content is paid-for, but studying is expensive, so every little bit of pocket money is very much appreciated. So far my lovely Patrons have paid this year’s annual fee for joining the University library, and I’m saving up to buy some of the books I’m not able to borrow as a non-student member. 


 So, there you have it. 

When I’m not busy with the sewing machine, I’ll be busily photographing Miss Mouse & friends, volunteering at the Herbarium, or happily reading as many Early Modern/ History of Medicine books as I can! 

Claire with sidesword
Claire with sidesword

Oh, and when I’m not doing any of that, I’m looking at translations of 16th century fencing manuals and fighting my friends with swords. As you do. 

Subscribe to the eternal magpie newsletter!

eternal magpie and miss mouse
eternal magpie and miss mouse

You might have noticed a new pop-up thingybob appear when you came back to the website – that’s because I’ve just added a brand new mailing list option! 

If you’re fed up with social media algorithms only showing you what they think you ought to see, but you also don’t want to be manually keeping track of every website you’d like to follow, this is a handy way for you to keep up with me. 

I’ll send out an email once or twice a month (usually once – twice if there’s something exciting happening like this week’s sale) with updates about new products in the shop, new fabrics for custom dresses, new blog posts that you might have missed… so it should be a good way to get all of the eternal magpie gossip in one place! 

If you haven’t already signed up via the handy pop-up, you can find the form in the right hand side bar… or scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page if you’re viewing this on your phone. 

Come and join me – please don’t make me type out newsletters to myself each month!

(PS – if you keep on getting the pop-up whenever you visit the site, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I hate that with a fiery passion, and I’ll do my best to make sure that you only see it once!)

Here, but not here.

painted rock with the words "you are stronger than you think"
painted rock with the words “you are stronger than you think”

Hello! It’s been a while. I’m sort of here, but not here.

It was recommended that I should streamline my time by creating lots of social media posts all at once, and scheduling them to appear each day. The idea was to spend less time doing this, so that I could have more time to do other things. This has worked! I definitely spend less time photographing things and composing posts and thinking of the right hashtags when I’m doing it for a whole week at a time, rather than individually every day. 

But, the side effect of not directly posting to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram every day is that I’m not checking them every day (which is part of the time-saving thing, I suppose), and the result of that is a feeling that I’m… disconnected. Disconnected from my friends, and disconnected from my sewing and knitting buddies, because I’m not seeing the lovely things that they’re posting in a timely fashion. Add in the complication of the dreaded algorithms to that, and I’m barely seeing anything! It also means that I’m missing comments and messages, because it looks as though I’m hanging out online when I’m actually not available. 

There must be a happy medium around here somewhere, but I definitely haven’t found it yet. 

I’m also not making much in the way of new dresses at the moment, mainly because I’ve already got more than twenty in stock, and it seems futile to spend my time sewing even more things that are going to sit on my website and in a cupboard for months on end. So, I’m having a bit of a re-evaluation about what I’m making now, and what I want to make in the future. I have a couple of personal projects coming up soon (a ball dress for myself, and a prototype cloak for my swordfighting group), so maybe that will perk up my lapsed sewing interest a little bit. To be honest, my health has also been a bit more challenging than usual over the past couple of months, so my time and my focus have been not entirely on the dresses. 

Still. The unbearable heat of summer is beginning to calm down, we’re gently heading into Autumn which is my favourite season, and it’s almost my birthday, which means Birthday Sale! (More about that in the next post.) Hopefully I’ll find a way to feel a little more connected very soon.

GDPR Shenanigans

Claire and miss mouse drinking a giant cup of tea
Claire and miss mouse drinking a giant cup of tea

This may well be the size of the cup of tea I’m going to need by the time I’ve finished going through all of the new GDPR regulations! 

You’re most likely to have heard about this via a sudden influx of emails asking you to re-subscribe to mailing lists in order to confirm that you give permission to keep receiving messages. Basically it’s to do with consent, privacy, and what I can and can’t do with your data.

I don’t have a mailing list (yet), so I didn’t know that the Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations states that specific consent is not required if you are sending an email to a customer who has previously purchased a similar product. So if you have ever bought a dress from me, I could add you to an email list of Existing Customers, and have automatic permission to send you marketing emails. I would like to state for the record that I DO NOT DO THIS, and I WILL NOT DO THIS even when I do set up my mailing list, because it doesn’t seem like a good fit for the way this little business works. But it does explain the messages from email lists which I didn’t subscribe to in the first place, to which I have happily said goodbye! 

But anyway. That’s not the point. 

The point is:

you have the right to know what data I hold about you, you have the right to see that data, and you have to right to ask me to delete it, insofar as doing so is within my power.  

That’s it! 

There is a Proper Legal Version, in the form of my updated website privacy and cookies policy, if you’re feeling as though you might need some help nodding off to sleep quite soon. 

The short version is this: 

Your data includes:  

  • Your name, address, and phone number. 
    These are required for the purpose of fulfilling the contract between us, which is that you pay for a dress and I use this information to send it to you. 

  • Your name, or pseudonym, if you give it on a blog comment
    You are also required to give your email address when you leave a blog comment, but I’m not sure why. I never see it, so it cannot be used to add you to any sort of email list.

  • Your photographs, of yourself and/or your children
    These are freely given with your consent – I never copy your images from social media, or use images that have been emailed to me, without asking you first. I may edit them, usually to add a caption, or to crop to a certain format. I will usually use just a first name to identify the person in the photograph, or occasionally a rough location, such as a country or a county, if that information is relevant. 
    Please bear in mind that photographs on the internet are public property
    If you withdraw consent for me to use your photographs, which you are welcome to do at any time, I will of course delete them from my website, blog and social media sites. However I do not have the capacity to remove instances of these images which may have been downloaded, copied or shared by a third party. 
    This is particularly important to be aware of if you are sending me photographs of your children.  

Other data collected by the website itself, or by third parties, are payment details and Cookies. I do not have direct access to either of these types of data. 

All of my payments are currently processed by PayPal so I never see your payment information, whether you’re checking out through the shopping cart or paying instalments on a flexible invoice.  

Cookies are used for two reasons: 

  1. to ensure the functioning of the website 
    For example, you might put an item into the shopping cart, wander off for another browse around the site, and when you come back to the cart your original item will still be there waiting for you. They also ensure that your customer account, if you choose to set one up, knows who you are when you log into it. 

  2. to analyse the use of the website 
    Google Analytics gathers information about website use by means of cookies. The information gathered relating to this website is used to create reports about its use. The data gathered may include information about your location, or the type of device you are using to access the internet, but it cannot be used to identify a specific individual. These details help me to understand who is using my website, and how I can improve it in the future.

 You can check out more information about what all of this means, including links to PayPal and Google’s own privacy policies, in the updated website privacy and cookies policy.

Phew! 

If you’ve read all of that, thank you, and well done! 

I still have a fair bit of work to do behind the scenes, in terms of paperwork to justify why I need to use all of this data (mainly because my website doesn’t work without it!), but this is the only thing you really need to be aware of. 

Now, is it time for that nice big cup of tea…? 

I’ve moved…

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I haven’t been around much lately. I haven’t had a great deal to say in terms of big long blog posts, I’ve just been posting lots of little snippets.

These start on Instagram, usually, and automatically copy to Facebook and Tumblr. If it’s easier for you to follow me at those places, please come and join me there! If you use a feed reader for your blogs, you should be able to add the tumblr url to that.

Those three places are effectively all the same, so you don’t need to follow me on all three of them, unless you’re extremely keen!

If you only want to see updates about Miss Mouse and her little felt animal friends, the best place to see them is over at Patreon. You don’t need to be a member to see the posts, although if you sign up to follow me, you’ll get them automatically. The vast majority of posts there are public, with just a few that are reserved for Patrons only.

Most of Miss Mouse’s Patreon posts are copied over to Twitter and Facebook, but not all. (Mainly because it’s a faff to do it, and sometimes I forget.)

To be quite honest, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this blog in the not-too-distant future. I’m having some technical difficulties at the moment in terms of being able to easily access my own domain names and update my own websites, which is why instant social media has been the best way for me these past few months. It might be worth looking me up in one of those Other Places, just in case I suddenly disappear from here.